Street Illegal: Watching Better Call Saul

For fans of Breaking Bad, like me, there's a fix out there - Better Call Saul - a surprisingly good prequel, a genre that usually is just an attempt to exploit the popularity of a far more vibrant original and pales in comparison. Not so here, as BCS is a good series in itself, enriched by knowing what eventually happens to Saul (Bob Odenkirk) in his legal (illegal) practice, but you don't have to know all that to enjoy the series. Odenkirk is great in the title role, which he plays, variously be-wigged, in various time frames. Over the first 4 episodes, we see Saul in some scenes as a scheming petty crook probably in his 20s - and also as the criminal lawyer in witness protection, working in a Cinnabon, in Colorado. But most of the series shows Saul - who at that time was called Jimmy McGill  - as a young attorney trying to make a living in Albuquerque, picking up near-hopeless criminal defense cases on assignment at the county courthouse. He's a completely lovable and engaging schemer, who'll do just about anything to get a client and to win a case - but he does have moral scruples (albeit with some flexibility) and he has a heart. And, as one of the thugs he encounters puts it bluntly, he has a mouth - and part of the fun of the whole series is watching him talk his way out of various scrapes, applying his legal skills to his life's troubles. Also fun to see how he gears up, how nervous he is - in the courthouse men's room, rehearsing his lines - before a case, however petty and pathetic, however obviously guilty his clients may be. Four episodes in and it's still not known how or why he will change his name and start his new, high-profile practice: his still living in his office, which consists of a fold-out bed in a storage room at the back of a manicure salon in a strip-mall. I would say that at times the complex plot feels a little creaky: his "discovery" of the couple that fakes a kidnapping-abduction is so improbable as to push even the boundaries of comedy, but that aside, the series is fun to watch, engaging, and promising.