Breaking better
Who do you want to be your lawyer? In the famed television series Breaking Bad, crooked lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) says, “Everyone wants Atticus Finch for a lawyer. Until there’s a dead hooker in the hot tub.”
Now Goodman has his own television show, Better Call Saul, a spin-off and prequel to Breaking Bad. Six years before the opening scenes of Breaking Bad, Goodman was an Irishman named Jimmy McGill. (He changed his name and his ethnic identity because, as he says in Breaking Bad, “Everyone wants a Jewish lawyer.”) At the beginning of Better Call Saul, it is 2002, and McGill is desperate for work. His car is a horror, he sleeps in his office at the back of an Asian nail salon, and his phone never rings.
He decides to feign a crisis to stage himself as a hero. He pays a billboard worker to fake a fall and then rescues the man as he dangles from the sign. The incident is recorded on videotape and plays all over the Albuquerque media.
