Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould created Saul Goodman as a comic relief character in Breaking Bad and then gave him a prequel that turned him into one of the most tragic figures in television. Before he was Saul Goodman, he was Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer from Cicero, Illinois, who genuinely wanted to do good work and genuinely could not stop cutting corners. The transformation from Jimmy to Saul is not sudden. It is incremental, a series of small compromises that each seem reasonable in isolation and catastrophic in aggregate.

Dr. Dan McAdams of Northwestern University, in his work on narrative identity, has studied how people construct stories about themselves that justify their current behavior, and Jimmy McGill is the clearest fictional example. Each step toward Saul Goodman has a reason. Each reason makes sense. And the cumulative effect is the creation of a person who does not exist, a character named Saul Goodman who practices law like it is a game show and treats clients like contestants.

Chuck and the Wound That Would Not Heal

Jimmy's brother Chuck is the wound that never closes. Chuck is a brilliant, principled attorney who believes that Jimmy is fundamentally corrupt and who works actively to prevent Jimmy from succeeding in the legal profession. The cruelty of this is that Chuck is partly right. Jimmy does cut corners. Jimmy does bend rules. But Chuck's refusal to believe his brother could ever be legitimate is what pushes Jimmy toward the illegitimacy Chuck predicted. Gilligan and Gould created a self-fulfilling prophecy with two brothers who destroy each other.

The Name That Ate the Man

Saul Goodman is a character that Jimmy McGill plays, and the performance gradually becomes permanent. The colorful suits, the billboard advertising, the inflatable Statue of Liberty on the office roof, all of it starts as marketing and ends as identity. Jimmy disappears into Saul the way an actor disappears into a role that runs too long, and by the time Breaking Bad begins, there is no Jimmy left to find. Gould and Gilligan's final act of mercy is letting Jimmy resurface one last time, in the courtroom, confessing everything, and choosing prison over the freedom that Saul Goodman would have taken without hesitation.