yea

It's really good so far and Odenkirk really earns every ounce of praise. This show could have leaned far more comedic and played into Odenkirk's obvious comedy talents and it would have been fine, but that it tries at least a little to give Odenkirk some actual moments to act and be a real character speaks volumes about his talent. He was good on Breaking Bad, but he's better in this, I think.

As an Albuquerquean, though, it's still hilarious, just as it was in BB, to see how the show messes with the geometry of the city to get shots. A character will be up where I live (a lot of stuff was shot up here, I guess), then 5 minutes later they'll be somewhere that takes, like, 45 minutes to drive to.

Yea. I was disappointed with the third episode (too many improbable events in too short a time), but otherwise it's been very enjoyable so far.

Michael McKean, too, could have leaned into comedy but is playing it straight and very sympathetically. It's like Vince Gilligan is running a shelter for the rehabilitation of comedy actors.

Great writing and acting so far, and it gives every indication that it's building to something really impressive arc/plot-wise. Absolutely worth watching, and I can't wait to see where it ends up going over this and future seasons.

OK this is pretty great so far.

OZ this won't really spoil the episode or most of the story arc, it just explains who James really is, character-wise. If anything, the third episode on sets up super spoiler-worthy material but I thought I'd put that on there anyway. This scene's fun to watch but it's not like that facebook friend that spoils the end of True Detective..

So far I like it more than Breaking Bad. I started watching it in Season 1 and didn't really care. "Good Guy doing bad things? That's Dexter, that's The Shield, that's Mad Men.." I said to myself. I should've stuck with it because I missed some great dramedy which sadly doesn't work as well when you know the outcome, but so far Better Call Saul is starting off at the same pace as the later episodes of Breaking Bad I've seen ended on. @Stanley I get that vibe too. Same thing happens with shows filmed in Portland. Like, ya you can bike from one end of the city to the other in less than 4 hours if you really want to, but the natural light's always the same. In shows based in NYC and LA, I usually notice the change, even though I've never really lived in either place.

It'd be cool to have some random video on here that's the official Better Call Saul discussion forum, because a lot of my FB friends and real life friends don't really like it, and for all the wrong reasons.

i also already like this show more than i like breaking bad

you could do worse with your time, would recommend

Actually, I'm really grateful for the fact that it does have a good share of comedy. I loved Breaking Bad's first two seasons because it was dark and hilarious. In the third season, it suddenly became very "serious" and I found it a bit jarring.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not shitting on Breaking Bad, it was a great show, but I kept missing the comedy aspect of the first two seasons. So far, this show covers the black comedy aspect very well.

It's a slow, steady burn. I very much respect its restrained storytelling in contrast to the majority of modern shit. This *isn't* Breaking Bad, nor is it really a sequel/prequel. It stands on its own. If you have the patience, and appreciate subtlety, then I recommend it.

Anyway, much love OZ.

Yeah that part's great. I love him because he's the reason why I'd like to pursue law school and also the reason why I'm afraid of it: he wants to do good but he'll do it tomorrow. And I have college friends who are now lawyers who have to do the exact same kinda stuff just go scrape by (not to mention pay off their student loans) and keep their practice, their offices sometimes in their parents' basement.

Question however (and this really isn't a spoiler; the episodes all begin with a flashback which I'm sure will lead up to something but at this point are pretty separate): How exactly does that scam at the beginning of episode 4 work? Maybe I'm as boneheaded as the guy who got scammed but I don't get it. It was the passed out drunk guy's money in the wallet, right? So James gets half or whatever for the fake Rolex, but how does the big guy (or James) benefit from this?

The rube in this scenario gave everything he had in his wallet in order to gain the fake rolex - the money in the fat guy's wallet was obviously their money to begin with, so really all they came up on was half of whatever was in the rube's wallet to begin with.

Right? I wasn't sure myself how it worked, but that's what I got so far. Exchange contents of wallet for fake rolex.

