The conventional wisdom seems to be that the second season of AMC’s Breaking Bad-Spinoff/prequel “Better Call Saul” was better than the first season. And, as usual, the conventional wisdom is wrong. The second season was actually worse than the first on almost every level.
The first season had a couple of early missteps (like Tuco dragging Jimmy out into the desert so early on) but found a natural, original rhythm in the early middle of the season. It introduced an entire world and actually seemed to have fun playing in it, and nearly every character was brand-new so we weren’t really sure what would happen. It also made clear that we really didn’t know Jimmy “Saul Goodman” McGill at all, and hadn’t learned much about his background throughout “Breaking Bad.”
The series best episode to date was the sixth in season one (the heralded “Five-O”) where we finally learned Mike’s backstory. The series best individual moment to date was–you guessed it–in season one when Jimmy finally learned that his brother didn’t believe in him and confronted him over it. And nearly all of season two’s main storylines were introduced in season one: Jimmy’s crush on Kim, Jimmy’s falling out with his icy brother Chuck, the Sandpiper nursing home case, Jimmy working at a bigger law firm, Mike helping his son’s wife and granddaughter out, and even meeting Michael Mando’s “Nacho.” Even season two’s black-and-white post-Breaking Bad opener (where we see an on-the-run Saul hiding out in Omaha) wasn’t really showing us anything new or that we didn’t get from season one. In the few areas where season two departed from season one, it was near-unanimously negative.
–The storyline between Jimmy and Chuck is getting o-l-d. In season one, it was a little bit easier to take Michael McKean’s horrible Chuck (the most pitiful and hateable family member of a main anti-hero since Livia Soprano) since we didn’t yet see him as much besides a doddering old fool with a psychological allergy. It made his true colors and treatment of Jimmy all the more startling in the second half of the first season. However, the second half of this season spent way too much time asking us to care about the fate of a character that most of the audience just simply doesn’t care for, and the second-season finale once again had Jimmy falling into the predictable trap of trusting his brother even after being told his brother is out to get him. Sure, the series is telling us that Chuck is Jimmy’s blind spot and he doesn’t yet see him really, but who cares? At this point in “Breaking Bad” we’d seen amazing, tense, terrible things that kept us glued to our seats. I get that “Saul” is a different show, but watching Jimmy fuss over Chuck and try to make him tea while they scheme around each other feels like a bad episode of “Frasier” meets “Grey Gardens” restaged as a Greeky tragedy. It’s just not that compelling for the central storyline of a series.
–Mike’s adventures can’t go anywhere. In season one, most of the characters we saw Mike interacting with were brand-new and therefore could easily die. In season two, his main adventures have been well-staged, and crafted to build suspense…that doesn’t exist because we already know that none of these characters dies. Mike’s scenes with the gun dealer, Tuco, the creepy Cousins, and Tio Salamanca are just time-fillers since we know for a fact all of them are alive when Breaking Bad starts. At this point, we’re just killing time until Mike meets his inevitable employer Gus Fring (who appeared to leave a note for Mike in the season two finale) and it’s now getting anti-climactic that we haven’t met him yet. This season, Mike’s B-side storylines are like a disposable crime novel: interesting in the moment, but ultimately a waste of time.
–But seriously, what has Jimmy really done this season? Season one worked because we saw Jimmy actually do things: con people, try to build a law practice, have an existential crisis, negotiate for his own life, have an interesting storyline trying to land a major embezzlement case, have a feud with Howard Hamlin, land a major class-action case, find out the truth about his brother, get involved with Mike, and find out a truth about himself in the finale. It looked like we were going to see the rare show that was actually interested in the business of being a lawyer, and creator Vince Gilligan had said he was intrigued with the idea of a lawyer-show where there weren’t many actual trials (as there rarely are in real-life law cases). All of that sounds great, but season two seemed more content to spin its wheels. Jimmy spent the first two-thirds of the season barely doing anything besides be stuck in a corporate law firm and hanging out with his girlfriend Kim. Then the last third saw him mostly try to outmaneuver his own brother before falling into a predictable pattern of taking care of him. It wasn’t just the lack of “riveting” drama, it was the lack of humor, sideways scams, and interesting legal entanglements (laugh if you want, but the embezzlers and Sandpiper class-action case were actually interesting to me) that made this season a bit stagnant.
Anyway, it’s nothing the show can’t fix next season. The big problem is that with this season’s shortcomings barely even getting mentioned by other media outlets, I’m not sure the creators will even get the message that they have a problem. And yet another season of watching Jimmy and Chuck be doofus-adversaries might turn me off the series for good.