I know this show is pretty old at this point, but I don't really care about the date of media I consume generally, and everything about 'Better Call Saul' has already been said, but what stuck out the most to me about the show was Howard's arc.
Howard started seemingly as an antagonist in the show, but as it progressed and more of the cast's characters were revealed, he ended up as perhaps the show's straight man. Fitting with the show’s overall theme of impending doom, Howard and Chuck were ultimately vindicated in their motivations against Kim and Jimmy, albeit they, especially Chuck, were written in a way to be unlikable to the viewer while being morally correct. The show also never mocked the sincerity of their self-respect or even elitism. This vindication is part of a larger point about how decency can be morally thin and how that form of morally thin decency can eventually be tragic.
I think a key aspect of his arc is competence without responsibility, which seems to be a larger critique the show makes. Howard is an excellent manager and legal professional, yet for what? With Chuck specifically, he hid behind policy and bureaucracy, which allowed Chuck’s worsening mental state to guide the direction of the firm. Because he filters his life through rules and regulations and optics, he misread Jimmy’s morality, and because of this, the burden of responsibility for Chuck’s suicide was placed onto him through happenstance, and because of this, his attempts to make amends with Jimmy over it feel performative, both because it felt like the job offer was an attempt to get forgiveness for Jimmy and relieve others while changing little.
At the same time, even though the program uses Howard to make a point about niceness in an unfair system, showing how your bog-standard ‘good’ morality can become both dangerous because it allows others to function in morally ‘bad’ ways, cushioning evil in systems as well as helping unjust outcomes feel civilized and ‘fair.’ Yet, the show never depicts him as villainous; instead, as a tragically misguided figure, he failed to recognize the depth of Kim and Jimmy’s resentment towards him as well as failing to understand that fairness according to the rules and regulations can be perceived as condescension by those outside its prestige. This is where the show’s brutality comes into play: when he steps outside an institutional bubble into a raw, risky, morally murky world, he is destroyed by that world because it plays by rules where violence, not bureaucracy, civility, or procedure, decides the game.
It feels like it’s saying both that decency relying on law and order, rules, and bureaucracy is not enough to do real good or change, yet that the dickhead that lives in such a morality can sometimes have a point.