Lawyer up

Spinoff shows are like the afterlife of television. They give us glimpses into worlds and characters only briefly explored on the sidelines of popular shows, yet deemed too interesting to let fade away once the final episode airs. They’re like TV’s undead, allowed to draw breath once again.

Witness Exhibit A, Saul Goodman, the fast-talking lawyer last seen on the run from drug cartels and DEA agents when Walter White’s crystal meth empire goes tits-up in the finale of the AMC show Breaking Bad. Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk, had too many funny lines to let him die off when the show did. It didn’t take much to convince Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan that Goodman needed his own show.

The result — Better Call Saul — plays off lawyer Goodman’s low-budget TV ads, his catchphrase aimed at lowlife clients caught red-handed — drug dealers, embezzlers and the like — looking for a “Get Out Of Jail” card.

But not for free. Goodman builds up a respectable nest egg on Breaking Bad by representing a certain clientele with enough ready cash to hire a good defender with loose morals. (Goodman usually requires a gym bag loaded with cash as payment for his timely services.)

Goodman — known as Jimmy McGill when Better Call Saul opens — is not exactly living the high life. His office is a cramped closet in the back of a Vietnamese nail salon in New Mexico. He takes public defender work from the county for small paychecks, and prays that a dream client will ring his phone number.

While he doesn’t sound like a particularly sympathetic TV character, in the well-oiled hands of Odenkirk, Goodman transforms into a living, breathing good guy. Picking up a year or so after Breaking Bad ended, the opening scene — shot in black and white — takes us to a generic, snowbound Cinnabon somewhere in the Midwest: Goodman is now bespectacled and aproned, working behind the counter, one eye always on the lookout for an assassin’s bullet. Living underground after fleeing a South American drug cartel, Goodman’s only joy in his black-and-white existence is replaying his old TV ads on a videotape: “Are you the victim of injustice? Have the opponents of freedom wrongly intimidated you? Better call Saul…”

Admittedly, the show takes a while to work up a decent bit of steam. Episode one merely fills us in with back story: before he was Saul, he was Jimmy McGill, fledgling lawyer, defending public morons pro bono. (His first case is a hoot: trying to exonerate three college kids who broke into a morgue and drunkenly videotaped themselves sawing off a corpse’s head… then having sex with it. “I’m sure all of us did things we’re not proud of when we were 19, am I right?” Goodman pleads with the jury.)

The first sign that things will get interesting is when Goodman tries to rope a couple teen skateboarders into an injury scam — one of the kids fakes a broken leg after flipping over a car hood, then Saul shows up to “represent” them, angling for a settlement from the driver. The plan backfires when they target the wrong car, and end up with guns pointed at their faces in the living room of Tuco, the maniacal drug kingpin last seen on Breaking Bad.

The series receives a proper spitball spin from Gilligan himself, who has a talent for writing his characters into situations that go from bad to worse.

One of the best moments in the opener occurs in a New Mexico desert, not unlike the one where Walter White negotiated with drug dealers for his own continued existence. Like Scheherazade, bargaining for another day’s reprieve by telling stories to keep the listener hooked, Goodman slips into lawyer mode, arranging a hasty “settlement” with twitchy drug kingpin Tuco over how many of his clients’ legs he may break: Tuco wants all four, but Goodman talks him down to two.

Watching Odenkirk work his magic here is probably the thing that will save Better Call Saul from mere spinoff-itis, the disease that afflicts well-intentioned side projects when they start to grow too familiar or formulaic. That, and Gilligan’s presence on the project, means we at least will have to check out the first season.

One reassuring presence is Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), Saul’s right-hand man and enforcer from Breaking Bad, back before they were sympatico. Expect even more colorful characters to populate the show.

One side character who doesn’t quite gel is Goodman’s brother, gifted lawyer Chuck McGill, who’s had a major crackup and is now an electromagnetic-phobe living in an isolated, un-powered home, wrapped in a “space blanket.” Played by Michael McKean (a Gilligan alumni, having worked together on The X-Files), Chuck probably represents the conscience that Saul is often seeking to avoid in his line of work, but so far he doesn’t bring much to the party. Then there’s Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), an old flame of Saul’s who works at Chuck’s old law firm. She’ll probably come into play a lot more in the season.

Gilligan, like many TV writers these days, loves a flash-forward opening: we first see Saul after the Breaking Bad debris has settled, trapped in a life that’s (literally) colorless. The things that will make the show colorful depend, one guesses, on how well Gilligan remembers what a huge gamble Breaking Bad was: a show about a sympathetic meth cooker? Who would watch that? About a hundred million people, it turns out. Gilligan was literally scraping for work when the Breaking Bad idea first came to him. He must have stockpiled enough memories of those “bad times” — before success rewarded him — to fill a show about a down-and-outer who’s fighting for his big break.

Saul — working his way up from a slippery past into a character who has not exactly “arrived” but at least knows who he is — has his work cut out for him, trying to keep us as interested in his exploits as we were in the tightly-wound adventures of Mr. White and Jesse Pinkman. But the raw materials are there. Saul just needs to do and say the right things to keep us watching.