"S'all good, man..."

 “Better Call Saul” Streaming series 1-2, 2015-2016

Better Call Saul is another long-running lawyer series, which makes me wonder if there are so many paralegals, attorneys, partners, administrative law assistants, tech and legal staff in the U.S. that these shows have a guaranteed audience.

“Saul” or Jimmy is a charming, street-wise lawyer that slips between illegality and insight.  His past is full of cons for small change in Chicago, talking people out of money with his buddy Marco, or staging fake pedestrian auto-accidents as ‘Slippin’ Jimmy.’  They both lived in Cicero near Chicago, so that may be the reason.  Supposedly giving up that life, Jimmy tries to impress his white-shoe brother, Chuck, who is a key partner in a big Albuquerque law firm.  Jimmy moves and works in their mail room and finally gets a law degree from an on-line law school, passing the bar after 3 tries.  His brother considers him a fraud as a lawyer with his ‘mail-order’ law degree from Samoa.

ENTREPRENUERSHIP

So ‘edgy’ lawyers – see ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ or ‘Goliath’ - are now white-collar folk heroes to the buttoned-up crowd that inhabits the precincts of the law.  Jimmy, who has a gift for gab, discovers an over-charging scheme in his pursuit of elder law ($200 wills!) at a large chain of nursing homes.  He convinces his nasty brother – who has an absurd allergy to electricity – that it could be a federal class action.  Since Jimmy’s an overly-emotional baby and still does stupid things, his careerist girlfriend Kim has to advise him on how to move up the law ladder.  He eventually gets hired at an established law firm in Santa Fe to pursue the suit, after first rejecting their offer. 

Jimmy had wanted his own practice, as every self-respecting social climber does.  But he was a failure at that, officing out of the basement of a Vietnamese nail salon instead.  So there is a bit of ‘class’ influence in this, as Jimmy doesn’t really fit into a highly-controlled bougie law firm environment.  His father ran a small corner store in Cicero, and Jimmy stole $14,000 out of the till while working there as a teenager.  So he really doesn’t fit.  His attitude is best summed up in a scene of lawyer jokes at the expense of his stuffy brother.

CONS

Meanwhile Jimmy leaves behind his fake accident scam, which he was also pursuing in Albuquerque.  He initiates tacky stunts, starts soliciting elderly clients personally after a lawsuit is filed, fakes evidence, ignores consulting with his boss, bullshits for clients, alters documents - stretching the law and ethics any way he can. But he also gets results.  

A hint of things to come is a black and white intro at the start of each season, in which Jimmy, in a mustache and paper hat, is hiding from the police as the sad manager of a Cinnabon© in nowhere Nebraska. So evidently, after 6 seasons or so, things have not gone well in semi-crime land.  This show is a sort of a follow-up to Breaking Bad, with some of the same characters, another show featuring a ‘normal’ man drawn to crime.  But in this case, Jimmy has no excuse.

Other characters are a highly intelligent and calm drug dealer, Nacho and a retired, very experienced cop engaged in criminal activities, Mike.  Unlike Jimmy, Mike claims he’s a criminal just to help his daughter in law and grandchild.  What follows is a long string of suited lawyers, comic doofuses and bonkers drug dealers, with Jimmy being the prime tragicomic relief until he is not.  All the Latinos are cartel assets and the lady owner of the nail salon is a hard-ass.  Jimmy gets his lawyer girlfriend Kim into trouble after one of his successful fuck-ups, to the point where she, as an experienced attorney, is put in ‘document review’ – something coders, paralegals or first year associates do.  After that he still runs innocent ‘cons’ with her on unsuspecting white-collar assholes in bars for fun.

WHAT TIME IS IT?

On a legal side note, digital law work was the main way big firms handled evidence – not just boxes of documents.  I was working in the legal field on computers in 1993 when offices already had them. I even had a personal computer in 1980. These people don’t seem to have coding software, editing software, imaging software, access to legal research or much of anything.  They go to meetings without laptops.  No computers are initially on their desks, though they start appearing.  Jimmy doesn’t even use his. The nightmare of hundreds of boxes of paper and a yellow marker is Kim’s punishment.  Really?

Because of this I’m not sure what time period this is set in.  It is certainly not pre-digital. They have a Chia Pet ad on TV, which would place it between ’78 to ’82, but then Jimmy pushes a scam about Dot Coms, which were big in the late ‘90s, crashing in 2000.  They mention the past Enron and Worldcom scandals, which were in 2001 and 2002.  This is pre iPhone, but everyone has cell phones, which were common in the 1990s, especially Blackberries in the later part of the decade.  Wikipedia says the film spans the time period 2002 to 2008, so their technology time is fucked up.  Artistic license? Or just being cute and post-modern?  Or they forgot? 

BAD BOYS, BAD BOYS

The real question is, why is criminality so fascinating that streaming show after show focus on it?  It is the yin/yang alter-ego of regular capitalist exploitation, its dark mirror image, for sure.  Is it because normal capitalism is just boring – or they are scared to go there?  After all, this series is really a dark Horatio Alger story about a man creating his own business…the petit-bourgeois dream.  Why are slick fuck-ups like Jimmy / Saul Goodman (“S’all good, man…”) anti-heroes?  Why are so many shows about people trying to get rich through any means necessary, like sad negatives of Malcolm X? Why do the dipshits get all the glow? As each of his antics flows by, he becomes repulsive, not funny or 'edgy.' After all, the legal industry in the U.S. is a swollen turd beyond measure, topped by a criminal Supreme Court dragging us back to 1787. The criminal enterprise of capitalism and its laws is the inspiration for drug dealers evidently – and now their lawyers.

Jimmy / Saul gradually becomes a flamboyant criminal lawyer repping drug dealers, running his own solo practice, a hero of bootstrap entrepreneurship.  By turns funny, tiresome, ridiculous, stupid and entertaining, Better Call Saul might be worth watching for a while.  I’m in Season 2 and that might be enough.  (It was...)

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “Goliath,” “A Time to Kill,” “Gray Mountain” and “The Appeal” (all 3 by Grisham); “The Trial Before the Trial” “The Cult of the Constitution,” “Eric Holder,” “Bad Cops, Bad Cops,” “Prison Strike,” “Three Days in the Jury Pool,” "Professional Degrees in Democratic Party Politics," "With Liberty and Justice For Some" (Greenwald); "The Divide" (Taibbi); "I Care A Lot" or the word ‘streaming.’

The Cultural Marxist

July 2, 2022