Is Better Call Saul better than Breaking Bad?

Is Better Call Saul better than Breaking Bad?

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yes

Yes

no

Yes

It is if you have patrician taste and can understand the based slow burn

I enjoy it more. really liked breaking bad, but it's ultimately a depressing show. BCS stimulates my brain in a similar way but I find much more joy in the characters. I smile and marvel more. I'm rooting for people instead of in spite of them, or in pity.

better memes

Soon

More like Better Call a New Showrunner

>Talking: The show

Breaking Bad had god-tier writing with pretty great direction

Better Call Saul also has god-tier writing and god-tier directing as well

>Not rooting for Walt the whole way through.

Your pic related is in my top three sequences of that show. I love her so much.

>dogshit waste of time
>ughh wow ADD much?

*teleports into you're fedora*
heh... it aint me bein personnel, big guy.

You have ADD

I'd say they're equal now but BCS definitely has the potential to surpass BB

I mean I did, but the metaphorical Ark of my rooting for him was filled with a different set of animals than the Ark I have for the characters on BCS. Breaking Bad taught me all of the shades of blue while Better Call Saul is flaring burnt orange.

waste of time.

there is so many better shows you can waste your time on

>implying a show is bad because it has strong dialogue

>nothing happens durr

At least try not to look like gigantic plebs, you gigantic plebs.

Being better than Breaking Bad is not a compliment

imagine Vince G showrunning Supergirl

I dropped BCS after a couple of eps in season 2.

Didn't drop BB.

BB > BCS

it's so dense

>when a pleb alerts u to their presence

It might be when it's done, however both season finales have been some of the worst season finales I've seen in my life.

I bet you used to own at least two pairs of jnco's

Yes.

>nothing happens "character study" storytelling
>we know where everyone ends up anyway
>wasting resources and talent on such a pointless show

This was greenlit when BrBa was at its peak so the hype made it seem like this will be a runaway hit too.
Too bad all the excitement after BrBa evaporated and Vince was left with this turd on his hands and a whole bunch of cast and crew to feed.

Not only that but Saul is a crap character anyway and as someone said the show would be better off as Someone Shout Ehrmantrout.

That's because there's nothing interesting to tell in the show.
It's like a whole show made out of filler episodes of a better show.

The only thing worth watching it for is the cameos.

I think people like you view Saul as crap because he never goes dark side. Walter not only gets evil, he relishes it at times and I think people like you really dig that note. Saul is more of a rusty knight thing.

The difference between Walter and Saul is, Saul was bad early in life and then reformed, whereas Walter was a beta cuck and then revolted late in life.

>The only thing worth watching it for is the cameos.

And this is how I know you're a pleb

>Not sure who's worse the people thinking that it's boring or the people calling everyone plebs

I don't mind Saul as a character but everything else you've said is true.

No, it's because they chose to do nothing in the S1 finale, and while you may feel that nothing happens in BCS, you're wrong, even if what happens isn't all that grand or essential to the plot, stuff happens, however nothing happened in that episode. In the S2 finale, it felt like the writers thought they were writing the penultimate episode of the season rather than the finale, and the result is an ending that doesn't close off the season in a satisfying way, or more accurately, a finale that doesn't feel like it's closing off the season at all.

I just don't like the show because I never really liked Saul to begin with.

the people lashing out at differing opinions are the redditors. They are worse since they are true plebs.

The first season was really great, but the second season back pedaled from the ending in what feels like an effort to draw everything out. The acting, direction, cinematography are all still good, but the season finale was dramatically inert thanks to a cheap cliffhanger and Mikes story still not meaningfull6 converging with Jimmys (a step back from season 1).

Season 2 could've been goat if the story it told was seriously trimmed and/or it ended with Chuck dying/seriously injured from the fall (which would be a direct consequence of Jimmys own actions).

Then again I was watching this alongside my first viewing of The Sopranos and that show is on a level I think very few can even hope to touch, so maybe that's coloring my perception.

Here's an unrelated image for my post.

>Someone Shout Ehrmantrout
he's honestly the best part of the show
inb4 'slow burning character arc you pleb'

I pretty much agree, but I found season 2 more disappointing. By the third episode, I had to go rewatch the first season to remember why I liked it so much. I think the cinematography, lighting, coloring, character dilemmas/development, and even the music cues are much better. It's like they wanted to completely change the tone of the show, but couldn't agree on what it should be.

It feels like Season 1 was made with 3 seasons in mind and Season 2 with 5. Like, it would be the perfect end to an Act 1 of a 3 Act story, but it has to be stretched out now.

"Oh, shit, Season 1 ends with Jimmy utterly rejected by Chuck, the person he so desperately wanted to earn respect and validation from? This drives Jimmy on a downward spiral, setting him off the straight and narrow path he was trying so hard to follow? Well, we can't be having that, we've got time to fill."

