INSIDE THE HOUSE, a cameraman captured a
beguiling tableau: There was a glass-topped
watch winder, lined with felt and fi tted with three
fancy-looking timepieces, each traveling in its
own hypnotically undulating orbit. A few inches
away stood a framed photograph of a dog and,
next to this, a squat urn.
Framed from overhead, Odenkirk shuff led
into the shot and planted himself in front of
these things, telegraphing a faint, happy drunk-
enness, with just a few grunts and an impres-
sive economy of motion. He set down a glass of
liquor next to the urn and proceeded to pluck
the watches from the winder, stuffi ng them into
his coat pocket. Slowly, the camera tracked for-
ward, making clear that Odenkirk stood on a
balcony overlooking a living room — and, a beatlater, revealing a jarring sight on the fl oor below.
Lagging behind the camera, Odenkirk casually
peered over the balcony’s edge and, spotting
the thing in question, reacted with a jolt, his
boozy contentedness giving way, abruptly, to a
silent-comedy pantomime of terror.
‘‘This is the God’s-eye view,’’ Gilligan called
out to Odenkirk, explaining the mechanics of
the shot. ‘‘We see something a second before
you do.’’ They fi lmed one take, then another, the
sequence short but demanding precisely timed
interplay between camera and actor. ‘‘It’s real-
ly funny,’’ Gilligan told Odenkirk of his perfor-
mance. ‘‘Let’s do one where you hang out there
a touch longer.’’
‘‘Maybe the camera shouldn’t move till I touch
the urn?’’ Odenkirk suggested.‘‘Yeah,’’ Gilligan replied, ‘‘but let’s perfect
this version fi rst, where we see it before you
do. That’s how the Coens would do it, and I
love those guys.’’
Much like Coen brothers’ fi lms, ‘‘Better Call
Saul’’ is a show about audacious schemers —
some of them drug lords, some thieves, some
hit men, some cops, one veterinarian and many
lawyers — who put elaborate plans in motion
that those of us at home are routinely kept in the
dark about, left to guess where they’re headed.
Saul is, fi rst and foremost, a rhetorical safe-
cracker. Odenkirk realized early on that virtually
every time the character speaks, his aim is to
entrance people with a slick spell of words until
he gets what he wants. ‘‘He’s trying diff erent
tacks, looking at the person he’s talking to, going
down one road, seeing if it’s working,’’ Oden-
kirk told me. But one of the dramatic tensions of
‘‘Better Call Saul’’ is that his mouth rarely stops
running when it should, even when it gets him
into trouble. ‘‘It’s almost like he thinks the more
complicated his scheme is, the better,’’ Odenkirk
said. ‘‘Like Huck Finn: I know how we’ll sneak
into the house — fi rst, you pretend to be a widow.... ’’ Odenkirk laughed. ‘‘Like, Hold it, why not
just go through the window?’’
That night’s shoot required something
besides verbal acrobatics, though. Gilligan
showed me an iPad with a schematic of the set,
upon which he’d diagramed Odenkirk’s looping
path through the house and the camera angles
he devised to capture it. ‘‘I think it’s going to be
a very shocking and dismaying sequence for the
audience and one that does not have the benefi t
of dialogue,’’ Gilligan told me. ‘‘Bob doesn’t say
a single word, and what he’s known for is his
mouth,’’ but ‘‘he really made himself indispens-
able to this show because we realized there’s so
much more to him than his mouth.’’
Like its predecessor, ‘‘Better Call Saul’’ is about
a man who descends in fi ts and starts into his
worst possible self, and who fi nds that descent
irresistible in comparison with a straight-and-
narrow life spent, as Henry Hill puts it at the end
of ‘‘Goodfellas,’’ as ‘‘a schnook.’’ Or, as Saul him-
self puts it at the end of ‘‘Breaking Bad,’’ as ‘‘just
another douchebag with a job and three pairs of
Dockers,’’ managing ‘‘a Cinnabon in Omaha.’’ One
of the dark jokes on ‘‘Better Call Saul’’ arrives in a
series of fl ash-forwards, when we discover that,
after fl eeing New Mexico, Saul is indeed living
under an assumed identity in Omaha, oversee-
ing a food-court Cinnabon — a drab and joyless
existence, shot in black and white.
Both shows resemble updated westerns,
depicting lawlessness on the onetime frontier
of a now-fading empire. And both suggest that
the impulse to cheat, cut corners and get over
on chumps, if not infl ict harm upon them out-
right, is far from some aberrant pathology in
the American identity but rather a constitutive
From top: Michele K. Short/AMC; screenshot from HBO. force. One of the more provocative implications
The New York Times Magazine 29Top: Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn in Season 3 of ‘‘Bette
Odenkirk and David Cro r Call Saul,’ ’ in 2017. Bottom:
ss in the ‘‘Mr. Show’’ sketch-comedy series, in 1996.