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Monthly Archives: September 2018
Better Call Saul: The Slow Burn Threatens to Bring Down Jimmy and Kim in “Something Stupid”
I’ve known the evenings, mornings, and days alone,
I have measured out my life in Mesa Verde awards and burner phones.
With my sincerest apologies to T.S. Eliot, it’s amazing how Better Call Saul can move so slowly and then so quickly in the same season, without missing a beat. It’s hard to know exactly how much time has elapsed in the show so far, but this season picked up right where the last one left off and has, more or less, crept along in the aftermath of Chuck’s death and Hector’s “accident” ever since.
That is, until now. If the last episode stood out for how it seemed to set Jimmy and Kim on diverging trajectories, “Something Stupid” takes that idea up a notch, with a cold open set to the famed Sinatra melody that provides the episode’s title. The series taps into its unrivaled ability to craft montages, depicting the passage of time via unwrapped statuettes, filing cabinet labels, and holiday sale signs. But the show goes a step further with its formal creativity, using a well-placed split screen to show how both Kim and Jimmy are flourishing in their new lives, but also how those lives are slowly but surely pulling them further and further apart.
BoJack Horseman and When Life and Death Don’t Fit the Rules of Television
CAUTION: This article contains major spoilers for Season 5 of BoJack Horseman.
There was a random forum post the other day, asking when movies stopped showing characters getting into elevators. Well, it was more complicated than that, but that was the gist. Movies used to show a character leaving a room, walking down the hallway, getting into a car, stopping for gas, arriving at the next location, etc. etc. etc. In the early years of film, that’s how you transitioned from one scene to another.
Then, Jean-Luc Godard happened. And suddenly movies just cut past all that stuff. A character would start in one room and then, boom, be someplace else, with a brief establishing shot or a quick dissolve or little more than a different backdrop to let you know what’s going on. Movies eventually came to trust their audiences to understand that the character on screen did all that boring transition stuff in the meantime, without needing to see it.
Castle Rock’s First Season Offers the Same Old Tiresome Excesses of High Class Genre Fare
CAUTION: This article contains major spoilers for Castle Rock.
When the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil came out, it felt like the series fulfilled an unmet need. The show had its problems, even in its promising first year, but it did things differently than other live action superhero shows at the time. The series had something on its mind. It had production values and grimy visuals and creatively-staged fights. It was far from flawless, but its quick success made it seem like the herald of a new phase of genre television, one that aimed for something a little deeper, a little darker, and a little realer than what we’d had before.
Well maybe it’s time to send that herald back from whence it came. As I discussed on The Serial Fanatacist podcast, Castle Rock doesn’t directly borrow much, if anything, from Daredevil, but it’s part of the same wave of prestige-aping, navel-gazing genre shows whose reach far exceeds their grasp. While briefly novel, this sort of take on geek-approved material has worn out its welcome amid the onslaught of shows that know enough to gesticulate toward deeper themes and move the camera around in faux-portentous montages, but never really master the trade, let alone the depth of character or storytelling that could make those badges of seriousness legitimately meaningful.
Posted in Other Prestige Dramas, Television
Tagged Castle Rock, Genre Television, Horror, Season Reviews, Stephen King
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Better Call Saul Sets Jimmy and Kim on Different Paths in “Piñata”
Jimmy and Kim are on different paths; that’s been clear for a while now. But the cold open in “Piñata” makes it literal. The episode starts with a flashback to the halls of HHM, at a time when Jimmy is a gregarious mailroom clerk and Kim’s a precocious law student. Even then, the two share a rapport, but also have obvious differences.
The Walking Dead Ponders Divine Intervention and Kindness in “Dead or Alive Or”
I like The Walking Dead when its episodes give us a series of vignettes much more than when it’s trying to pull off a single story that has umpteen tangled tentacles. That’s why Season 4 was such a high point for the show. Rather than weaving and unraveling scores of different characters, episode after episode, the show took time to let each of them have their own stories and gave their individual narratives the space to really breathe. That allowed the audience to get to know those characters and better appreciate their individual struggles and perspectives, rather than letting them be rolled up into the morass of dinge and lopsided plots that otherwise rumble through the series.
So my favorite parts of “Dead or Alive Or” are the interludes with Father Gabriel and Dr. Carson, because they feel like a throwback to those semi-standalone adventures from earlier in the series’s run. That duo’s portion of the episode doesn’t move the overarching plot forward much, but it serves as an illuminating short story in the midst of the larger, ever more tiresome narrative machinations of the Negan/Saviors arc.
Better Call Saul Veers Ever Closer to Breaking Bad in “Quite a Ride”
Better Call Saul has never been closer to Breaking Bad. That’s not just because this episode opens with this show’s first glimpse of our hero during the Walter White era. It’s not just because Gus Fring seems to nail down his plans for the facility that will one day become Heisenberg’s lab. And it’s not just because Jimmy visits The Dog House, the fast food restaurant and seedy hangout where Jesse Pinkman once sold his drug of choice.
It’s because “Quite a Ride” is about people who are almost peerless at what they do, unable to walk away from it, and the different directions those superlative skills take them. That was the larger story of Breaking Bad, a show devoted to a man who had an undeniable talent, but who could not let it go in the face of the money and long-awaited recognition he thought he was due, even when it came with a side of peril and human misery. Breaking Bad lived on the conflicted thrills of watching someone as talented as Walter White operate at the top of his game in a terrible industry, and earned its emotional resonance from the uncertain but foreboding sense of where those talents would lead him.
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia Finds Its Unsuspecting Heart with Kids
The most shocking thing from the season 12 finale of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wasn’t that Dennis Reynolds, the venerable instigator of The Gang, seemed poised to leave Paddy’s Pub, and with it the show, forever. It was why he left.
Posted in Other Sitcoms, Television
Tagged Dennis Reynolds, Essays, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
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Better Call Saul Uses its Timeline to Show Us What’s Bothering Mike in “Talk”
Despite a few similarities (trunk shots for example), Better Call Saul rarely goes for the non-linear storytelling tricks that you might see in a Quentin Tarantino movie. Sure, you may get the periodic flash forward to Cinnabon Gene, or the occasional flashback to some illuminating incident from Jimmy McGill’s old life, but it’s rare that the show depicts the events of the present in something other than chronological order.
It’s noteworthy, then, that in this is episode, we see the end of Mike’s speech in group therapy before we see its beginning. The episode opens with a scene from his past, where Mike is meticulously laying down a slab of concrete and letting his son write his name in the wet cement. It’s a sweet moment, but one tinged with melancholy, and a dissonance when the episode then quickly cuts to Mike in the present, looking out at a stunned room and gruffly remarking that, hey, they wanted him to talk.