There's nothing wrong with a slow burn if you're going somewhere, but it feels like it's just spinning the wheels (We spent eight episodes on Davis & Main for what? Jimmy's going back to Elder Law?).

Honestly, Mike's kind of my least favorite part, at least of Season 2. I don't care about Tuco, or Salamanca, or any of that right now. It seems more interested in call backs to BB. Mike's great when he and Jimmy are reluctantly brought together and playing off each other, but it feels like they barely exchanged ten sentences through all of the second season.

I agree that the S1 finale turned out to be nothing, especially since S2 backpadels on its conclusion super hard, but I'd chalk that up to production playing it safe in case BCS turned out to be a one-season show.

The S2 finale, on the other hand, I actually like quite a bit, and I think it does draw a clear line on what S2 was about and what S3 will be about, at least as far as Jimmy's story goes. S2 was about Jimmy's unhappiness at the law firm followed by starting a pseudo-joint practice with Kim. S3, on the other hand, will be about the legal battle between Jimmy and Chuck. It wouldn't be suitable for the S2 finale twist to be in the penultimate episode because the repercussions are too huge to be dealt with in one episode.

A 3 season/act structure would have been a good scope for the show yeah. The second season gave some hints of what I was hoping for in terms of laying out why and how Jimmy created Saul Goodman, but Jimmy was underused and didn't seem like the focus of the season. I suspect the writers were trying to ease Odenkirk's workload because on their podcast they say how hard he was working in the first season and he hurt his voice or something in an unrelated way around that time. Also, like you and other people have been saying, Mike seem hamfisted into the story.

eh, I enjoyed Mikes bit with the wimpy drug dealer guy, and some of his other scenes (I honestly don't remember what season they were in) but yeah, I think that he would work best on his own show, on Saul he's just kind of a weird 'Hey, remember Breaking Bad?' that they don't really use enough.

lurking this discussion

It definitely leans more kino than breaking bad.

Yes. It has such a great cast

nothing happens: the show

mike is the only thing worth a shit. saul is a boring character and his only strength is how funny he can be, but that has all been squandered to tell some droned out shitty story about buying office spaces and how his brother doesn't really like him

fuck vince

>mfw chuck

this is a personal thing, but I enjoy watching Saul because most of my family members are addicts. addicts are the BEST liars, dream weavers. especially when backed into a corner. Saul is just as slippery a fish when shit gets limited, and I enjoy that ingenuity especially when it's motivated by not drugs (yet).

>there's not enough action scenes I'm bored! >:[

Better Call Saul is shit. How can there be any suspense if we know that Saul and Mike end up fine?

because the peril lies within the ancillary characters around Saul and mike that aren't around in BrBa.

Mike is definitely the worst part of the show for me. It feels like they were scared to have a show of just Saul doing lawyer things so they stuck in Mike so they could have some action. If it wasn't a prequel and I didn't know that Mike is a big part of BB, I'd be wondering why this character who is hardly connected to Jimmy is so prevalent. It's like if ther was an ongoing side story in BB about Eyebrows running his car wash.

Not to mention that the main thread of the entire series is not whether or not Saul and Mike will die, but rather what exactly ends up driving them to be the amoral people they are in BrBa.

the show should have just been a comedy about saul doing scummy saul lawyering things

mike shouldn't have been in it, chuck the electroid fuck shouldn't have been in it. kim can stay or go, she's a worthless character anyway but waifu fags like her

This
Its boring shit

exactly. the vase is broken, the show is just showing you the mouse trap board game of how it went down.

I almost view better call Saul as the carefree 60's before the free love movement got ravaged by cult leaders and serial murder.

I didn't like the S2 finale because I typically expect seasons of a show to be enjoyable and well written in their own right, without over reliance on other seasons. Of course I don't think you should be able to just jump into any season and kniw what's going on, but each season should feel like a distinct story in its own right. Season 2 of BCS feels like an incomplete story as a result of the ending, which didn't feel like an ending. It was like ending a movie at the end of the second act instead of the third. I feel like it would have been better if the season was a few episodes longer, and Chuck and Jimmy resolved their conflict in those episodes, but I suppose the shows writers couldn't do that even if they wanted to.

