Note: This review contains mild spoilers for the first episode of the show.

The third golden age of television, which may or may not be coming to an end, has been defined largely by the male antiheroes: self-pitying schlubs trying to survive in a world of decay. This was the working theory of Brett Martin's book , and while Martin was explicitly trying to connect the central characters of the shows with the difficult men who created them, his argument largely holds up just on the evidence provided onscreen. Tony Soprano. Don Draper. Walter White. Almost everybody in The Wire. All of these men exist in the same spiritual state: They are all trying to preserve a sense of masculine virtue in a declining America that values them less and less.

In a recent essay in The New York Times Magazine, Lili Loofbourow has made the case that that era of television, with its collapsing masculinity, is itself collapsing. In shows like Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, and Getting On, female creators are producing a new kind of televisual narrative, in which women, collectively, figure out ways to survive the collapse surrounding them. It's altogether a more positive, less dark, experience, and much less focused on the agonies and weaknesses of individual characters. "If The Sopranos started the age of the antiheroes," Loofbourow writes, "these shows mark the dawn of promiscuous protagonism: a style of television that, rather than relying on the perspective of one (usually twisted) character, adopts a wild, roving narrative sympathy." The misanthropy is replaced by a sense of hope; the self-pity by perseverance.

Loofbourow's argument makes a lot of sense, I think. The television of difficult men is ending. Walter White is dead. Tony Soprano is... well, he's something. And we'll find out the end of Don Draper soon enough. But the television of difficult men will have at least one great last hurrah, and that is Better Call Saul, which premieres February 8 on AMC.

I'll just say it: The first few episodes that I saw are better than Breaking Bad. They are smarter. They are sharper. I have never seen a prequel handled so cleverly. What we know from the previous series about Saul Goodman, or James McGill as he is known in Better Call Saul, provides a kind of counterintuitive suspense mechanism. In the very first shot, in silent black and white, we see the ruins of Saul Goodman after the action of Breaking Bad, just as he said he would be. He's working at a Cinnabon in a mall, terrified of anyone slightly threatening who walks into the store. The question for the plot is: How did he become this way? How did he fail so catastrophically?

Other familiar characters from Breaking Bad make quiet appearances, no doubt to blow up later, but Saul is absolutely the focus of the show—an antihero in the established antiheroic mode but maybe even a better lens than his predecessors for examining the breakdown of contemporary masculinity. The other shows from the difficult-men period of television were extreme examples of the state of decline: the gangster who has seen the gangster code erode, the ad executive watching the shuddering transformation of the 1960s, the chemistry teacher who takes up meth. They were symbols. But Saul Goodman (sorry, James McGill) is much more representative of the real decline than those icons. He's a lawyer who can't make a living honestly, a fate that is known to many real people. A job that once guaranteed a middle-class existence has left him hanging onto his shitty car and sleeping in a foldout bed in his office. Plenty of Americans can relate to that.

The opening courtroom scene of Better Call Saul could not be more perfect. McGill's first words are "Oh, to be nineteen again," which serve as a kind of a bracket to Tony Soprano's line from the first episode of The Sopranos: "Lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over." What was tragedy for Tony, McGill plays out as farce. It turns out that Saul's description of "youthful exuberance" is in defense of a group of teenagers who have gone into a morgue, cut off the head of a corpse, and fucked it.

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So Saul does not begin as a good man who falls. He begins as a man doing whatever he has to do to survive, and we are called to watch the last shreds of his dignity and sense of self-worth dissolve, along with any residual morality.

In Loofbourow's essay, there is a sense that maybe it is best for all these self-pitying men to go away, and for them to be replaced by the more cheerful groups of suffering women: "Above all, promiscuous protagonism is interested in truths that are collectively produced. Its greatness stems not from a single show runner's bleak and brilliant outlook but from a collaborative vision of art that admits a spectrum of shades. The central question driving this movement forward is no longer 'How did these mad men come to be?' but rather 'How did these women get so good at staying sane?'"

I take her point, but Better Call Saul provides a hell of a counter-example. "How did these mad men come to be?" is still a gripping place to begin a television series. The first two episodes of Saul will air on consecutive nights, and I can't imagine that anyone who sees the first will miss the second. I'm already desperate for more than AMC has let me see, and no one has even mentioned meth yet.

Better Call Saul may be on the declining slope of the story of the decline of men. As it turns out, there couldn't be a better place for it.

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Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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