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 Chuck’s moral code in the process. This caper is reminiscent of Breaking Bad, which was notable for juxtaposing deep character drama with exciting set pieces that forced the characters to devise clever ways to escape perilous predicaments. Thus Better Call Saul adapts the narrative blueprint from its originating series by creating a variation on its approach to prestige drama, simultaneously embracing innovation and imitation.

      Another important dimension of Saul’s storytelling is its pacing. Like Breaking Bad, the series swings between highly tense, fast-paced moments and glacially slow sequences with little dialogue or narrative information. The scene after the opening credits takes viewers to the narrative “present” of 2002, with a sequence of wordless shots of an Albuquerque courtroom waiting to begin its proceedings. This sequence runs for over a minute, generating viewer confusion and creating a restless mood counter to a pilot’s need to convey narrative exposition efficiently. The action then cuts to an institutional bathroom, where we see close-ups of mundane objects over a male voice muttering to himself, seemingly a lawyer practicing his remarks as the bailiff comes to fetch him. The first dialogue occurs a full two minutes into this scene, as the character we’ll come to know as Jimmy McGill enters the courtroom and delivers a brisk two-minute monologue, laying out his idealistic case defending his trio of adolescent clients facing unspecified charges. The scene then slows down again, as the prosecutor wordlessly ambles across the courtroom to set up a video monitor and play a videotape of the defendants committing their crime: breaking into a funeral parlor and gleefully recording themselves decapitating and having sex with the head of a corpse. In all, this six-minute scene offers almost no important information for the ongoing narrative but establishes a key tone for the series through its contrasting pacing: in a slow and quiet world, Jimmy is the driving force of energy and language, provoking humor and exciting contrasts. Additionally, this scene establishes the series as a legal drama (of sorts), but one that distinguishes itself from the genre via unconventional portrayals of courtroom dynamics, with a characteristic visual style, narrative pace, and edgy content.