Gilligan and co. use that unglamorous locale to create a lush aesthetic experience, with the camera lavishing attention on kitchenware, dough, passersby, and dopey signage. When Saul’s face is finally shown, it's disguised in glasses and a mustache, making him look like the ghost of the person Walter White always feared he could be—a middle manager mass-producing pastries instead of meth. The notion of an ambitious person’s hell being a Midwestern mall job, is, of course, a little on the nose; Gilligan has never seemed all that worried about leaning on tropes. Maybe that’s because he knows that originality can be earned in the details: in skewed camera angles, in excellently selected musical cues, and in simple, powerful twists. By the end of the flash-forward intro, we’ve seen that the worst part of Saul’s dead-end future isn’t merely that it’s boring; it’s that even in the most anonymous of places, he can’t ever feel safe.

If that “black-and-white, dialogue-free, cinematic ravishment” sounds more art-movie than hit TV show, well, that's not wrong. Even factoring out the prologue, Better Call Saul starts tentatively, zipping back to 2001 but intentionally delaying first the protagonist’s arrival, then any sort of plot movement, and then much sense of suspense. And yet once all the elements are in place, the feeling is of watching vintage Breaking Bad—a feeling that’s underscored at the very end of the premiere hour by … well, no spoilers.

That's because Better Call Saul doesn't just share characters, locale, and a cinematic style with Breaking Bad. It also has that show’s values. Gilligan and Gould build plots that are Rube-Goldberg machines, driven by unintended consequences that are actually quite intended—not by the characters, but by the universe and its wicked sense of justice. The clockwork nature of the storytelling helps elevate the show’s aesthetic choices into thematic statements; the process animating the coffee machine that the camera lingers on is just as inexorable as the one that leads to, say, an early Bad-style encounter in the desert, where life and death depend on unlocking the right combo of words and actions.

The person doing that unlocking this time out is Bob Odenkirk's James McGill, who will, we trust, at some point rename himself Saul Goodman. Walt relied on his smarts, his ruthlessness, and his underdog angst to win glory; James has other talents, and other goals. Much of the first hour is spent establishing the dire financial straits he’s found himself in, and placing him in situation after situation where his gift of the gab just doesn’t work: in the courtroom, at the parking attendant’s booth, and in front of prospective clients. He can’t persuade his mentally troubled brother to cash out from the mega-firm where he’s a stakeholder; he can’t even get two punk teenagers to pay for the windshield they’ve broken.