Better Call Saul

Six seasons of a TV show about a man becoming a lawyer badly. That’s the sell. If your mental model of a prequel is “the origin story nobody needed, milking a famous brand for nostalgia,” I understand why you’ve skipped this one. Everyone has. It’s the best-written show of its decade hiding inside a title that sounds like a joke.

Better Call Saul is not a joke.

Here’s the thing about Breaking Bad: it’s a machine. Every episode clicks forward, every season escalates, Walter White is a rocket sled of cause and effect. Saul is built the opposite way, and that’s the entire point. It takes its time. It tells small stories about small cons and a man who can’t stop committing them. And the slowness isn’t indulgence — it’s the mechanism. You watch Jimmy McGill make a choice you know is wrong, a choice that costs him almost nothing, and then you watch the next one, and the next, and by the time you look up, the man you started with has quietly stopped existing. Nobody alerts you to it. There’s no “I am the one who knocks” moment. There’s just drift, and the horror is that it never once feels like drift while it’s happening.

The procedural pacing is the Trojan horse. Each episode functions like an episode of television — a case, a con, a problem to solve — which makes it the easiest prestige show in existence to keep watching. You will watch it at the speed of a cop show and feel it at the speed of a tragedy. That’s a genuinely hard trick and I can’t name another show that pulls it off.

Then there’s Kim Wexler, played by Rhea Seehorn, and you should know going in that she’s the real centre of the show. Her arc is the one that will follow you around for weeks, and it’s built on the same engine as Jimmy’s: two people who love each other enabling the worst versions of each other, one good decision at a time. The last stretch of season five into season six contains some of the most devastating television ever made, and it’s devastating because of things people chose, not things that exploded.

The craft is absurd, too. There’s an episode — “Bagman” — that’s essentially a feature film about a man in the desert with money, and it plays like a thriller even though you know he survives, because he has to, because he’s in the other show. That’s the background dread this show runs on: you know where Saul Goodman ends up, so every step toward him is fate with a smile on its face.

You’ve had a decade of people telling you TV’s best work happened already. This is the counterargument, and it’s the rare one that’s airtight.

Watch it. Then watch the last five minutes of “Fun and Games” and try to shake it off. You won’t.