If you had to reduce the revered series Breaking Bad to its haiku essence, it might be the moment when Skyler White looked at a freight palate stacked waist-deep in money and asked her broken-bad husband Walter, “How much is enough?”
Breaking Bad’s prequel/spinoff Better Call Saul, whose second season launches Monday at 10 p.m. ET on AMC, increasingly seems to be asking the same question, only from a different angle.
Creator Vince Gilligan was determined from the start to give Better Call Saul a personality of its own and he has, even aside from its more deliberate pace and lighter tone.
Like Walter White, Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill – who by the time of Breaking Bad would call himself Saul Goodman – is a guy trying to figure out his life.
But most of Jimmy’s dilemmas at this relatively early stage aren’t life and death. He just can’t seem to get out of his own way and isn’t sure he wants to.
If that sounds vague and cryptic, Odenkirk and Gilligan make Jimmy’s often exasperating life worth watching. If Better Call Saul isn’t as compelling as Breaking Bad, it’s entertaining.
Which brings us to Jimmy’s version of “how much is enough?”
Jimmy’s a sharp guy, quick and funny and even usually self-aware. He’s a good learner, a sponge, and he’s got the combination of street smarts and book smarts that could make him a first-rate lawyer.
Last season he also caught a break, stumbling onto a nursing home where massive fraud was being perpetrated. He had the radar to spot it and the drive to pursue it, and it could catapult him into the legal big time.
As this new season opens, he’s being courted by Davis & Main, a spare-no-perks law firm. He also seems to have a shot at a relationship with the woman for whom he pines, Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn, right).
And yet he keeps thinking it’s not enough. The Kim part, maybe. The Davis & Main part, maybe not. Law at this level, the kind practiced by his dependent yet domineering brother Chuck (Michael McKean), may not give Jimmy the rush he used to get from the 80-dollar scams he used to pull in back alleys.
That’s where Better Call Saul builds on Breaking Bad. In Breaking Bad, Saul Goodman was an amoral lawyer, alternately the comic relief and the grease that slid Walter White through the system.
Here, we watch the whole rolling series of decisions that led him there, and as a bonus we also know exactly where they will ultimately take him: to managing a Cinnabon in an Omaha shopping mall.
Monday’s episode starts on a lonesome Nebraska night, with a long black-and-white vignette of Jimmy closing up the shop.
And yes, Better Call Saul also continues the story of Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a former Philly cop who’s moved out West en route to breaking bad himself.
We don’t get a lot of Mike in Monday’s episode, but we do get a nice subplot involving his idiot client Donald, who just bought a bright yellow and red H2. Hint: We’re laughing harder than Donald.
Donald has been dealing with our old friend Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), and it’s just possible Mike could re-enter the equation.
That could tip the ever-shifting balance of Better Call Saul from a little more comic to a little more tragic. And Jimmy will still be wondering whether either one is enough.