That scene is a bit convoluted, but yes. James and Butthole get the mark to "buy" a fake Rolex with whatever money is in the mark's wallet at the time; James and Butthole then presumably split the take in half, which in that case would have only been a few hundred dollars each. It's not a particularly profitable scam, as James mentions afterwards.

Or if I asked where the nearest 7-11 to buy beer was when all that was around was Wawas. People would probably know what I mean, but if I ask for a Wawa around here people don't know what I'm talking about.

As I said already, the shark was jumped in episode three.

*****I guess now this might be a bit of a spoiler so I'll leave some lines...*****






*********etc.*************** last chance bitches






*******u know, before the spoilers n shit**********









How exactly do you think it jumped the shark? Saul's a Falstaffian genius but it wasn't some David Caruso type detective work: Ermantrout basically gives him the idea and he goes with it. And I'm not super familiar with the outskirts of Albuquerque (actually I'm not at all) but it doesn't seem too implausible that one direction leads to more of a camping destination than the other, so a day's search in the middle of the desert for the Kettlemans doesn't seem too far fetched. Like, if somebody I was an acquaintance with went missing, I'd know where to start looking at least.. not saying you're wrong or anything, but I'm just curious :)

Too many coincidences in too short a time. He gets scooped up by the cops, but they assume he's Nacho's lawyer and let him go. The detectives decide to just randomly let him go tramping about the crime scene... because he's, what? Sleeping with the defense attorney, and also a skeevy dude with a vested interest in foiling their case against Mr Nacho? Mike, alright, I was on board with that one; Mike's cool as shit, and coming up with the answer to his problem is precisely the sort of casually hardass thing I can see, and I daresay even expect, Mike's character to do. But the family could have been *anywhere*. Another house, a motel room two blocks down the road, a totally different campsite fifty meters away from where Saul was walking. But no, he just HAPPENS to guess exactly the right spot they'd be, on the basis of one bumper sticker, and then just HAPPENS to walk in exactly the right direction, for FIVE HOURS (totally nonchalant about the strict time limit imposed upon him by Mr Nacho), and oh look there they are, right in the one spot of barren sunless woodland I happen to be walking through, and hey they have the money too, how fortunate that this all happened in the space of one TV hour.

Breaking Bad jumped the shark during that dubstep car porn/ product placement scene, but fortunately that was a one-off blemish, and it got back into form... at least until the final episode, which sucked.

WHICH BRINGS UP SOMETHING ELSE, namely, the fact that they *started* Better Call Saul with product placement! Really obvious, awkward product placement, which lasted like two whole minutes. The product placement has receded in subsequent episodes, but... Jesus, is that really how they wanted us to have our first glimpse of Better Call Saul? Big fucking Cinnabon logo in our faces? I mean, yeah, it probably is, that's the point of product, but for the sake of common decency they could have at least waited until thirty or forty seconds into the opening scene to hit us with the PP.

AND WHERE IS TWAUGHTHAMMER?

I DEMAND TWAUGHTHAMMER.

"But no, he just HAPPENS to guess exactly the right spot they'd be, on the basis of one bumper sticker, and then just HAPPENS to walk in exactly the right direction, for FIVE HOURS (totally nonchalant about the strict time limit imposed upon him by Mr Nacho), and oh look there they are, right in the one spot of barren sunless woodland I happen to be walking through"

For whatever it's worth, I figured that Jack found them only because night had fallen and he could see light from their campsite. You're spot-on that it still depended upon him being within the same general vicinity so yeah there was some coincidence at work, but I'll work with it.

The family did leave the convenient clue that they are campers, yes, but that's just because those stickers suck.

Yeah, I figured that'd be the reason why. I mentioned it above but this must seem kinda silly to someone who lives in Albuquerque, and that's probably because the writers don't live there. I don't really watch the show, but a bigger city show like L&O SVU tends to stay fairly consistent time-wise. Like if they're in Brooklyn and they need to get to Queens on a tip, the time seems pretty consistent, whereas StanleyPain noted, people zoom across New Mexico at light speed. The X-Files was like that too: I can't cite any specific examples but there were definitely times where they went from DC to Corn country and it was like no time had passed. Maybe that's a Vince Gilligan thing: he liked the term "Jump the Shark" so much that he named an episode of the X-Files just that.

