Film & Television Studies: Better Call Saul

Foundational instruction in how to analyze the aesthetic, social and political significance of a television series. Representative topics: Breaking Bad and Masculinity, Twin Peaks and Desire, Wire and Ethics. May repeat for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years.

Open to Degree and PACE students; Colocated with FTS 1300 B Total combined enrollment= 100

This course explores Better Call Saul as a philosophical inquiry into the serial logic of democracy, speech, and law. Saul Goodman’s office crowned by the Statue of Liberty and his refusal to turn away any client evoke a democratic impulse—everyone deserves a voice, every case a hearing. Yet this egalitarian ideal is inseparable from his relentless pursuit of profit. The series transforms this tension into a question: can democracy’s commitment to equality survive its entanglement with capitalism? As a prequel to Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul begins at the end—from Saul’s collapse of his “criminal” law practice (“criminal” here bearing a double meaning, as Jesse Pinkman once asked, “a ‘criminal’ lawyer, or criminal lawyer?”)—unfolding mostly in retroaction. The suspense of the series lies not in teasing what will happen but in what could have happened. What is changeable is not the future but the past itself. Its temporality thus follows Freud’s retroaction (Nachträglichkeit): each moment gains meaning only afterward. This recursive temporality links the series’ form to the structure of speech, where each act of saying produces remainders and can always be overturned by another uttered word that follows it. Democracy, like language, endures through this continual reopening—a serial process in which every declaration redefines the whole. Finally, the series’ debt to film noir and the western—the quintessential American genres—grounds its meditation on justice, love, and desire. Through its play with law and transgression, public duty and private passion, Better Call Saul asks what remains of the democratic ideal when every act of speech risks becoming its undoing.

Viewing: All episodes of Better Call Saul are available on Netflix. You should either subscribe, borrow someone’s subscription, or buy the dvds of the series. This is a requirement for the class. The pace of viewing will be roughly four episodes per week except for the first week of the semester. Content Warning: Better Call Saul includes scenes of graphic violence, sexuality, and drug use that may be unsettling for some viewers.

Weekly Screening Notes 25% Weekly Reading Response 25% Two Exam 50% (25% each)