Monthly Archives: February 2016

The Maturing — and Inevitable Breaking Bad Arc — of Better Call Saul

 

Pity poor James McGill.

He’s got a brilliant, condescending older brother who undermines his career dreams. He’s got such a penchant for scoundrels  he becomes known as ‘Slippin’ Jimmy’ in the neighborhood for his staged injuries. He has the Albuquerque branch of the Mexican drug cartel miffed.

And now he has to carry on the legacy of one of the greatest television shows of all-time, Breaking Bad.

Better Call Saul, which launched its second season this month, stands as a marked improvement over its smart-but-sporadic freshman year. Two episodes in, the series already has recovered some of the dark humor and violent tension that defined Vince Gilligan’s landmark preceding show.

Saul Goodman (Jimmy changed his name to match his motto: ‘S’all good, man.’) now has a love interest. A company  car and his own digs. He’s even smoothing out the relationship with soon-to-be hired gun Mike Ehrmantraut. mike n saul

Of course, that puts Saul — and creators Gilligan and co-creator Peter Gould — in something of a pickle. As the chronological predecessor to Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul must, eventually, return its hero to the place we first saw him: In Breaking Bad climes, as a pretty sleazy Yellow Pages injury attorney.

Consider how Saul was first described by Jesse Pinkman in Season 2, Episode 8 of Breaking Bad: When you’re up against the wall, “you don’t want a criminal lawyer. You want a criminal lawyer.”

And while he was great comic relief, Saul also was, in truth, a racist  and chauvinist. He openly propositioned his secretary Francesca (“You’re killing me with that booty”) and confided in Walter the reason he changed his name: “My real name’s McGill. The Jew thing I just do for the homeboys. They all want a pipe-hitting member of the tribe, so to speak.”

The Breaking Bad Saul even sassed the feds. In the same episode, he trades barbs with DEA macho man Hank Schrader, who offered an unsolicited review of Saul’s daytime TV commercials. “I’ve seen better acting in an epileptic whorehouse,” Hank taunted.

hank n saul

“Is that the one your mom works at?” Saul snapped back. “She still offering the two-for-one discount?” Saul is decidedly gentler in his own series, and Gilligan and Gould  would appear to have wedged themselves into a creative corner.

But Gilligan takes to pickles like a kosher dill. He is the first to admit he likes to write his characters into near-inescapable peril — then have them pull Houdini-esque escapes. Gilligan said he knew, for instance, that he wanted to end Season 2 of Breaking Bad with a plane crash, even though the series had been as landlocked as a dehydrated scorpion. So he wrote the season finale first, then retrofitted the story arc to include an airline disaster.

Shades of those darker grays are surfacing in Saul. Just as Walt slowly circled the drain into villainy in Breaking Bad, Saul appears headed for a fate that will change his law-office nickname from Charlie Hustle to Charlie Hustler. Just how dark a fate? In Gilligan’s hands, you’re almost scared to ask.

Still, Saul deserves credit for understatedly fixing what Hollywood movie studios still can’t: creating tension in a prequel. There’s a certain lack of suspense in an opening chapter: After all, your hero has to survive an origins story if chapter two is already written (and a hit). Gilligan and Gould circumvented that by making Better Caul Saul both flashback and prequel, leaving us to fret over his ultimate fate.

Of course, Saul the man still has a ways to go before he becomes a lovable lowlife, just as Saul the show faces its own challenges turning sinister: Mike continues to look older than he did in the “sequel” show, and capturing any of Breaking Bad‘s bleak lightning in a bottle would seem an impossible appeal.

But in the courtroom of television drama, even a shadow of Breaking Bad is a convincing argument. And in Gilligan’s and Gould’s hands, s’all good.

 

 

 

 

 

It’s Alive!!

 

As grim as the news has been of late, give this to Fortuna: At least she has a dark wit.

Why, were it not for the gallows humor that is the GOP, The Daily Show would have perished already. Please, Comedy Central, consider a host (like Larry Whitmore) who has the snarky cynicism of a political insider, not the baffled chuckle of a tourist. For now, though, all Trevor Noah need do is aim his camera at the Republican Party, and it will send in the clowns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZV7HHbbYhw

And then there’s the absurdity between the U.S. government and Apple. In investigating the San Bernardino mass slayings, the U.S. District Attorney attempted to crack the encryption code on the shooter’s iPhone. The execs at Apple (a notoriously petulant and uncooperative bunch) responded that their new IOS 8 was so invulnerable that even they can’t hack into the new operational system.

In response, the District Attorney’s Office hustled two bureaucrats on Charlie Rose to castigate the corporation, rightfully doubting the company’s claim of invulnerability (sure does make for a nice ad) and absurdly asking that Apple go back to the more-hackable IOS 7 (has technology ever moved backward?).

But the larger question — one Rose failed to ask — is this: What did the feds think was going to happen? Apple is already under investigation for skirting the US Treasury of more than $64 billion in taxes.

But Washington’s need to sniff the thrones of profitable syndicates, from Smith & Wesson to Pfizer to Bank of America, has fed a creature that’s grown larger than the creator.

And it’s hungry.

That’s the problem with monsters.

You never know who they’ll kill.