Better Call Saul Review

The prequel problem is that everyone knows where it lands, so Gould and Gilligan make the destination the source of the dread instead of a spoiler, and the result is more carefully built than the show it descends from. Everything is placed deliberately: a hidden bottle cap, a dropped cone of ice cream, a document reprinted with one digit changed. The photography is the most ambitious on American television, extreme wide lenses, objects shoved into the foreground, held compositions that let a scene play at its own speed, and the monochrome Cinnabon openings turn a man's future into purgatory.

Bob Odenkirk turns out to have had a tragedian in him the whole time, and Rhea Seehorn gives the best performance in either series, assembling Kim's collapse from posture and cigarettes and one devastating shift in her voice. Michael McKean's Chuck is the rare antagonist whose contempt is essentially correct. The talk is excellent but it is not the main instrument here, which is silence and framing, and the middle seasons are slow in a genuinely demanding way. Everything the show attempts, it lands.