Also, this is a minor complaint and I understand why it was done the way it was, but the montage of Jimmy trying to get fired pissed me off. I understand why it was done the way it was done, but there's no way Jimmy would ever get away with that, he would have been fired and he would not have gotten money from it.

mfw I realize the season 2 poster depicts Jimmy as Sisyphus

>the "nothing happens" meme was right all along

>literally NOTHING happens, the show!!!
I don't mind slow stories
hell, Breaking Bad was slow at times
but it took its time to build up to something, and went shit went down, you really cared about the character it took so long to get to know
BCS... NOTHING happens
and every episode is a long montage of zooming into insects of something

the first season had some moments, the scene where saul and those two guys get kidnapped and tuco was going to kill them was a good scene, that's the kind of stuff i was expecting out of the show. tuco was shoehorned in but that's not the point.

instead of that, the show turned into this slow boring slog of shit story lines and shit characters

writing is terrible, characters are pretty flat and one dimensional. its the same as breaking bad, it panders to pretentious twats. the directing is edgy and try hard, same as breaking bad. gilligan literally said he has no idea how Jimmy becomes Saul or when that will happen. And this is after two full seasons. its deliberately padded out.

The first season actually had something. But the second season threw all that away. i dont understand why Sup Forums pretends to like it though, it's a popular show, they aren't being contrarian, and they bitched about the "slow burn" and "character drama" in Boardwalk but "love" better call saul, despite its faux cardboard depth

>The first season actually had something. But the second season threw all that away.

not only did the second season throw away the entire first season, but it did that in literally the first 5 minutes of the first episode of season 2.

saul at the end of season 1 has a chat with mike and basically says his conscious is never going to get in the way of anything he does again

5 minutes into episode 1 of season 2: "oh ok kim, i'll take the nice cushy job because it's the right thing to do"

>these scenes of Kim packing and unpacking her shit and moving into and out of her office a dozen times sure is riveting television

i remember when the show was airing, some idiot on here would constantly respond with how interesting the camera work was even when there was nothing happening in the show.

these are the types of people who enjoy BCS, idiots who think they know what they're talking about.

There are just inherently fewer stakes in BCS. BB revolved around Walt's finite time left to live and desire to feel alive whereas BCS is much more about determinism. We know the older characters and where they'll be by the end of the story, we're just given some more interiority to their lives and they react to things. Chuck's opinion of Jimmy is very deterministic and enables his behavior further. I don't necessarily feel like that's a postive trait for a story, but it's enough for what could be a good show and season 1 showed that imo

Yeah I was pretty pissed off about that. Tossed out 10 hours of actual character development and solid writing in ~5 minutes because they decided they want to just pad the show out rather than go into the Saul transformation.

Given the season 1 finale, this is how I saw the natural progression for the show:

>season 2: Jimmy transforms into Saul, slowly cultivating everything that we love from breaking bad, at the end of the season he is a full blown Saul Goodmen, amoral criminal lawyer and Mike is a solid cartel enforcer through his connection to Nacho
>season 3: shit hits the fan with Chuck and Kim in a big way, they end up out of Sauls life, Nacho tries to rip off the cartel and shit goes south, Mike is tapped by Nacho's superiors to clean it up

When I watched Talking Saul after the S2 premiere and watched that fucking hack Gilligan gleefully proclaim that he has no idea where Jimmy is going or when he becomes Saul (joking that it might take 7 seasons), I was sick. This fuck is thrilled that he has a blank check to do nothing for whole seasons and people will watch it solely because of Breaking Bad.

And the camera work isn't even interesting, its the same boring try-hard masturbatory shit that Gilligan used in Breaking Bad

Yes. Is that even a question

>When I watched Talking Saul after the S2 premiere and watched that fucking hack Gilligan gleefully proclaim that he has no idea where Jimmy is going or when he becomes Saul (joking that it might take 7 seasons), I was sick. This fuck is thrilled that he has a blank check to do nothing for whole seasons and people will watch it solely because of Breaking Bad.

vince is basically just a shill at this point trying to get that advertisement money. saul isn't a deep character, he's a scummy lawyer, we don't need some grand epic backstory saga of how he became a scumbag lawyer. who the fuck cares? he was a funny sidekick character in breaking bad, that's it. that's what i wanted out of this show, saul being a funny scummy lawyer.

but no, instead i get mike being breaking grandpa, dragged out stories about office buildings, and the worst of them all - chuck.

i just wanted a funny show man, THATS IT

>gilligan literally said he has no idea how Jimmy becomes Saul or when that will happen.

Is this true?
They did that in the last season of Breaking Bad too. They added that fucking machine gun without any idea of what they were going to do with it, then had to contrive a way for Walt to use it.

I was expecting it to be a 'cool-on-the-fly-lawyerin' against some baddies every week after that. I was really disappointed.

it's not groundbreaking but it's used well enough. hating something for being almost beautiful should be discouraged. I'd rather a show try real informatic framing than paint by numbers any day

>originally BCS was going to be a half hour dark comedy on Netflix

AMC couldn't let that happen. And naturally they had to do the same shit as Breaking Bad. Oh how does a "good guy" like Jimmy become Saul? Same with fucking Mike. They both have to break bad for some reason. Even though Mike established in BB that he'd been a cold motherfucker for a long time, no half measures, shit like that. Then they have him pulling half measures all over the place.

