It doesn’t really necessarily count as binge watching for me if I’ve watched the latest helping of BETTER CALL SAUL SEASON 5 over the past nine weeks, watching every new episode one it came out on a app now does it? But it does count as binge watching for you if you take my following recommendation: watch Breaking Bad on Netflix, it’s all there, then watch the El Camino Breaking Bad movie (love, love, LOVED it), and then start Better Call Saul, watch through season 4, and then borrow someone’s AMC Network log in information to watch all of Season 5. It’s going to be the best quarantine binge watching of your life. I guarantee it. Usually sequel or prequel series that come almost directly after one of the greatest television shows in history are doomed to fail, there is no way that the creators can reproduce that kind of quality so fast and the end product ends up nowhere near as masterful, sometimes even ruining and tarnishing a bit of the phenomenon that came before. But not Better Call Saul. It is the one and only television show that I have ever seen come so close to matching the glory of Breaking Bad, it’s absolutely astonishing that it has been able to pull it off so far, with each season being better than the last, and just getting that much closer to being the television show that Breaking Bad was. That’s right, Season 5 is easily the best season of the show, then 4, then so on to the first season. Not saying the first season is bad at all, just want to get it in your head the fact that this show that keeps on getting better and better is an almost near impossible feat. Yet it still does it.
After this season, there is one more green lit season (who knows when it’ll actually start getting filmed because of bitch ass COVID) and in the end, if you count the El Camino movie as one episode of Breaking Bad, both Better Call Saul and it will have had the same amount of episodes. 63, I think. Which to me, is perfect, stay in the game to tell the story it needs and then goes out on top without any sort of bad after taste whatsoever. If you don’t know what Better Call Saul is (first off, shame on you) it’s a prequel series to Breaking Bad that stars Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill and his eventual transformation into the sleazy criminal lawyer named Saul Goodman that we all love to hate in the masterful series that starred Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul. And while the series has had some minor cameos from old Breaking Bad alumni (Tuco, Crazy 8, Huell, Lydia etc.) and some major series regular call backs (Mike and Gus) it hasn’t felt the need to be a fan service kind of series, but one that stands out on its own, making the call backs tiny little winks, but then getting down to the original nitty gritty so to speak. The story telling is wonderful, and with each season, Jimmy slips deeper into becoming Saul, but also has giant satisfying character arcs of other original characters that were never in Breaking Bad, for example, Kim Wexler, played amazingly by the wonderful Rhea Seehorn. While she’s been a major supporting background character, season 5 was her’s to shine, revealing something shocking about her by the end that we didn’t know we were supposed to know all along. You’ll see, it’s just a fantastic narrative.
The early seasons dealt mainly with Jimmy and the relationship with his brother Chuck, and while those were the weaker seasons to be sure (but still wonderfully addicting), Season 4 and 5 have gotten so close to the quality of Breaking Bad, it’s unbelievable. My God, if in Season 6, they can stick the landing just like the last season of Breaking Bad did, you’ll have two series and a movie that will be unmatched and unrivaled for the years to come. “But what about Game of Thrones?” FUCK GAME OF THRONES. It was masterful until those two schlock showrunners David Benioff & D.B Weiss ran out of book material and pulled shit out of their ass to bring us one of the worst final seasons I have ever seen out of a tv show. And while I love 24, only really season 1 or 5 of that show got anywhere near the ballpark of (and certainly not even in the stadium) of how great Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are. It is storytelling, acting, cinematography, editing…to absolute PERFECTION. Breaking Bad is a perfect series and Better Call Saul is a near perfect series, with El Camino as a nice, sweet, really great, yet unnecessary epilogue for both of them. If you haven’t watched any of it, you are a moron. I said it, a moron. And well, if you have nothing to do right now…what are you waiting for? Especially if you haven’t heard any sort of spoilers whatsoever. You are in for an absolute treat. The only bad thing is we’ll probably have to wait another year to 2 years for the final season. Fuck you COVID-19, you fucking FUCK.
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