Better Call Saul review: the box set equivalent of a (very) well-made play

I lost count long ago of the number of dinner parties and pub conversations where I’ve had to utter the humiliating words, ‘Actually I haven’t seen Breaking Bad.’ The social isolation became even more shaming when my 81-year-old mother rang to ask me if I’d heard of the show and to explain how much she loved it. (‘But isn’t it very violent, Mum?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she replied.) All of which means that I can approach Better Call Saul (Netflix) with what I like to think of as stern critical neutrality — rather than, say, ignorance.

The main character is, or will become, Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman, who, from a mixture of cultural osmosis and Google, I know to have been a crooked lawyer, last seen heading to a new life in Nebraska. He clearly got there too, because the opening black-and-white sequence showed him looking depressed in Omaha: by day, mournfully working in a cake shop; by night, mournfully drinking scotch and Drambuie as he watched videotapes of his old adverts.