Californication is another good example of the time-based thing: the world seems to revolve around Hank. Hank's in Santa Monica and he's in Los Feliz and no matter what, events would've transpired in-between a 2-hour drive (with no traffic). As far as Saul's journey goes, yeah.. pretty inconceivable but not impossible by any means. Like I said, if I ran away/went "missing" in Portland people looking for me would have a few leads, like the bars and parks I like to go to and "check in" to on facebook: assuming James and the Kettlemans had a pretty good non-work relationship (at least enough to be friends on facebook or something) they probably mentioned where they liked to camp. Hell, Chris-Chan's stalkers seem to always know where to find him. Plus you wouldn't want to take some kids who don't know what the fuck's going on into some unfamiliar place, because that would be as scary to the kids as Nacho himself.

As for the Cinnabon thing, it didn't really bother me. I'm willing to bet that someone in the writers room suggested that he was working at a Pollos Hermanos instead, but got shut down, and somebody said "nah, just like, I don't know, something at the mall, like a Jamba Juice, Panda Express or a Cinnabon" and it stuck. Basically a job that nobody really wants, especially not someone with a BPTC like Saul (ostensibly) has. The idea of working at a place like Cinnabon post-grad (or practice) is kind of every college graduate's nightmare; it's honest, good work but it's nothing to do with following whatever dreams or aspirations you might have had when you started your higher education. It was all the product placement that Lionel Hutz gave to Orange Julius when he offers an almost full cup to Principal Skinner out of his law office.

But the more I think about it, the whole show is a Shark Jump in the best possible way. Like I said I watched a couple of BB S1 and was like "meh" and missed out on a lot, but the show could've been two seasons or 5 and covered the same story, but it was just so well done. I still haven't seen the whole show and sometimes see them out of order and I don't care: it became its own world and like the drug itself, it's a place to visit but you don't want to live there. BCS is like a vacation.

Then there was the Rolex scam in the last episode, which obviously wasn't presented clearly, hence why it didn't make sense to many viewers. Furthermore, I have to question whether the choice of "a Rolex" was yet another instance of product placement (Rolex is notorious for this), because if I know my ArchieLuxury, and I do, they should have used a fake Patek Phillipe, or at least a fake Audemars Piguet.

IZ- it's definitely product placement. You don't display logos that prominently without expecting a sizable lump of cash in return; furthermore, the internet reveals that Cinnabon offered a number of tie-in deals, including an attempt to encourage viral marketing via Saul-themed Twitter selfies, which proves that their company knew exactly what was going on. The *original* mention of Cinnabon - from the final episode of Breaking Bad, when Saul predicted that he'd wind up as a Cinnabon manager after fleeing Albuquerque - that was probably just writers being writers. But the first scene from Better Call Saul was shameless product placement!

For me at least, "Rolex" and "Cinnabons" are standard enough brands that people recognize them. Like, I refer to all smartphones as iPhones instinctively and not as all the other kinds, unless I happened to find one and put it on the lost and found on Craigslist. Actually that happened to me the other night. I was sitting next to an unattended smartphone and I was just like "is that your iPhone?" when it was obviously a Samsung Galaxy or something. If you know a lot about smartphones, you'd be like "yeah that's my phone but it's a Samsung Galaxy" but otherwise you're just like "yeah that's mine." Rolex to most Luddites is the only brand of watches that implies $$$.

AND FINALLY, how come Heisenberg's still alive? I thought Hank murdered him to keep him quiet about Hank's drug smuggling operation? But no, there he is, alive and well, working as a parking lot attendant, and at a COURT no less! What if the cops see him?

Ah OK forgot about that in the final episode. But that made me think about this: Remember the Mr. Show sketch with Michael McKean and Bob Odenkirk as law professor and assistant professor? The one where Odenkirk has to take over and does his "Paper Chase" speech the best he can and predicts things like death and suicide, and ends with how two will quit law school and start an Apple Butter Farm? And it all happens? That's totally the same joke!

Rolex is the brand that implies $$$, because Rolex is the brand that spends a ton of money on product placement. (ArchieLuxury actually did make a video about that one!)

This is the actual clip, but that's totally the same joke:

http://youtu.be/fxMS59sxwxs

And the same actors. Dun dun dun!

Shit.. the clip cuts out at the best part at the end, which reveals the commercial for the apple butter farm they started :)

That actually is something that bothers me: if the show is supposed to be 7 years before Walter and Saul met, and for shits and giggles let's just say that the show all took place in modern time, that'd set the show in the year 2000. One of the big visual cues was when Chuck puts his Zach Morris cellphone into the jail mailbox, but I've seen a few things that wouldn't match up with the technology back then

"that'd set the show in the year 2000" ----BCS, not BB.

I sort of had that problem with True Detective as well, like when Hart's fucking that cellphone salesgirl and Father John Misty's playing. I wouldn't have a problem with a song (especially a song that I like) in a show, but it's done to make it sound like she put it on, and that's like 2002? 8 years before it came out? Little things like that bother me. Mr. Luxury would disagree, but a "Rolex" is more akin to ordering a Jack and Coke. Bartender will probably ask you if you want actual Jack Daniels or if well whiskey's fine before pouring, and whatever's coming out of the tap ain't coca cola, but you say it anyway.

Oh yeah, Hey Homer, did you know about this?

http://teespring.com/the-official-archie-luxury-t-s

Oh my god, really? No, I had no idea!

Aww Christ, I've really got to send him a new one. It's so crappy looking...

He made them himself.

Better Call Archie, he's calling it the Official Archie Luxury T-Shirt

http://youtu.be/aLjHw0WtfgA

If nothing else, you should ask for a free shirt. I want one. I guess the old saying is that artists are their own worst critics but I love that drawing. I quite literally slept through an art history class in college so I'm no pro, but I see a bit of Francis Bacon in there. Mmmm bacon

"Hank's in Santa Monica and he's in Los Feliz and no matter what, events would've transpired in-between a 2-hour drive (with no traffic)."

...what? Are you driving in a golf cart? Everywhere in LA is easy to get to without traffic. Santa Monica to Los Feliz would be like 30-45 minutes depending on what route you took.

And I mean, is the Cinnabon reference that hard to understand? It was an offhanded joke in Breaking Bad that they decided to make literal in Better Call Saul. I get that there's always a temptation to think people who write TV shows are in the Illuminati, planning their moves 47 steps and two years in advance, but there's a 99% likelyhood the writers already liked the Cinnabon idea, asked if they could use it, and then received a bonus lump of cash independent of their decision.

Believe it or not, I'm pretty sure AMC would have been willing to finance BCS even without the precious, precious Cinnabon fortune.

While I'm back on this video's page, I'm not that familiar with LA. Being from Portland, I just got off the plane at LAX and started walking and was picked up in Inglewood at night time. This was before cellphones were really around and I think I had a dollar to my name. Up here, you can pretty much get anywhere by walking and get to most destinations in 8 hours and that was my stupid plan, and if I needed to sleep outside for the night that's cool.. if it wasn't for the nice people of Inglewood (sure there are some thugs but there's also hospitality) I'd probably still be walking or dead on the side of the highway, just to cover e3 for some website that hasn't existed since 2001. But I remember the drive without traffic was like at least an hour.. but it could've just seemed like an hour.

Anyway, IZ LJ over and out.

Wait, what? You think *product placement* is an Illuminati conspiracy now, SDC? Or are you trying to say that product placement doesn't exist, and that every time, say, a character on TV pops open a laptop with a big ol' Apple logo displayed prominently in the center of the screen, or guzzles a soft drink with the label turned just so and says, "Mmm mmm boy that sure is a good Dr Pepper™!", that this is all just a happy coincidence? Some miracle, conjured from nothing, by the grace of the TV gods? "I am. A TV. Watcher. Product. Placement. Does not. Exist. Companies. Do not. Advertise. Covertly. Enjoy your. Delicious. Doctor. Pepper."

