Better Call Saul (mildest of spoilers)

[mlrg]

Honestly, I think there's too much TV now. I'm so far behind and just not really hopefuly about catching up

Totally agree with you. It's just too much time consuming. In recent years I've seen all seasons of The Crown, Ozark, Succession, Big Little Lies and The Kominski Method. Gave up Game of Thrones in the middle of season 1 because it really isn't my cup ot tea. I've also watched Mare of Easttown, Mrs America, Normal People, The Queen's Gambit and Squid Game. And that's it. This is what I've seen during the last 4 years.

I much prefer catching up old movies/oscar completism.

[Okri]

• I've seen all five seasons of The Wire multiple times each; I'll echo dws that season five easily the worst and that season two is at least season one's equal (I think I prefer season four to both).
• I think Homicide is a textbook example of a show slightly before it's time. You've got before The Sopranos (pre-1999) and after. I agree that being a network show hinders it (and maybe even a little more, but I'm curious about how it holds up. My library has the DVDs, so maybe I'll check it out. I do think it's interesting that comedies/sitcoms never really got displaced by cable shows the way that dramas did.
• I liked Breaking Bad, but not to the level the critics/audience did. In fact, I've never really fallen for any AMC show. I finished Breaking Bad, but couldn't hang in there for Mad Men and gave up after half a season. Can't do gore so The Walking Dead was never going to be it for me. I really liked Rectify and Rubicon, though. So I didn't start watching Better Call Saul.
• Honestly, I think there's too much TV now. I'm so far behind and just not really hopefuly about catching up.

[Sabin]

dws1982 wrote
It's a shame that Homicide is so gone from any cultural conversation about TV Dramas, because it is excellent. But in the streaming era, since it's never streamed anywhere (probably due to music issues), it basically doesn't exist. The complete series is on DVD, I think with the music intact. I know the A&E releases from the mid-00's, which I bought, had all of the music intact. Not sure if the re-release from Shout has it, but I believe it does.

A friend of mine leant me his DVD box set a year ago. It's his favorite series. I haven't watched it yet. On your rec, I'm going to do that.

[dws1982]

Anyway, a bit of a shame but at the very least, I'm back on the drama horse. After reading your post I'm reminded that I've never finished Mad Men, The Sopranos, or The Wire and perhaps I should get on that. I hear Homicide is excellent.

It's a shame that Homicide is so gone from any cultural conversation about TV Dramas, because it is excellent. But in the streaming era, since it's never streamed anywhere (probably due to music issues), it basically doesn't exist. The complete series is on DVD, I think with the music intact. I know the A&E releases from the mid-00's, which I bought, had all of the music intact. Not sure if the re-release from Shout has it, but I believe it does. The listing on Shout's website doesn't mention music alterations, which they usually do. (Northern Exposure, which I'm enjoying, is not available in the US with intact music but has a complete series BluRay release overseas with all of its music.) Homicide is hindered a little by the limitations of being on a major network, but seasons 1-5 are up there with the best drama series ever. Season 6 is good and has the famous subway episode, and Season 7 has its moments but is the weakest by far; it's not that the creators and original writers had left--Fonatana, Overmyer, Yoshimura, Simon had all been there from the beginning. But something was missing, more than just Andre Braugher, and some things had been added that didn't really fit. But even then, it was unlike anything on TV visually, it was still using directors from film, and not just the rotating array of TV hired guns that almost every other show used. (Just in season seven, Kathryn Bigelow, Brad Anderson, Barbara Kopple, Lisa Cholodenko and Joe Berlinger directed episodes; earlier seasons used everyone from Whit Stillman to Peter Medak to Michael Radford.)

"Three Men and Adena" is probably its best episode (and it could probably play okay out of context if it's out there on YouTube or anything), one of the all-time great TV episodes, but it's all very much worth a look. Network drama hasn't ever been much better than Homicide was in its third, fourth, and fifth seasons where it was putting out great episodes week after week after week.

The Wire is one I loved back in its original airing, even though my take on it was slightly off-center: I thought season two, which lots of people considered the clear worst season, was its best. (Season five was the worst, and I would not trust anyone who says otherwise.) I started rewatching a few years ago and didn't get too far; possibly just because I was busy and had other distractions, but I also think it's possible that its matter-of-fact pessimism doesn't resonate with me now the way it did in 2007, when I was much more pessimistic in general. Need to rewatch it in full, but Homicide, which was set in the same city and made with many of the same writers and producers, and which never took itself quite as seriously as The Wire, never tried to be some kind of Grand Statement about America, is the one I feel more excitement about rewatching.

[Sabin]

No spoilers for the series finale below save for the fact that I didn't like it as much as I would have liked.

