To paraphrase veteran television critic Alan Sepinwall, TV’s greatest strength is time. Novels end, movies elbow their way through an awards season or two, but television keeps going, year in and year out, pacing its story to match the slow unspooling of our own lives. This romantic notion is a little less true in the mushrooming of Peak TV, where time is often measured in seasons instead of episodes—and in an era of film franchising so extensive that the movies, too, become a place to visit the worlds and the characters you love. But the sheer pleasure of watching Season 4 of Better Call Saul is a reminder that the maxim is still true, even if much of the television industry seems to have moved on from the model of telling an ongoing story in hour-long increments. The events of Better Call Saul are set slightly before those of its predecessor, Breaking Bad, placing this season’s sepia tones and flip phones in 2004 and 2005. It’s an era that contains very little to be nostalgic about, and yet in the hands of show-runners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, New Mexico’s harsh, flat landscapes are strangely welcoming. Like the desert it’s shot in, Better Call Saul is a show that knows how to make emptiness staggeringly dramatic. Somehow the show is both boring and utterly sad, like the morning-after pall following a night of carousing. The hangover is not from alcohol; it’s the after-effects of being intoxicated on optimism.
