Two things “Better Call Saul” gets right

First off, “Better Call Saul,” the brand-new prequel to “Breaking Bad,” gets way more than two things right. It’s a brilliant show, and I can’t imagine how satisfying it must be for creator Vince Gilligan. You know how at the end of every project, no matter how successful it was, there are things you wish you could have done differently? I’m sure Gilligan felt that way at the end of “Breaking Bad.” He’d learned things doing that show, about himself as a director, about the fictional Albuquerque he created. In “Better Call Saul,” he essentially gets a do-over. He can apply all those lessons learned.

Anyways.

In the second episode, Jimmy (this is Saul’s original name; viewers don’t as yet know how or why Jimmy McGill becomes Saul Goodman) shows up at the wrong house and gets dragged inside with a gun to his face by the terrifying and violent Tuco. Jimmy launches into a long monologue to convince Tuco that he is no threat and please to let him go, and at one point says, “I’m not sure if this is a situation where I should or should not look you in the eye.”

First, it’s mildly hilarious that Jimmy is so aware of his internal processes, especially with a gun in his face. It’s a great reveal into who the character is.

Second, this is a one-sentence summary of a point I made in my 10th-anniversary piece last week: “Etiquette has an evolutionary basis. Like all social animals, humans question how to find mates, raise kids, get their fair share to eat, and resolve conflicts. If you?re a chimpanzee or a wolf, your biology gives you the answers. If you?re a human, you write to an advice columnist.” Jimmy wants to signal cooperation and submission, but most body language in humans isn’t hardwired. We negotiate what a given gesture or posture means. The meaning of eye contact among other animals is mutually understood. Not among human animals.

This made me think of a New Yorker article that came out after the Louise Woodward trial. Ms. Woodward was an English au pair convicted of manslaughter in 1997. Much was made of her furtive, guilty-looking body language on the stand. But Jonathan Raban, an Englishman living in America, saw it differently:

My English eyes saw one thing; my American-resident eyes saw something else altogether. With one pair, I was for acquittal; with the other, I was for conviction. Shoulders hunched submissively forward, eyes lowered, voice a humble whisper, Ms. Woodward made a good impression as an English church mouse. Her whole posture announced that she knew her place? Her deferential body language was nicely spoken, in the old-fashioned accent of the English class system. I thought she was telling the truth. Then I looked again. I have lived long enough in this country to know that when you tell the truth in America you stand up straight, you throw your shoulders back, you meet your interlocutor squarely in the eye and speak out plainly. My second pair of eyes saw Ms. Woodward as sullen, masked, affectless, dissembling. Her evasive body language clearly bespoke the fact that she was keeping something of major importance hidden from the court. I thought she was telling lies.

It is very hard to be human, no?

The difficulty of being human–particularly, a working human–is the second thing that “Better Call Saul” gets right. “Breaking Bad” got this right, too: how bloody inconvenient everything is. How it’s really hard to get people on the phone, or to sync up schedules, or get the resources you need to do your job. How hard it is to feel productive when you spend so much time dealing with interruptions or waiting around for someone or something. Most shows about work do not show this. They show people briskly snapping, “Walk with me!” and discussing work problems en route from a briefing to a press conference. They show cops who have to call every mechanic in town starting with AAA and then cut to the call to Paco’s Chopshop that reveals the location of the stolen vehicle. They don’t show the false starts, the hours on hold, the time spent downloading a new version of whatever it is you do your work on. They don’t acknowledge Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” Granted, this isn’t the mission of procedurals like “Law & Order: SVU” or even the nuanced “The Good Wife,” shows where a major portion of the appeal is that stuff happens, and happens at a fast clip. “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” however, aren’t playing that particular kind of wish-fulfillment game. They portray work as it is for most of us: tedious chores and a lot of waiting around, interspersed with moments of insight and/or panic.