>Walt, fuck Jesse, don't go through with this hair brained scheme to get him arrested, just kill him
>Nacho I won't kill Tuco, I'll come up with some hair brained scheme to get him arrested

And then they took the scenes where Mike does weasel shit, using the balloons to knock out the power before his assault, putting the toy over the peep hole, and extrapolated the hell out of it so that Mike is some stupid McGuyver type character.

Yeah Vince is a hack. He admitted that the machine gun flash forward was an awful idea in every way and yet people are under the illusion that he's a good writer, for some reason. For some reason he thinks it has to be some crazy epic transformation, but in reality all he needed to do was just not shit on the S1 finale in the first five minutes of S2. Boom, there's your Saul origin right there. Simple, elegant, smooth.

>Oh how does a "good guy" like Jimmy become Saul?

the worst part of this is they've already established jimmy has been a piece of shit since he was a kid, he stole money from his dad

no. things actually happen in BB

But who gives a shit if literally nothing is happening on screen except for epic deep camera work? Who cares? It's derivative no substance all style bullshit, idc how many times you masturbate too it

How is Gilligan a hack? The S1 finale reversal is hardly bad enough to tarnish all his work on The X Files and Breaking Bad.

meh, his dad was a dope who would have gleefully handed away that money and more to everyone with a story. That was also probably one of the only good scenes in this season

>wolf or a sheep kid, who ya gonna be?

>breaking bad
OMG INTENSE EVERYTHING HAPPENING ALL THE TIME CONSTANT MOTION ZOOM BOOM METH METH METH

>better call saul
oh look chuck is having problems with electricity again, damn

BB was just as stale, two dimensional as BCS. Thats why BCS is the way it is.

are you fucking sorry? Gilligan admits he just writes shit because he thinks it sounds cool and then when it comes time to close the circle he fucks up. He said in an interview that that flash forward was a terrible decision that put him in an awful spot. And here he is in the same spot all over again.

vince is a good writer. that's what he should do and that is what he's best at. he is NOT a good show runner/show planner.

>are you fucking sorry? Gilligan admits he just writes shit because he thinks it sounds cool and then when it comes time to close the circle he fucks up. He said in an interview that that flash forward was a terrible decision that put him in an awful spot. And here he is in the same spot all over again.
Am I serious? Of course - a writer making a mistake shouldn't discredit the rest of their work. Have you watched his X File episodes? They were usually top-tier.

No because its a show about nothing

youtube.com/watch?v=by2O3WVkc6M

there's a difference between writing for a show, and being a writer+show runner.

chris carter was the show runner for the x files when vince was writing for it. you may have noticed that chris carter lost his shit at some point and hasn't written anything good since season 7 of the x files.

but even that is better than trope style and no substance.

if you examine the emotional/motivational retcons, particularly mike committing half measures...

I mean the idea is that he doesn't have that belief yet. He's a few degrees away from the person he is in BB. Obviously something of absolute importance is going to blow up in his face that breaks his bad. daughter in law and kid are gonna splat for sure.

If that's the case, the show has to be viewed as a pretty car wreck in slow motion to be enjoyed. the series is basically the 2nd and beginning of third act of every drug/mafia movie

I could watch Rhea for hours desu.

He's clearly a shit showrunner/executive producer. He killed Breaking Bad with that stupid flash forward decision. And he's a shit writer because hes a shameless company man with no vision. Don't give a fuck about X-Files. The Lone Gunmen was a hilariously colossal failure in the hands of Gilligan. So it seems to me that X-Files stands as the exception that proves the rule.

not the person you're replying to but I agree with what you said about mike except the daughter in law and granddaughter are alive in BB

at least Seinfeld is funny, BCS, not so much. not to mention BCS has twice the runtime as Seinfeld. Twice the time double the nothing

trips yes

oh shit I didn't know that. interesting. gonna have to find a real sexy maguffin to make him adopt no half measures in any real way

>implying that the camemera work is anything but empty and try-hard

What are you some kind of retard? Mike has held his stance on half measures since he was a Philly cop decades ago. Words directly from his mouth to Walt. And both his daughter in law and granddaughter are alive in Breaking Bad, do you even pay attention to the shows you watch or are you too busy shitposting?

And his granddaughter in BCS is already older than she was in BB lmfao, she's supposed to be 5 in BB and BCS is set like 5-7 years before BB. By the time they "catch up" to Breaking Bad she'll be a fucking teenager.

I thought we were talking about him as a writer? Then fine, he may be a shit showrunner, I was just defending his writing.

Not caring about the X Files is disappointing desu senpai.

>Jimmy don't be a conman
>LOL dude Jimmy come help me con this dude

I got sick of staring at that stupid mug of hers after the first few episodes and it became evident that she was going to have much focus while she did nothing of importance but be a flip floppy wishy washy bitch