Let's consider for a moment if Better Call Saul was based on what just about every other spinoff has been based on — the further adventures of protagonists who gained an audience in their original show. Or, gained an audience of producers in the boardroom of the original show who saw dollar signs. You can't tell me that Norman Lear saw George Jefferson, Archie Bunker's dry cleaner, and envisioned a story with so many unanswered questions it just had to be told. No, he saw the opposite of Good Times, a black family in a dee-lux apartment in the sky and not a housing project. And then there's Maude (see what I did there?), who appeared on one episode of All in the Family as Edith's liberal cousin. I'm the first one to say that Bea Arthur is magical, but it's pretty obvious the network was just being lazy and throwing underrepresented demographics out there to see if they stuck.
But not Saul. Sure, AMC has had more duds than hits and could use a cash cow once Mad Men is gone. I saw an ad for Turn, the network's Revolutionary War drama, and thought, "About time! When does it start?" only to realize that it's already been on for one season. Did anyone talk about it, or blog about it, or even watch it? No. Ditto for Rubicon. So yeah, you could say AMC is "jumping the snark" by adding the wry dramedy. But I'm not complaining.
Most networks of lesser worth would have written the continuing story of Saul Goodman, trapped in obscurity in Omaha, Neb., eventually using his Cinnabon franchise as a money laundering scheme for the Mexican Mafia guys who find and blackmail him. That's too obvious. And the magic of Breaking Bad was how the characters started in one moral universe and ended up in an entirely different one.
So the fascinating thing about Better Call Saul is that it is a prequel, not a sequel. Who knew that Saul wasn't always a debauched, unethical schlub? The problem with a prequel, however, is that we already know that when someone puts a gun in his face and threatens to kill him that he's not going to die, but the writers are just using that fact as a challenge to make the show as suspenseful as possible. This means they have to add characters whom we don't already know and also don't want to die. For now, my money is on Michael McKean's character, Chuck, Saul's brother who is suffering from mental illness. They've also introduced lawyer Kim Wexler (played by Rhea Seehorn) who is a good foil to Saul's buffoonery.
The Chuck character is the only thing in the mix that feels forced — it's obvious that we had no idea what Goodman's family was like back on Breaking Bad, so it's logical to introduce someone. An elderly, sick mother would've been a cliché, but an estranged son who dips in and out of his life could've worked if done right, especially if he's the total opposite of his dad in some way. But they went with a sibling who's a formerly successful lawyer who now suffers from some sort of environmental phobia, and therefore must be care-taken by Saul.
This is a common device in spin-offs — surround the hero with the disenfranchised. Fish was Abe Vagoda's sitcom that came from Barney Miller. He played the patriarch of a family of racially mixed foster children who were always either in some sort of peril or creating some sort of havoc. The Brady Bunch had a spinoff that never even made it to the light of day, but it was called Kelly's Kids and was about neighbors of the Bradys who — you guessed it — adopt three orphans of different ethnic backgrounds. Cheers to Frasier, a man who lives with his elderly dad. Friends to Joey, which featured Joey's nephew with Aspergers. Golden Girls to Empty Nest: a man becomes a widower and his grown daughters move in. Gilligan's Island to The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island, wherein the team crash-lands on the island and has to play a game against a hoard of robots. Okay, so that doesn't really prove my point, it's just rad. Especially since it was originally supposed to be The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders on Gilligan's Island. (Truly.)
So yep, these writers (I keep saying that, but it's basically Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould) are mostly smart. They are not completely patronizing us by showing Goodman's slow downward spiral into "bad," for starters. He's not a squeaky clean high school science teacher, he's a lawyer, and, well, we all know what Shakespeare said about those guys.
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