If AMC wanted to finance BCS without that precious Cinnabon fortune, then they should have fucking financed BCS without that precious Cinnabon fortune. Or, at the very least, they should have found some other, less obnoxious spot to put the product placement in! I'm sorry SDC, but it happened, we know for a fact that it happened, and it was bullshit. The opening scene sets the tone for the entire series, and starting with product placement is the equivalent of starting with a long, luxurious fart.

I would be curious to see if Cinnabon saw a jump in their sales. I don't really hang out at the mall; I'm much like Chuck in that the mall specifically brings on certain triggers, but much less severe; basically I don't want to be there) but I doubt if there was any sort of tie-in, like Better Call Cinnabon. It's all the product placement of True Detective where Hart's at the T-Mobile store. It's got nothing to do with switching to T-Mobile, it just provides context: in 2002 T-Mobile was just starting out and specifically in the Southeastern United States. If he was at a Z-Mobile instead, or even a Verizon store I'd call bullshit because Verizon wasn't down there back then. Like I said above, they could've probably just used a fake name like Hermanos and probably saved a bunch of money, but to me it was just a joke: he said he'd be working at a Cinnabon and it happened.

But you're right: product placement is product placement is product placement. I can't remember what beer Cohle requested in the first episode. I think it was Pabst, or basically one of the beers that tastes the same. And he's draining a six pack of Lone Star. Lone Star's still hard to find west of the Mississippi, especially up north, but I've started to see it in stores! It tastes like piss.

EH:

In Breaking Bad, which was shot, written, and completed long before BCS was a twinkle in an AMC suit's eye, the Cinnabon reference was a half-second throwaway gag, and not a particularly flattering one. By the time the writers had sat down to plot out BCS, the ONLY thing they knew with certainty was that Saul Goodman was probably working at a Cinnabon, and it was a spectacular, degrading fall from grace.

Literally nothing about the Cinnabon references is flattering or makes me want to go there; it's like saying Louis CK's Cinnabon bit was product placement, or that Jim Gaffigan is in the pocket of Big Hot Pockets.

Or David Cross and Squagels. Although, I'll admit that I was on the East Coast (we don't have 'em out here) I totally saw a Cosi and went in and got one.

And isn't it just SO CONVENIENT that Walt went on a ride-along and just so happened to come across his former student? And isn't it just equally convenient that a piece of the debris from the plane crash Walt caused would fall in his pool? And on the same subject: Isn't it kinda weird that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father all along?

Boy, Star Wars really jumped the shark with Empire, right folks?

Actually that whole plane debris thing WAS indeed very stupid.

I just happened to notice this reply.. wouldn't it be cool if poeTV had notifications a-la Facebook instead of just clicking on yourself and finding a video from a while ago? I thought the plane thing was stupid as well, but I think BB set a precedent between what's entertaining and what's realistic in a way that few shows (at least the ones I've seen). Like, I kinda like what I've seen of Dexter. But there's NO WAY that would happen in real life. It's conceivable that the plane thing happened, but that's, you know, fiction, and I think it sort of broke ground for shows like True Detective and the like: the plane thing seemed no less inconceivable for Hart to just randomly run into Cohle on the highway 10 years later. It's still entertainment. The definition of jumping the shark is when you run out of things to write about, like when The Simpsons did the spin-off episode. I was only 13 or so and I figured that was the final season because it, like the X-files, The Jetsons and the Flintstones, and Happy Days, were like "fuck this, but we're gonna make a shit ton of cash."

I don't have a problem with extremely unique and interesting "coincidences" happening in a film. The problem with the plane thing is that it was used throughout the whole season to hint at a dark future wherein our hero's are possibly the victims of some violent attack, and then it's just "RICKROLLED!" it was actually the girl's dad who just fucked up with the plane and one piece just happened to hit Walter's backyard.

Basically, it wasn't an interesting (if unlikely) coincidence that sparked an interesting plot-thread. Rather, it was a silly (unlikely) coincidence that was used "Deus Ex-Machina" style to just wrap everything up.