Better Call Saul is one of the weird TV spinoffs that is practically just as good as the original, having spawned as a prequel series to AMC’s acclaimed Breaking Bad. However, one thing the Bob Odenkirk-starring lawyer drama centered on the pseudonymously named Saul Goodman arguably did even better than its Bryan Cranston-starring counterpart was its love story.
Truthfully, Breaking Bad was never trying to be a love story, to be totally fair, unless you count a high school chemistry teacher’s affair with producing meth as the real romance at the show’s heart. No, we’re claiming the unmistakably toxic yet swoon-worthy relationship found between Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill and Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul to be the superior love story.
The funniest part of all of this is that Better Call Saul did not start out with romance at its thematic center. Rather, the focus was on the fraught relationship between two brothers, Michael McKean’s Charles McGill and his sibling with a con-artist past, Jimmy. This eventually transitioned into focusing on Saul and Kim as the series progressed. When Better Call Saul executive producer Melissa Bernstein was recently asked by The Hollywood Reporter about this transition from sibling rivalry to doomed romance, she described the direction the show was taking as “counterintuitive” but lovely:
“I loved seeing the show as a love story because it felt so counterintuitive to Breaking Bad and the complex character of Saul Goodman. As soon as we met Kim, it just felt like this woman was going to be critically important. Rhea Seehorn’s portrayal of the character just immediately felt so lived-in and human, and we all fell in love with her. It was only a matter of time until we saw how that shook out. We know it took a very toxic turn, but it presented itself — at least to me — in the early days.”
To give Breaking Bad its due, the show did heavily feature a rather nuanced and emotionally heavy fraught romance between Cranston’s Walter White and his wife Skyler, a role that won actress Anna Gunn two Emmy Awards. Though her performance is a source of praise and Walter and Skyler’s relationship transformed in unexpected ways over the years, it arguably wasn’t the main focus of the show. Instead, a rather dark father-son-type dynamic emerged at its core between Walter and his student-turned-protégé, Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman.