TV HIGHLIGHT: Better Call Saul Season 2

Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk was a middle-aged man in a hurry when I caught up with him last year. At 53, the comedy veteran was coming to terms with life in the spotlight – an elevation that followed decades of assiduous obscurity. Season one of Saul – an outwardly frothy yet often devastating prequel to Breaking Bad – had just debuted on Netflix, with Odenkirk excelling as the show’s eponymous crooked lawyer. Things were moving fast...

“I’ve done so many projects that never come off,” he had told me, shaking his head in disbelief. “You kind of assume that’s how things go. I’ve written shows, shot pilots. Nobody saw them. You start to forget that sometimes your stuff does get seen. Breaking Bad has been seen by so many. It goes over your head...

“I am comfortable with failure. That’s a good philosophy to have in showbusiness. The popularity of Better Call Saul is surprising – even though I know it shouldn’t be surprising. You see your face on a billboard, you reflect on the popularity of Breaking Bad. It’s like – oh yeah, people love Breaking Bad, they will give this show a try. And yet, I still can’t get over it.”

Twelve months later, Saul is back for a massively-anticipated second season and, judging by the two episodes this writer has watched, the returning series doubles down on everything people loved about its first year.

Odenkirk is heartbreakingly believable as Jimmy McGill, a small-time hustler trying to live honestly as a lawyer only to discover, painfully and profoundly, that the straight-and-narrow is not where he is meant to be. The journey from the essentially upstanding McGill to the amoral Saul Goodman – as Jimmy has taken to styling himself by the time he becomes Walter White’s counsel on Breaking Bad – has begun and there is no turning back (the alter-ego moniker is from his catchphrase “S’all good man”).

“He’s not getting any breaks,” was how Odenkirk described Saul to me last year. “His instinct tells him he has some ability. He wakes up every morning thinking, ‘I can do this thing’. And then, as the day goes on, he gets pounded and so he goes to bed a little drunk and sad. And then he wakes the next morning thinking, ‘I can do this...’

“I think people can relate to that. It’s good to trust your instincts and it’s frustrating to not have the world reciprocate your feelings. Sometimes it’s just about hanging in there and being ready when the world turns its eyes on you.”

Season two opens straight after last year’s finale. Jimmy, shaken by the death of his home-town bro Marco, returns to Albuquerque and rebuffs a once in a life-time opportunity to join a high-end legal firm. Instead, he drives into the sunset, humming the riff from Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke On The Water’, finally at peace with the bleak truth that he was not meant to be a straight arrow.

But there’s a complicating factor – his feelings for lawyer pal Kim (Rhea Seehorn). We learn that one of the reasons he walked away from the law was because Kim has rejected – or at least long-fingered – him romantically. So he’s hanging by the pool – having fast-talked his way into a five star hotel – and enjoying life as a confidence artist. He seems happy. Or at least not actively miserable. Something awful is almost certainly around the corner.

Though Odenkirk steals every scene in which he appears, Better Call Saul also has a buddy movie aspect, with motor-mouthed Jimmy striking up an uneasy alliance with taciturn Mike Ehrmantraut, a heavy played with wonderful nuance by veteran Jonathan Banks. Indeed, for brilliance of Odenkirk’s acting, it was Banks who arguably delivered the defining performance of Saul year one, in an episode that explored the death of the character’s son, for which Goodman received an Emmy nomination.

“I was very aware that I had got something that was very, very special as soon as I got it. I was very grateful,” Banks said in a recent interview. “Because, like all actors, I enjoy what I do. But if you give me that monologue, if you give me those words to say... that’s why I started to do it in the first place. Forty-nine years ago when I got my first pay cheque; when Bryan Cranston got up at the Emmys, or the SAG Awards one year and said: ‘I’m so proud to be an actor’... I felt the same way.

“The thing about a great character like Mike, for me anyway, is that I’ll be doing his backstory ‘till the day I die,” he continued. “I‘ll still be coming up with Mike-isms forever. I think about him. I gotta tell you I haven’t been Mike now for three or four months, and I’m pretty much relaxed back into the insanity of being Jonathan. As soon as I work with the character again, work with Mike, my mind is very active. I love Mike.”

On paper Better Call Saul ought to have been a mess. It dispenses with one of those aspects of Breaking Bad that audiences came to love – its sense of relentless doom as school teacher-turned-meth baron Walter White grew incrementally more psychotic. And it’s a prequel – which, if The Phantom Menace and Fear The Walking Dead taught us anything, is a genre where there’s a severe danger of underwhelming. Yet Saul charms and beguiles, whilst making serious points about destiny and how, no matter how hard we resist, it always gets us in the end. In a way, Odenkirk’s life mirrors that of Jimmy McGill – a respected comic actor apparently set for a footnote career. Then Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan cast him as a sleazy attorney, and people loved it. He was on his way and is still pinching himself.

“I met [Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould] at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles and it was clear they had some ideas,” said Odenkirk. “They were leaning towards a drama. It was no longer a half-hour thing. Instead of being mostly comedic with some drama, it was going to be mostly dramatic but with comedy. That’s the thing about Saul – he’s funny. Even when he’s being tortured and it is played completely seriously, it’s still funny.

“I have a reputation among comedians in Hollywood as a guy you go to for advice,” he continued. “And I’ve always told people, ‘part of this job is waiting in line’. When people say they like your work, they mean it. They’re not lying to you. You’re going to think they are lying because you can’t get a fucking break.

“Part of you is thinking, ‘you’re lying to me, you didn’t get me a job’. You’ve got to stay in the line, don’t become an alcoholic, keep your brain in shape. Eventually they will cut you some slack and give you an opportunity. And you have to be ready for that when they do.”

Better Call Saul Season 2 is on Netflix, with a new episode arriving every Tuesday.