Excellent post, Tee. I did note Breaking Bad's use of cliffhangers in passing. I recall writing a little bit more but I trimmed it for length because I wanted to invite conversation (success). I think Vince Gilligan's utilization of cliffhangers are a big reason for the series' success and one of the things that I miss about serialized television is how a certain show will just live inside your head for a week, which Breaking Bad accomplished like almost no show I've experienced in my adult life. But as time has worn on and as more and more shows have adopted that format, I've had time to wonder what the fuss was about. I have friends who watched Breaking Bad after the series ended and walked away from it saying it was overrated. I certainly think one should make an effort to watch a series as it was intended, but on the other hand if it can't impress under any other circumstance that's indicative of other shortcomings. I hadn't thought about cliffhangers as a narrative device used previously to hacky effect.

I don't think I quite managed to put into words the most interesting thing about Better Call Saul to me, which is that because one half of the series is an entertaining character study and the other half is a depiction of a larger world the series has a squirrel-y quality that's hard to pin down. Occasionally, it feels like it's saying something truly grand. Other times, I feel like I'm watching a sterling accomplishment in expanding an unworkable concept into something far more workable than it has any right to be. The series finale left me more in the latter camp than I would have liked. They did a better job with this series than they had any right to, but it made me feel like I was watching more of a character piece than a series about an idea, something I was really hoping it would be. I'll say nothing else save for the fact that I found it overly straight forward (as well as the fact that there was something else that truly bothered me that I'll get into once more have seen it).

Anyway, a bit of a shame but at the very least, I'm back on the drama horse. After reading your post I'm reminded that I've never finished Mad Men, The Sopranos, or The Wire and perhaps I should get on that. I hear Homicide is excellent.

[dws1982]

dws1982 wrote
I've been meaning to catch up to this forever. I think I would like it. Breaking Bad is one of those shows I really liked when I was watching it, and would honestly like to revisit, but its online fandom who insist that it's the greatest TV show ever have really put me off of anything related to it. (Also been put off by Bryan Cranston's decade-long victory lap, where he still gets prizes and acclaim, despite being mostly bad in everything.)

Oh, interesting. I could've sworn I remember you being in the camp of thinking it was one of the greatest televisions shows ever.

I was, after I it finished airing, and I might even think that if I rewatched. But it's one of those shows (Mad Men is another) where its online fandom (I am including Twitter people, message board people, and professional critics here) is so obnoxious, its greatness is so unquestionable that any discussion often gets choked off beyond descriptions of why it's great. So both of those shows I haven't had any real desire to revisit in quite awhile (I never actually finished Mad Men) even though I think I would still like Breaking Bad a lot if I could watch it in any kind of vacuum. This is one fun thing about going back to some older, mostly forgotten shows from the 90's (and even before), which I've done recently. No one much talks about them so I can watch and rewatch them kind of fresh without a ton of discourse. My current rewatch is Northern Exposure, which I don't think I ever saw all the episodes of.

[Mister Tee]

Your mention of spoilers made me delay reading this till I'd caught up with all of this semi-season's episodes. My way of binge-watching is to save up all episodes till a week or so before the finale, so I don't have to store info for such a long stretch. (As it turned out, I was supposed to have remembered stuff from Breaking Bad, which I definitely didn't; had no idea who Carol Burnett's son was supposed to be.)

I'm a bit more medium on the whole Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe than you are, Sabin, in part because of something you note in passing: the use of cliffhangers. For me, that's a TV trope from the days when I never watched -- most famously, Dallas, where half the country evidently spent the summer wondering who shot JR?, while I didn't know one thing about who JR was. Gilligan's use of them told me he sprang more from traditional TV than did the shows I'd especially loved over the past two decades -- The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men -- and I never felt as attached to his work as a result. Also because his drama relied more heavily on physical menace (from assorted cartel psychopaths), and an overlaid sense of dread, which I sometimes found simply unpleasant.

Nonetheless, I've watched both shows end-to-end. I actually didn't watch Breaking Bad during its initial run -- I was unimpressed by the first episode, and have never been much a fan of Cranston -- but, based on its ever-growing acclaim, I watched it all over a six-month period in the mid-teens, after it had left the air. I really liked the Aaron Paul/Anna Gunn characters, as well as later additions (Banks/Esposito/Odenkirk) who eventually formed the basis of Better Call Saul, and found the story interesting enough to keep with even while it sometimes drifted into territory I didn't care for. I was a bit reluctant to hitch onto Better Call Saul at first, on an "aren't we done with these people?" basis, but the sibling relationship with McKean was fascinating, and, over time, Seehorn's character emerged as one of the most unexpectedly complex and mesmerizing (to the point I, like many, came into this final season/part two dreading what her fate might be -- something about which I'm still only 95% confident).

I can't say I've been wild about the most recent episodes. I feel like I signed on for following one story arc -- what led Jimmy McGill into his Better Call Saul life -- and wanted to see that wrapped up; I wasn't that interested in what happened to the character after Breaking Bad (many of whose plot details, after 7 or 8 years, are not instantly summonable for me). That latter, however, appears to be where Gilligan and company are taking it, and, while I can enjoy elements (the mad mall spree, the chance to see Carol Burnett do some real, powerful acting), I'm not sure it's going to wind down in a way that totally satisfies me. But, of course, I'll wait till after the finale before I comment on that. (Probably hours if not a day or two after everyone else, because I'll have a ball game to watch while DVR-ing the initial broadcast.)

