The second season of “Better Call Saul” begins where season one did: in purgatory, which happens to be a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska. Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk), once Walter White’s skeevy lawyer, relocated there to save his skin after the bloody denouement of “Breaking Bad.” Like last year’s opening sequence, it’s a lovely, mournful short film, scored this time to the country standard “Funny How Time Slips Away.”

The song is a curious choice, because “Better Call Saul” does anything but let time slip away. It grabs on to it, jumping backward to 2002, when Saul was Jimmy McGill, a small-time con artist trying to go straight as an attorney in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It slows time down, stretches out key moments like taffy, as if Saul, in his sugar-glazed prison, were holding his past up to the light, trying to find the exact spot where everything went wrong.

Entering its second season tonight on AMC, “Better Call Saul” is not the best drama on TV. But it’s one of the most unusual and daring. Its showrunners, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, used the capital and patience the prequel had in the bank, as a series with a built-in audience, to tell a quirkily absorbing story of a little guy’s doomed struggle to break good.

The first season made Jimmy into both a sleazebag and a hero, trying to parlay the flimflam skills he picked up as a onetime street hustler (they called him Slippin’ Jimmy, for a fake-accident scam he favored) into a straight career in the courtroom. Despite resistance — not least from his judgmental older brother, Chuck (Michael McKean), an accomplished lawyer turned shut-in — he managed to do his weasel work for good, blowing open a case of fraud at a senior citizens’ home.

Is Jimmy a good guy overcoming bad tendencies, or a bad guy who’s fooling himself? The opening of season two slyly raises that introspective theme, as the protagonist’s face is reflected in a mirror on a Cinnabon employee-motivation sign. It asks, “Would you want this person to serve you?”

Even in triumph, he can’t shake the feeling that he will always be Slippin’ Jimmy.

Now, he’s weighing a job offer from the head of a top Santa Fe law firm (Ed Begley Jr.) against the feeling that going back to the hustler’s life would be easier, more comfortable and more true to himself. As he says to his colleague and sometime sex buddy Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn): “People tell me how they see me. And it’s not as a lawyer.”

The line implicates the audience, too: We half want Jimmy’s better self to win out, half want to be entertained by his palaver-spewing Saul side. “Better Call Saul” is a more fun, picaresque show than “Breaking Bad,” but it’s every bit as moral, a travelogue of the smooth-paved desert road to perdition.

The show has a con man’s view of human nature: People are easy marks, because they’re greedy and willing to take shortcuts. It’s full of crooks next door, including a headset-wearing, stock-trading jackass whom Jimmy swindles and a pharmaceutical employee selling meds on the black market.

The most powerful story of everyday moral failing in season one came in the episode “Five-O,” focused on Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), a laconic piece of gristle who will later become Saul Goodman’s hired gun. (Jimmy meets him as a cranky parking lot attendant who moonlights as freelance muscle.) The episode flashed back to Mike’s days as a Philadelphia policeman, when he persuaded his son, also a cop, to take a bribe rather than blow the whistle on corrupt officers. The dirty cops killed Mike’s son anyway, and Mike realized, wrenchingly, that his advice cost his child’s life and soul: “I broke my boy.”

The experience changed Mike, who is oddly the series’ moral center: He does his job, however dirty, but he doesn’t steal or double dip. His rigidity is as much a survival mechanism as Jimmy’s bubble-gum pliability. “Better Call Saul” makes the most of Banks’ rough dignity, just as it brings out the pathos that underlay Odenkirk’s verbal tap-dancing in “Breaking Bad.” (Seehorn also has a big role in the new season, as the no-nonsense foil who prods Jimmy to be better than he thinks he is.)

Though “Saul” is a cable series, its pacing is reminiscent of a Netflix show, parceling out plot slowly. But it feels confident rather than meandering, full rather than dull. When it lets scenes play out at length, it allows space to show how a con is played or a lie falls apart. Of all the assets it shares with “Breaking Bad — the visual playfulness, the A-bomb-bright New Mexico exteriors — the greatest is its ability to suspend time.

“Better Call Saul” could have simply cashed in quick, giving a curtain call to the glib fan favorite Saul from “Breaking Bad.” Instead, it took the risk of taking Jimmy McGill seriously. Like Jimmy, Gilligan and Gould know an opportunity when they’re handed one. Unlike him, they don’t seem inclined to screw it up.