aftermeth

I first saw Bob Odenkirk on The Ben Stiller Show in 1992, in the middle of that crazy surge of sketch comedy shows, the likes of which we wouldn't see again until, well, this last year or so: in a three or four year period, you had In Living Color, The State, The Edge, The Ben Stiller Show, The Idiot Box, Just Say Julie, and Mr Show, and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. (Mad TV came in just as In Living Color ended - I had to look it up to be sure.) These were sketch comedy shows that represented different viewpoints than SNL, which had already come to represent a sort of white, male, often fratty, often diluted mainstream.

The Ben Stiller Show isn't remembered as fondly as Mr Show or The State today, but I think everyone who watched it realized how much talent was on board there (the way those of us who saw Jon Stewart on Short Attention Span Theater realized we'd be seeing him in a bigger venue eventually -- not that anyone could have foreseen this week's outpouring of tributes following the announcement that he's leaving The Daily Show, nor the importance that a show like TDS could have). Janeane Garofalo and Andy Dick rounded out the cast; David Cross and Dino Stamatopoulos had their first writing jobs on the show. It's probably mostly remembered as a starting point -- Garofalo and writer Judd Apatow went on to The Larry Sanders Show, Ben Stiller's film career began with Reality Bites, Andy Dick had a few false starts and then wound up on NewsRadio. And Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, who met on the Stiller Show, went on to create Mr Show.

Its crazy to me how good Mr Show was, given that it premiered just after The State had ended -- and at the time, The State seemed to me like the definitive word on sketch comedy -- and how little overlap the two shows had. (I'm not looking it up, but just assuming they had a writer or two in common, or a guest star in common, or something.) It tells you a lot about the depth of talent available at the time.

I was exactly the right demographic for both shows -- early 20s, colorful hair, Camille Paglia and Douglas Coupland on the bookshelf -- but also exactly the right age that I could have easily missed them, what with not always being home at night and not always having cable. In fact, I missed the last season or two of Mr Show because of not having HBO (I may not have had cable at all - it's all a blur now). Anyway, like The State, or Python, or the occasional Key and Peele skit today - or some of my favorite SNL bits in the last ten years, like "Dear Sister" - Mr Show was fundamentally absurd, a style of comedy that you don't "get" just by telling yourself, oh sure, it's a parody of COPS only they're in the French Revolution.

Like David Cross, Odenkirk became a comedy fixture after Mr Show, doing small to medium parts in a million TV shows, but it felt like everyone who knew his name was a Mr Show fan. It wasn't until Breaking Bad -- and especially, when Breaking Bad suddenly became huge in its final seasons -- that it seemed like the rest of the world finally got to know Bob Odenkirk's name.

Even before Better Call Saul, Odenkirk's Saul Goodman was an outlier in this age of quality TV drama: a supporting character so vivid and interesting that you could easily imagine a Saul show taking place simultaneously with Breaking Bad, and his early appearances on BB as a crossover between the two shows. You could easily replay those early BB appearances from a Saul-centric point of view and imagine what the rest of his day might be like, or how the appearance of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in his life affected his overall arc. This feeling faded in the later seasons -- as Saul became more integral to Breaking Bad, the sense of him as a secret protagonist of some hidden show in a parallel universe naturally went away.

But think of how few characters among Breaking Bad's fellow dramas could so easily be imagined as protagonist of their own shows. Even when Frasier was spun off from Cheers -- more or less an ensemble comedy -- back in the day, they had to find a new context to put him in, and ignore his established backstory, in order to make it work. It wasn't just "here's more of Frasier, minus the parts of his life he spends in a bar."

The Wire lends itself most easily to this question, of course -- there was a Tommy Carcetti miniseries planned at one point, and it's easy to imagine the ongoing story of the stevedores, a Cutty-centric spinoff, a Bunny Colvin version of Parenthood, what have you. That's the nature of the show. But try imagining a character from Mad Men, The Sopranos, even Deadwood being given their own show that isn't in some sense a rejiggered continuation of the original show. Any character I pick, it feels like Frasier -- it feels like lifting this character up and removing them to some other venue to tell a story that, really, could have just as easily been told about a brand-new character. AfterMASH. Beverly Hills Buntz. Joey.

I think that's one reason Better Call Saul has been so highly anticipated, and why the premiere rated so highly: Saul Goodman already felt like a character who had his own show we weren't watching. He already felt that alive and that interesting, without needing to give him a fussy brother and a dad who doesn't understand him. Better Call Saul, if it's done right, is a story that can only be told with this preexisting character.

You know what it reminds me of, more than anything on TV? John Constantine. Constantine showed up as a supporting character on Alan Moore's fantastic run on the Swamp Thing comic book, sort of a Ben Kenobi with a Han Solo heart, there to guide Alec Holland to his destiny but not necessarily for Holland's own good. It wasn't until several years later that he got his own series, Hellblazer, and while we got to know other facets of Constantine through that series, none of it felt like it was at odds with what we knew of him in Swamp Thing. It just felt like we had backtracked and chosen to keep following John's story instead of Alec's.

Yes, the Saul we're getting in this first season isn't the Saul we know, yet. He's not even called Saul. But this is clearly the Albuquerque of Breaking Bad. This is clearly that same world, just a different segment of it, a decade earlier, from a different perspective. If it's a prequel, it's not a prequel in the same sense as The Phantom Menace et al -- this doesn't feel like a narrative that is primarily meant to explain how we got to the first few minutes of Breaking Bad, or even to Saul's first appearance on Breaking Bad. It doesn't feel like an explanation at all, and I think that's going to be one of its strengths.

With only two episodes, it's hard to say much about the show so far. It has a mix of darkness and humor like Breaking Bad often did, without the self-destructive megalomania of Walter White at its center. That alone is compelling. Taking somebody like Saul/Jimmy and having him take care of an older brother like Chuck, that's immensely compelling, and immediately makes you ask what happens to Chuck in the intervening years (perhaps like Chuck Cunningham, people just forget about him and stop bringing him up), what the rest of their family is like, etc.

I'm certainly on board.