Like “Breaking Bad,” its successor is about the metamorphosis of a sad sack. Illustration by Marc Aspinall

When the deal was announced for a spinoff of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” based on one of the show’s minor comic characters, the legal shyster Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), even superfans weren’t sure what to think. At the time, Vince Gilligan’s drama about a science teacher turned meth king was in its final season, whipping out brilliant episodes like fastballs. Media coverage, mine included, was caught up in worshipful celebrations. Though the last episode ended up being something of an anticlimax, a sleek set of showdowns between a clever badass and his cartoon foes, that still left sixty-one other rowdy, rich installments, forming the morally intricate backstory of an archetypal villain, Walter White. Why spin off, then? Just to keep things spinning?

“Better Call Saul,” on the verge of its own finale, of Season 1, has a lot to recommend it, particularly for devotees of the original show. Odenkirk, with his wry croak of a voice and his surfer-gone-to-seed looks, remains a likable figure, even when he’s doing wrong. We get backstories for “Breaking Bad” regulars, including the gangster Tuco Salamanca (Raymond Cruz) and the grizzled ex-cop enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut, played by Jonathan Banks. Like its predecessor, “Better Call Saul” has a mordant wit: it’s full of quotable put-downs and promising themes about the fuzzy line between legal and illegal skills. It has received plenty of praise for its cinematography, which has the deliberate framing of a graphic novel illustrated by Edward Hopper, all yellow-green suburban boxes and claustrophobic boardrooms, along with eccentric locations, such as a law office tucked away inside a nail salon, and surreal flashes, like a tarantula crawling over a necktie. And yet, nine episodes in, “Better Call Saul” never really answers the question: Would you watch this show if you didn’t miss “Breaking Bad”?

A show doesn’t need to be perfect to have a powerful allure for viewers who just want to hang out in the world it invokes. (I’ve watched every episode of “Nashville.”) But TV is triage these days. While it used to be possible to catch up with every ambitious drama—during that golden era of TV efficiency, when there were only five of them—that’s no longer true. At this year’s Television Critics Association meetings, FX’s C.E.O., John Landgraf, a prolific producer himself, presented a report that was highly alarming, at least to television critics. Last year, according to FX’s data, three hundred and fifty-two scripted first-run prime-time and late-night programs aired on broadcast, cable, and streaming networks in the U.S., not including PBS. Joe Adalian, crunching the stats at New York’s Vulture, wrote that the number of new prime-time scripted cable shows had “doubled in just the past five years, tripled since 2007 (the year Mad Men premiered), and grown a staggering 683 percent since the turn of the century.” When people angrily tweet at me that some show is the best thing on TV, I know they’re lying: they haven’t watched most of the other ones, and neither have I.

Under these conditions, the question of where to invest one’s attention becomes more complicated, and, so far, “Better Call Saul” doesn’t offer a clear answer, though it shudders with potential energy. At the show’s center is a character portrait, the story of James (Jimmy) McGill (Odenkirk), a seedy attorney scrambling for gigs among Albuquerque’s less affluent clientele. As a young man, Jimmy was a small-time grifter, scamming drunks in alleys, and a disappointment to his older brother, the high-powered lawyer Chuck (Michael McKean). Now he’s trying to use his bullshitting skills for good rather than for evil. (Or, if not for good, then for chaotic neutral.) Like “Breaking Bad,” this is a show about the metamorphosis of a sad sack: but, whereas Walt was an arrogant egghead, Jimmy is humble. He’s sweet to his onetime girlfriend, Kim (Rhea Seehorn); he’s tender with Chuck, who is sidelined because of a supposed allergy to electricity. We know where Jimmy ends up, however: someday, he’ll become Saul Goodman (“S’all good, man!”), that slick guy who helps you out when you want to kill someone, hide your meth earnings, or hunt down a ricin cigarette. Jimmy’s a decent-ish guy, but he’s fated to become a far worse man’s comic relief, “the kind of lawyer guilty people hire,” as one potential client calls him, in a description that stings.

There’s the seed of a funny, mean idea inside that portrait: that being a lawyer and being a grifter are not, in truth, different jobs. The future Saul Goodman is a gifted legal advocate, but only in the sense that “The Music Man” ’s Harold Hill was a brilliant music teacher and Don Draper the world’s greatest lover. He’s not sleazy; he’s just drawn that way. In one of the show’s best early episodes, he tries to pull off a double con with two idiotic scammers, red-headed skateboarders who fake accidents in order to defraud drivers. Jimmy’s scheme isn’t all that promising—he’s trying to “rescue” a wealthy criminal so that she’ll be grateful and hire him—but even that half-assed plan goes worse than expected. Eventually, Jimmy ends up in the desert, facing off with Tuco and his thugs, in a scene that can’t help reminding viewers of “Breaking Bad.” (There’s a sideways shot that’s an homage to one of that show’s best episodes, “Ozymandias.”) What begins as a scary showdown becomes a hilariously rude negotiation, as Jimmy talks a death sentence down in increments, getting Tuco to weigh options that range from a “Colombian necktie” to a black eye. “They disrespected my abuelita,” Tuco argues. “They called her ‘biznatch.’ ” Jabbering away, Jimmy gets Tuco to consider cutting off the skateboarders’ legs, then simply breaking them—and, finally, breaking just one leg. “I’m the best lawyer ever!” he announces afterward, at the hospital.

It’s a pungent, anarchic sequence, but after that episode the show seemed to lose focus, hopping from case to case, from style to style. One week, it’s a thriller; another, it’s a quirky procedural, full of thickly drawn portraits of loser clients; then it’s a solemn noir about Mike Ehrmantraut’s past. Ideas are invoked but not fully developed: Jimmy pulls off a phony-baloney P.R. stunt; he gets into elder law and plans to sue an old-age home. During more inconsistent episodes, I found myself craving the return of “Better Call Saul” ’s standout character, the normcore grifter Betsy Kettleman, a suburban mom who stashes her cash in the bathroom of her McMansion. As played by Julie Ann Emery, with a fabulous air of unearned outrage, Betsy feels as dangerous as any thug: there’s weird comedy in her intractable insistence—even to the lawyer who saw her bag of cash—that she’s innocent. With her pursed lips and her bland bob, the character has echoes of “Breaking Bad” ’s uptight Lydia, and of the whole nagging-wife dynamic that haunted Skyler White. But Emery’s oddball intensity makes Betsy feel like an original, less grounded in nostalgia than the show around her is, but well matched to its noir satisfactions.

Taste has its own algorithms. Do you enjoy neon signs, closeups of coffee cups, and men smiling with angry eyes? (I do.) Do you think an extended gag about a toilet-training potty that says “Gosh, you’re big” is hilarious? (I did not.) Do you fantasize about being as confident in your macho wisdom as Mike? (Maybe?) Finally, toward the end of the season, the show’s aims sharpen. It is revealed that Jimmy’s brother Chuck is working against him, and, as they fight, Chuck screams, about being a lawyer, “You don’t slide into it like a cheap pair of slippers and then reap the rewards.” Jimmy’s all surface, Chuck argues; and it’s true that, in some sense, our hero’s been playing dress-up all season long. In one episode, he mimics the threads of a corporate lawyer he loathes; in another, he dons a white Matlock suit. Before trials, he psychs himself up by yelling “Showtime!,” in a nod to “All That Jazz.” Once “Better Call Saul” puts on the black hat, at last, it may ultimately be a show about how manhood operates as a form of theatre—and how fun it is when you finally nail the role. ♦