Better Call Saul is an American crime and legal drama series created and produced by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould. There were also 11 other producers including Bob Odenkirk, who played the criminal lawyer Jimmy McGill A.K.A. “Saul Goodman”. The show first aired in 2015 and ended in 2022; It is also a prequel spinoff to the famous Vince Gilligan series, ‘Breaking Bad’.
*Note: For this series, I will approach it differently as it is full of rich characters and important messages to talk about. In order to keep this from being too long of a read I will not throw everything into a single blog. However, I may return to the series and talk about messages and ideas that I might not get into in this blog!
The Morality of the McGills
The show’s entire premise is about the origins of the snarky lawyer who assisted the drug kingpin Walter White in money laundering and a lot of other criminal activities; Now how could this ever be a show about good morals? Well, the thing about this show is how it depicts morals and ethics. It shows us how it isn’t always ‘morally good’ and ‘morally bad’, but it shows us the grey area in the middle and even the parallels between those meant to be moral and immoral. Jimmy McGill constantly skips along the lines of right and wrong. When he was younger he would steal from his father’s register, pull scams on people, and commit other crimes to satisfy his lust for money which he developed after seeing his father getting pushed around and taken advantage of. This behavior would obviously be seen as the unethical behavior of someone with bad morals. His older brother, Chuck McGill, is the one who tried to get Jimmy out of this kind of life, and it worked for a period of time Chuck often tries to present himself as ‘morally superior’ to Jimmy due to his career as a lawyer, but he too has issues with morality. After Jimmy put aside his life of crime, he tried to make the people in his life proud by becoming a lawyer. However, Chuck kept him from joining his law firm as he didn’t believe Jimmy could be a ‘morally good’ lawyer because of his past.
You could argue that Chuck judging Jimmy for his past and refusing him the opportunity to change is unethical. Chuck’s disdain for his younger brother eventually caused the two to have a falling out, and Chuck’s firm ended up stealing two of Jimmy’s high-profile clients. This led to Jimmy forging legal documents in order to make the clients fire Chuck as their lawyer. However, this wasn’t just a petty attack against Chuck, because Jimmy actually wanted the clients to fire Chuck’s firm and hire his love interest Kim Wexler as their lawyer. Chuck McGill does not believe that Jimmy can be a morally good person, ironically being unethical when he tries to stop Jimmy from being a lawyer like him. Jimmy McGill on the other hand, is an immoral person due to his greed, but he has done ethical things to support the ones he loved. When Chuck was suffering from a mental illness, Jimmy was the one who took care of him for years. When Chuck’s firm stole his clients, Jimmy took them back, but not for himself; Jimmy directed the clients toward his love interest, Kim Wexler. This show greatly depicts how morals and ethics are not black and white, you can have good morals and still behave unethically just like you can have bad morals but ethically behave.
Works Cited
(2015). YouTube. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from https://youtu.be/ImJ9i0TC_Jg.
IMDb.com. (2015, February 8). Better call saul. IMDb. Retrieved February 17, 2023, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3032476/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1