It’s not often that a spin-off show ends up being better than its predecessor, but having just completed all of Better Call Saul, I have to say that I think it was better than Breaking Bad. Obviously, Saul Goodman never exists without Breaking Bad, but from a storytelling, character development, pace of the story and general writing are concerned, I think Better Call Saul was better than Breaking Bad as a whole.
It’s almost like Vince Gilligan took all of the criticism and feedback he heard, willingly and unwillingly after the conclusion of Breaking Bad, and took a lot of the more valid critiques in mind and applied them to Better Call Saul, like it was one gigantic redo, a luxury that so many in the industry don’t get to have.
This isn’t to belittle Breaking Bad at all, it’s still one of the all-time best shows that comes to my mind when I think about the best things I’ve watched in my life, but I just thought that Better Call Saul was just a little bit better, and it’s not just recency bias.
Whereas Breaking Bad was mostly the journey of Walter White from mild-mannered chemistry teacher-turned-drug kingpin with some occasional spotlight onto Jesse Pinkman, Better Call Saul’s tandem storylines between Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut basically were two shows merged into one showing complex relationships, inner conflicts and ultimate choosings in paths for the characters with the characters entwining sometimes and at other times being completely independent from the other.
There was something inherently beautiful about the storytelling of Saul, where both Jimmy and Mike were basically both headed on the same character development paths, despite having vastly different backgrounds. And obviously, it was a treat to see the sprinkling of characters from Breaking Bad begin to make their appearances in this prequel timeline, before things started to get really intense and mold the characters closer to their final forms that they would transform into by the time they start appearing in Breaking Bad.
But if I really had to pinpoint where I thought Better Call Saul really trumped Breaking Bad, it really could be narrowed down to a singular character: Lalo. My biggest gripe in the world with Breaking Bad was just how shitty it was that the last boss of the series was more or less, a bunch of fairly generic white supremacists. Uncle Jack and his white supremacist group seemed like such a colossal step down after Walt had been entangled with Gus Fring for the previous seasons, and it just left a sour aftertaste in my mouth to have gone from such brilliance with Gus to some really lame bad guys to end the series with.