‘Better Call Saul’: the last great American TV drama?
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I have just read John Gray’s excellent piece in The New Statesman on the Netflix series, Better Call Saul, perhaps the last (and certainly the latest) of the great American long-form drama series of the last twenty years that started with The West Wing (1999-2006), The Sopranos (1999-2007), The Wire (2002-08), Breaking Bad (2008-13), Boardwalk Empire (2010-14) and Better Call Saul (2015-22).
These series were part of a new kind of American TV drama that became increasingly dark and morally complex, superbly cast, created and produced by a new group of showrunners, including Aaron Sorkin, David Chase, David Simon, Terence Winter and Vince Gilligan. These shows shifted the centre of gravity of American drama from the movies to TV. They were all long, between five and six seasons, between 56 and 154 episodes. Most were set in on the East Coast: New Jersey (Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos), Baltimore, Maryland (The Wire) and the political world of Washington DC (The West Wing).
Perhaps this is what made Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul so distinctive. It wasn’t just the world of gangsters, drug traffickers and cops that was so captivating. It was the new landscape of the Mexican-American borderlands, the abandoned wasteland of New Mexico (perhaps especially that portacabin, serving as a kind of downmarket tax advice company with the ghostly inflatable statue of liberty floating about the desert). That image embodied the new America of this dirty realism, a world in which moral ideals were compromised and it was hard to find good guys anywhere. The nearest we get are Nacho Varga, part gangster, part loyal son, who does everything in his power to protect his elderly father, and Mike Ehrmantraut, a loving grandfather, a former Philadelphia police officer working as a parking lot attendant at the Albuquerque courthouse, and later a private investigator, bodyguard and “cleaner” for Gus Fring.
Apart from the New Mexico desert, there is the world of small businesses and public law buildings in the state capital. These include the Twisters restaurant used previously in Breaking Bad for Gus’s Los Pollos Hermanos; a parking lot kiosk at the Albuquerque Convention Center where Mike worked in the first few seasons; the local courthouse; and two nearby office buildings in the North Valley, including Northrop Grumman‘s, that collectively are used for the HHM office spaces. Jimmy’s back office is located in an actual nail salon.
Then there is the world of the out-and-out criminal psychos: Hector and Lalo Salamanca and their family, perhaps above all the evil identical twins who made their astonishing debut in Breaking Bad. Then there are the more morally complicated figures: Gus Fring, the drug trafficker behind Los Pollos Hermanos, the fast-food franchise, dodgy lawyers and the central character Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman and his long-time girlfriend, Kim Wexler.
As Gray writes, “It may not be accidental that Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad were American series. They reflect a society more decayed than any in Western Europe.” It’s a society in which people are drawn to crime and violence despite their best intentions, often pitched against criminals who have never had any best intentions. And the law seems underfunded and ineffectual in its efforts to take on human and drug trafficking, as well as the suffering and violence they both bring.
Like all the other major TV drama series, it is a largely masculine world. Breaking Bad gave Walter White (the name is, like Saul Goodman, ironic) a wife and domestic life, just as Better Call Saul (prequel, sequel and spin-off) gave Saul a girlfriend, though love interest might be putting it a bit far. But you couldn’t help but feel that these were desperate, perhaps even cynical, bids to attract a female audience. The key characters in both series are men, usually without female partners, engaged in out-and-out violence, unlike the minor characters who tend to have husbands and wives and rub up against the main characters and suffer accordingly.
In the final episode of Breaking Bad, one of the minor characters summed up the series: “The whole thing felt really shady, morality-wise.” In the final episode, as all through the series, we are in a grey zone. The more the bodies pile up, the greyer it gets, the further away we are from the black and white morality tales of mid-20th century US television. We are a long way from President Josiah Bartlett and his family Bible or his team of decent liberals, fighting the good fight against terror, authoritarian regimes and Republicans.
The West Wing now feels like a bygone era. It began almost twenty-five years before Better Call Saul came to an end. Walter White was the embodiment of white rage in turn of the century America. He is the successor to Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down. Early on, a hospital psychiatrist asks White why he disappeared. “My wife is seven months pregnant with a baby we didn’t intend. My 15-year-old son has cerebral palsy. I am an extremely overqualified high school chemistry teacher. When I can work, I make $43,700 per year. I have watched all of my colleagues and friends surpass me in every way imaginable and within 18 months I will be dead. And you ask why I ran?”
This speech was at the heart of Breaking Bad. It is a strange coincidence that the first season was shown in 2008, just months before the global recession began. Breaking Bad was TV for the post-2008 era just as The West Wing was TV drama for the Clinton years.
What is perhaps most curious about these great TV drama series is the absence of the culture wars of the Trump and Obama years. Perhaps that will be the next great series, set in the new South, still fighting over the legacy of the Civil War. Or is that too real for liberal Hollywood, whose heart still lies with Bartlett, Josh Lyman, CJ and Toby Ziegler?
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