[Sabin]

dws1982 wrote
I've been meaning to catch up to this forever. I think I would like it. Breaking Bad is one of those shows I really liked when I was watching it, and would honestly like to revisit, but its online fandom who insist that it's the greatest TV show ever have really put me off of anything related to it. (Also been put off by Bryan Cranston's decade-long victory lap, where he still gets prizes and acclaim, despite being mostly bad in everything.)

Oh, interesting. I could've sworn I remember you being in the camp of thinking it was one of the greatest televisions shows ever. Well, Better Call Saul is quite a good show in ways that (for me) are very hard to pin down but I really think it's more than fan service. I'd welcome your thoughts.

[dws1982]

I've been meaning to catch up to this forever. I think I would like it. Breaking Bad is one of those shows I really liked when I was watching it, and would honestly like to revisit, but its online fandom who insist that it's the greatest TV show ever have really put me off of anything related to it. (Also been put off by Bryan Cranston's decade-long victory lap, where he still gets prizes and acclaim, despite being mostly bad in everything.)

[Sabin]

I always meant to get around to Better Call Saul but I was a little reticent to dive into another hour-long drama for a while. They're just so time-consuming. Over the last month, I've binged Better Call Saul like I've never done with another series in my life. I'm all caught up and ready for the series finale. I'd love to know everyone else's thoughts on it because I'm just obsessed.

I know people who at this point believe it's a better series than Breaking Bad. I'm not quite ready to say that if only because the experience of watching Breaking Bad was like nothing I've quite had in my life. In retrospect, it felt like the birth of a new kind of television (with its insane cliffhangers) happening in real-time. But Better Call Saul might be a richer film in terms of ideas but in a way that's hard to pin down. I think like Breaking Bad, it's a study of change (which is true of all television) but Jimmy isn't given a cancer diagnosis as a high-concept motivation. It's a long story beginning before the series starts where Jimmy just believes he can overcome his nature ("Slipping Jimmy") and have the same success his brother did. Who can blame him? In that sense, Better Call Saul is about the American idea of reinvention. But it's also always questioning whether or not Jimmy can change. It's ironic that Jimmy is probably given more names than any character in any show I can think of, and yet it's always drawing a clear line of continuity between them. We know he ends up as Gene alone in the future post-Breaking Bad. We just don't know how. But they make us care because Jimmy is good company (better than Walter White or Jesse Pinkman) but also because of how Vince Gilligan ties Jimmy's fate to his supporting cast. We care because of his relationship with Kim (Rhea Seaborn, who might be the best actor on the show) and his relationship with Chuck (Jesus, that arc is incredible). We also care because we see the potential in him just like everyone else in the series. Yes, he's routinely depicted as a pretty good lawyer albeit with unorthodox methods that step outside the law but in ways we don't necessarily disagree with (a good series engine), but the series never lets him off the hook. He's always being depicted as having the basic description of a con man, and we're always made to feel like he's either getting better (being more responsible, showing more empathy) or worse (demonstrating none of those things). That's not normal. Season Four walks this tightrope expertly by teasing us with Jimmy coming to grips with an emotional development only to slap us in the face. Con man might be the polite term for what Jimmy is.

And this is only half of the story! The other half presents itself as the story of Mike, with two sides of the law meeting and departing by chance, but slowly but surely we realize that we're watching the birth of a massive cartel war that will consume Mike, Jimmy, and birth Breaking Bad. It's worth noting that Jimmy always feels connected to these worlds in a way that Walter White never did; the cartels always felt slightly abstract in Breaking Bad. The way that Better Call Saul blends these two stories together is incredible, at times feeling like Crimes and Misdemeanors with two stories linked together without directly commenting on each other. Mike is an especially layered character in this series.

Every season has its own unique identity (season three is still probably the highpoint). Season six is a strange beast. At first, I found it disorienting (I'm surprised it was nominated for Emmys) because so much time was spent setting up a specific conflict but in hindsight it was a utilitarian choice that's paid off masterfully. Taken as a whole (especially the last episode "Waterworks"), it reminds me of The Irishman.


MILDEST OF SPOILERS....
MILDEST OF SPOILERS....
MILDEST OF SPOILERS....

Without giving anything away, this most recent episode is a fascinating flip of the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad; both feature protagonists on the run from the law. In Breaking Bad, it depicts Walter White as the ultimate badass, leaving a $100 bill and a shot of whiskey behind. In Better Call Saul, he's shamefully on the run from a little old lady (Carol Burnett, incredible) who just exposed him and called the law.

Where this story goes, I'm not sure but I don't think it ends in the glory that greeted Walter White, dying of a gunshot wound, surrounded by his drugs, getting to play the hero one last time. The midpoint of Better Call Saul saw him in jail briefly and it's hard to see his arc leading him anywhere else.



Anyway, I'm on pins and needles for the last episode. I'd love anyone else's thoughts.