while Jane the Virgin was never treated as prestigious, despite being quite ambitious and high quality in its own ways—largely because it was building off soap opera traditions focused on the domestic lives of women. Even though a prestige drama can be great TV, we must not assume that only prestige series are high quality, nor that the sophisticated style of prestige is a guarantee of aesthetic success. Instead, we must remember that labels like “prestige,” “quality,” and “lowbrow” are all cultural constructions, used to reinforce hierarchies steeped in social power and identity.
Clearly there are inherent tensions within series that foreground their status as prestigious television, while embracing imitative impulses rather than developing their own innovations. This conflict becomes acute for spinoffs, as the form overtly embraces its debts toward another program rather than asserting uniqueness or originality. Breaking Bad is generally regarded as one of the pinnacles of prestige drama, charting an innovative approach toward antiheroes, embracing narrative and stylistic experimentation, and gaining both large audiences and critical acclaim. How can Better Call Saul follow in such prestigious footsteps while clearly embracing the imitative logic of spinoffs, straddling the line between derivative and original? To understand the cultural location of Saul, we can examine how it presents itself as both a continuation of Breaking Bad and an original innovative series on its own merits, analyzing the program’s specific techniques that signal these dual identities. These codes of meaning-making address two sets of audiences (with clear overlaps): fans of Breaking Bad eager for more of the earlier series, and prestige viewers drawn to Better Call Saul’s sophisticated storytelling and style.
Appeals to these dual audiences were there from the start of Saul’s pilot episode “Uno.” When it debuted on AMC on February 8, 2015, Breaking Bad had been off the air for fourteen months—long enough to establish distance from its spinoff but recent enough that fans were still invested in the series and remembered how the narrative ended for its various characters. Saul Goodman’s ending was bleak: caught in Walter White’s imploding criminal empire, he went underground and relocated under a new identity to Nebraska. As he told Walter in the penultimate episode, “From here on out, I’m Mr. Low Profile, just another douchebag with a job and three pairs of Dockers. If I’m lucky, a month from now, best-case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha.” Better Call Saul’s opening scene continues directly from the previous series, as it presents the character under his new name, Gene Takavic, indeed managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. However, the sequence is presented in a highly unusual style: a wordless montage of black-and-white footage, with artful close-ups of pastry and Gene doing mundane tasks, over a 1939 recording of The Ink Spots singing “Address Unknown.” We see Gene fear that a burly customer might expose his secret identity, and follow Gene to his apartment, where he drinks whiskey and watches a videotape of his television commercials for his old law practice, letting the repetition of the catchphrase “Better Call Saul” sink in as he quietly weeps for his lost identity before the scene abruptly cuts off.
FIGURE 1.1. In the episode’s teaser, we see the title character in hiding after Breaking Bad, mournfully reliving his previous glory.
This six-minute pre-credit sequence embodies the dual impulses of the prestige spinoff. It highlights the familiar for dedicated Breaking Bad viewers—the television commercials, the presence of actor Bob Odenkirk, and the narrative continuity—in ways that highlight the spinoff as derivative. Even the portrayal of the Cinnabon’s mass-produced, factory-style mall food business evokes the formulaic and standardized elements of commercial television and its pervasive imitative logic. However, the tone and style of this sequence evoke the norms of art cinema more than primetime television, with monochromatic images and evocative shot compositions, the wordless portrayal of Gene’s deep sadness and fear, and the use of a fairly obscure piece of historical music as tonal counterpoint to the contemporary images. Nobody watching this episode without prior knowledge would regard it as formulaic, derivative, or hyper-commercial, thus establishing its legitimacy as prestige television within its opening moments.
The brief credit sequence for the series also contains these dual impulses toward distinction and imitation: every episode of Better Call Saul features a different set of images underlying the series title and names of creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. In the pilot, the image is of an inflatable Statue of Liberty, the gaudy display outside Saul’s office in Breaking Bad, but it is presented with bizarre video effects that oversaturate the colors and glitch the figure; the titles themselves are produced with bad special effects, evoking low-quality videotape production norms of the 1990s. The music is a fuzzy low-fi guitar riff that cuts off abruptly, suggesting a technical error. As Gilligan and Gould recounted, they wanted the credits to be “purposefully shitty,” both to evoke the videotape aesthetic of Saul Goodman’s commercials and to distinguish their credits from other prestige dramas, which “look very well-produced and beautiful and high-class.”6 Thus the credits directly contrast the arty aesthetics of the monochromatic opening sequence with a lowbrow cheap look, but the controlled design also distinguishes the series as part of the prestige tradition using ironically shitty style, straddling these cultural hierarchies within a compact twenty-second sequence.
The rest of the pilot lacks the aesthetic extremes of either the black-and-white opening or the gaudy, glitchy credits, but the episode certainly embraces the innovative stylistic flourishes and visual precision that typified Breaking Bad. “Uno” uses unpredictable close-ups, unusual angles, long takes, and impressionistic sound design to highlight its own aesthetic ambitions and distinguish Saul as part of the prestige drama tradition. Although “Uno” frames itself as a legal drama, with courtroom scenes and office politics inside a law firm, both the style and narrative structure highlight how Saul will avoid following genre conventions in keeping with the prestige drama mode.
Prestige dramas typically embrace narrative complexity, merging serialized storylines, episodic plots, and innovative techniques such as temporal play, twists, and reflexivity. Better Call Saul is notable as a prequel, a particularly challenging storytelling mode that precedes the original series chronology (aside from the opening teaser set after Breaking Bad). Since there are well-established “futures” for some of the characters, the series plays with how to creatively fill in the gaps in backstories. First and foremost, the series goes against its title by focusing on the main character before he adopted the pseudonym Saul Goodman, charting the legal career and personal life of Jimmy McGill, the character’s real name as revealed on Breaking Bad. His transformation into Saul Goodman is much slower paced than viewers expected, as the character does not fully embrace the identity until the finale of season 4. For fans seeking Goodman’s continued exploits bending the legal system to the point of criminality, the series fails to meet expectations. Instead, we get a protracted origin story, starting with Jimmy at a point of professional desperation, trying to make ends meet as a struggling lawyer with a shady past operating out of the backroom of a nail salon. The structure is the moral inverse of Breaking Bad : rather than watching a seemingly upright citizen transform into a vicious drug kingpin, we look backward at a corrupt lawyer’s early career of trying to make good.
As the spinoff of one of the most successful and acclaimed prestige dramas, Better Call Saul builds on Breaking Bad’s narrative structure, especially through its integration of tightly plotted crime stories with slower-paced attention to character morality and relationships. The pilot episode incorporates both of these elements, with character drama flowing from Jimmy’s challenging relationship with his brother Chuck, a successful lawyer sidelined by a confounding illness. As conveyed in the one scene between them, Jimmy clearly admires Chuck and tries to take care of him but also resents his older brother’s arrogance and lack of empathy; Jimmy’s love for Chuck is quickly established as the moral foundation for his actions, including an ongoing feud with Chuck’s partner Howard. The final thirteen minutes of the episode present a caper plot, as Jimmy executes a con game to steal a client from Howard but violates
