The Education Of Better Call Saul

Last night brought down the curtain on Better Call Saul, one of the highlights of this “Golden Age of Television.” This prequel to Breaking Bad has been justifiably showered with the same kind of richly deserved praise as its predecessor. While I’m no TV critic and won’t speak to all that, I do think it’s worth taking a moment to contemplate what the operatic, gritty world that creator Vince Gilligan brought to life has to say about–of all things–American education.

Breaking Bad was the story of a high school chemistry teacher who becomes a murderous drug kingpin. As Gilligan famously explained, the concept was to morph Mr. Chips into Scarface. And Better Call Saul, under the guiding hand of Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould, was the story of how one iconic figure from Breaking Bad evolved from a genial conman into an amoral sleazeball attorney.

Along the way, via indelible characters and intricate plotting, Gilligan and Gould cast a harsh light on education today. For those who know and love these shows, that may sound like a stretch. These are dark, dense, and darkly funny shows about drugs, cartels, and suspect lawyering. Where’s the education?

Well, for starters, it’s intriguing how deeply formal education is intertwined with the story.

Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, is a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher who’s frustrated and unsatisfied. Partnering with his former student to cook and deal crystal meth, White finally gets to apply his exquisite skills and finds, in building a drug empire, the sense of self he never found in his classroom.

White’s partner, Jesse Pinkman, was an abysmal high school student who skipped college, became a small-time drug dealer, and then develops a sense of responsibility and self over the course of his toxic partnership with White.

Then there’s the tragic figure of Gale Boetticher, who, like White, uses his mastery of chemistry to produce high-grade crystal meth. Boetticher earned a masters degree in organic chemistry but dropped out of his National Science Foundation-funded doctorate research because he was bored by academia, and sought to preserve the “magic” of being in a chemistry lab.

In Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill (who becomes the eponymous Saul Goodman) transforms his life via a correspondence law degree from the University of American Samoa. McGill uses the degree to scrape his way into increasingly creative and lucrative transgressions, never unduly troubled by his legal and ethical obligations.

Throughout both shows, schools and colleges are places seemingly devoid of meaning or moral education. Formal schooling figures into key storylines, but this education contributes nothing of import to the characters’ interior lives. Schools provide credentials and technical mastery. Across perhaps 120 hours of story, one never gets the sense that any character even once found education to be fulfilling or formative.

Indeed, during more than a decade of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, the only moment in which I can recall education being depicted as rewarding was when Jesse Pinkman tells of building a beautiful lacquered box in high school woodshop. He had slacked off on his first attempt but when the teacher, Mr. Pike, asked him if that was the best he could do, Jesse painstakingly constructed the lustrous, intricate box. And then? Jesse trades it for an ounce of weed.

The contrast between these dismal educational experiences and how the shows depict real-life learning is stark, especially given how gracefully it captures the teaching that unfolds in the midst of criminality. Truth is, the shows are rich with mentoring, almost all of it rooted in the hard-earned wisdom and discipline of criminal enterprise.

Over the course of both shows, Mike Ehrmantraut, the ex-cop turned private investigator (and occasional hitman), dispenses a series of gruff lectures on what it means to live by an ethical code—even as he lives a life of dubious morality. As he tells one aspiring crook early in Better Call Saul, “The lesson is, if you’re gonna be a criminal, do your homework . . . I’ve known good criminals and bad cops, bad priests, honorable thieves—you can be on one side of the law or the other, but if you make a deal with somebody, you keep your word . . . You’re now a criminal; good one, bad one—that’s up to you.”

In Breaking Bad, White’s dismissive relationship with his former burnout student Jesse turns into something invested, nearly paternal, when they become partners in crime. Seeing Jesse become an attentive, prideful meth “chef” or observing White carefully explain the importance of the apparatus is a reminder of what learning can and should be—but clearly wasn’t when Jesse was White’s student.

Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad, alike, are dotted with scenes of repressed drug lord Gus Fring preaching the importance of discipline and restraint, while the credentialed protagonists of Gilligan’s world—the teacher and attorney—are undone by their insecurities and appetites.

What leaps out, at least for one used to contemplating such things, is the sheer disconnect between schooling and education, and between education and any sense of morality. Indeed, it’s perhaps no coincidence that formal faith and its accoutrements are absent from the show.

This is a world in which the central characters constantly rationalize shortcuts. Education is just one more part of that. As Jimmy McGill tells a shell-shocked applicant for a scholarship honoring his dead brother, “You didn’t get it. Let me tell you something. You were never gonna get it. They dangle these things in front of you, they tell you you’ve got a chance—but it’s a lie.”

Jimmy’s advice? “Look, I read your essay. You can do it the way you’re supposed to, you can work fifty times harder than the rest of them. Makes no difference. They’ll smile at you, they’ll pat you on the head—but they’re never, ever gonna let you in. But . . . You’re not gonna play by their rules. You’re not even gonna try. Go the other way.”

Gilligan and Gould’s world of meth dealers, cartels, and seedy lawyers winds up offering an uncompromising meditation on the distrust with which so many Americans regard schools and colleges today. I’m confident Gilligan and Gould would laugh it off if anyone suggested they were trying to say any of this. But there it is.