Why I Like the Endings of BOTH Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad(SPOILERS FOR BOTH)

There was a specific reason why I liked the ending of Breaking Bad and when I saw the ending of Better Call Saul...I realized that the creators had done it AGAIN, and I liked that one too.

The Sopranos and Tony Soprano himself seemed to start the trend of "shows about bad guys you can root for." The story goes that HBO didn't want Tony to brutally strangle that "rat" guy in Maine only 5 episodes into the series; "audiences would hate Tony" for being such a sadistic killer. But audiences didn't mind at all(the guy was a rat, after all) and Tony went on to do much worse -- even while sometimes being a better "moral" man than the worse gangsters around him -- and yet pretty much a psychopath.

Of course, Tony didn't just materialize out of thin air. Once the MOVIE ratings code collapsed in 1968, Al Pacino in Godfathers I and II gave us an evil man who "got away with it"(if not in his soul) and in 1983 Pacino gave us a "principled killer" in Scarface, too.

But that was the movies. Tony Soprano started a whole slew of "bad man" TV shows, and at least one "bad woman" show (Animal Kingdom, where Ellen Barkin's aging Ma Barker literally seduces her clan of boys into criminal activity.) And then some "bad couple" shows -- the Commies embedded in America in The Americans; the Yuppie scum drug kingpins in Ozark.

And here's my thing: in so many of those shows noted above, not only were audiences asked to "root for the bad guys" -- the bad guys pretty much WON at the end. Or got away.

I started to tire of it. In one of these series, it was a trifecta: the bad guys won, the "good person" was killed, and the show ended on an ambiguous "fade to black" ala the Sopranos(hey, we know that Michael Corleone survived in I and II, but it wasn't too fun not to know WHAT happened to evil Tony...and I was rooting for his death or imprisonment.)

Pretty downbeat shows.

And then came Breaking Bad.
And then came Better Call Saul.

And here's why I like the endings:

The bad guys LOSE.

Whatever else one might think of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, they wrote two series in which a certain morality actually triumphed for once.

Amazing. Particularly in Breaking Bad in which, along the way and right up to the climax, ALL the really bad people got killed -- Tuco, the Twins, Gus, the Mexican drug lord by the swimming pool, the repulsive Jesse Clemons character, ALL the Nazis( thanks, machine gun), the evilly neurotic Lydia -- and, indeed, Walter White himself(no Tony Soprano ambiguity for HIM.) Only Jesse was allowed to get away , evidently because though he committed murder(of the nice but nonetheless crooked Gale) and did other bad things, he was more victim than villain and PAID with the deaths of his women and his own torture by the Clemons character.

Of course, some good people got killed along the way too -- Hank and even Mike(who did bad things but was a principled guy). But bottom line -- the bad guys lost.

Better Call Saul didn't have nearly the roster of bad guys that Breaking Bad had, but the worst of them got killed -- Lalo.

We'd always been ambivalent about the extent of Jimmy/Saul/Gene's evil (he was too funny and likeable) but we saw enough of it over time to realize that , as Walt said "You've always been that way" -- crooked and too willing to align himself WITH killers.

In the final episode, Jimmy/Saul/Gene had done some bad things -- hounding Howard to ruin(before his death at the hands of Saul's "client," Lalo), perhaps hounding his own brother to suicide(the brother was a meanie, but Saul pushed it), pushing local Nebraskans into a life of crime, robbing the house of a cancer patient, ALMOST strangling a nice old lady.

So...when the feds were laying the big years on Saul and he forced them -- in a cocky, smarmy, EVIL way -- to reduce his sentence down to 7 years in a cushy place, I thought: "Oh no -- Gilligan and Gould have decided to let Better Call Saul be one of those "the bad guy wins shows."

I was wrong. Saul went for his better angels at the end, fessed up, saved Kim and -- in his courtroom speech -- laid at his own feet all the death that followed in Walter White's wake. "If i had not defended him, he would have been dead in a month," said Saul, "and all those people wouldn't have died."

It was hard to see Saul go to prison for the rest of his life (and maybe he won't -- he might escape)...but Gilligan and Gould stuck to their guns. The bad guys lost again.

That's rare on cable TV.

And rare in life.

SPOILERS FOR ALL MARTIN SCORSESE GANGSTER MOVIES

PS. Another filmmaker who "delivered justice" to his gangsters was Martin Scorsese -- in Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed, the bad guys all lose.