The End is Near For Saul... And it Ain't Good, Man

When we left Jimmy McGill, he had just embraced his destiny by pulling off his biggest con yet on the New Mexico bar association, and also taking on the name that will be engraved on his metaphorical tombstone: Saul Goodman. After spending much of Season 4 in limbo, he has decided that he can no longer be Chuck McGill’s bad brother, and has decided to try something bigger. That’s how Jimmy tries to justify to his beloved Kim (the impeccable Rhea Seehorn), and who he keeps trying to plan a future with, but who increasingly can’t understand the level of cons in the man she loves.

Darkness is looming for almost everybody else in the world of Albuquerque. Mike (Jonathan Banks, taking his masterwork to a new level) is still reeling from his assassination of a virtual innocent in the Season 4 finale, and who is isolating himself from Gus Fring and the family he has been saying he’s doing it all for. Gus (Giancarlo Esposito) is dealing with the delay of the superlab he thinks will give him everything, but is still trying to deal with the chaos of the cartel and the arrival of Lalo Salmanaca (a very impressive Tony Dalton), who in just a few episodes has already demonstrated that he is just as ruthless as everybody in the Salmanaca clan, but far smarter. As for Nacho (Michael Mando) he remains increasingly stuck between two monstrous drug kingpins, and can’t seem to find a way out.

Better Call Saul is becoming what Breaking Bad, for all of its magnificence, could never quite become: a genuine tragedy in the making. Jimmy may be embracing the shyster we always knew was lurking beneath the surface, but every time we see him interact with one of the darker forces on this series, we always can tell just how over his head he was. The more you watch him, the more you realize just how many lives could’ve been spared had Walter White just listened to the advice he gave. As brilliant as Bob Odenkirk has been in both series, it’s only in Saul that we realize that he is a tragic figure, and not just because of where he will end up. (We’ll get to that in a moment.)

Indeed, all around the series is the pall of tragedy. We don’t know what fate will befall Nacho, but considering we never saw him in Breaking Bad, it can’t be anywhere good. Mike, who seemed utterly soulless when we met him, we’re not getting a much clearer picture of who he was before he ended up being Gus’ fixer, and it’s unalterably sad. And poor Jimmy will no doubt lose Kim, not just because we know the future, but because Kim is unlike almost anyone in the world Vince Gilligan and his crew have created: she has a conscience, and as much as she loves Jimmy, she is increasingly appalled by who he has become.

Which brings us to something far darker. At the beginning of each season, we have seen increasingly longer flashforwards of Saul in Omaha. In the season premiere, Saul’s worst fear came: someone recognized him from his past life. He made a call to the ‘vacuum cleaner salesman’ (Robert Forster’s farewell gift) to the try and make new arrangements – only for him to say: “I’ll handle it myself.” Jimmy did many horrible things in his career, but is he finally going to cross the one threshold he never quite did in all of his years in the Gilligan verse and take a life?

The end is near for all of them. This is the penultimate season for Better Call Saul, and if its anything like Breaking Bad near the end, things are going to get much, much bleaker, and that’s before you consider that everybody else is doomed is some way. What is also clear is that Saul, currently the best series on television by a considerable margin, is prepping for us to enter the stages right before Saul ends up meeting Jesse and Walt. (We already know that Dean Norris is going to show up as Hank Schrader at some point this season, and while I’m glad to see him, he’s just another reminder of the body count that is in our future.) Part of me really wishes Jimmy would just take Kim and get the hell out of New Mexico, but we all know that’s not in the card. So all I can say is, before the one who knocks enters stage right, I think the Emmys Better… well, we know how it ends.

My score: 5 stars.

I'm Keane on this CW Comic Show

When the CW began its work in what could eventually be called the Berlanti version of DC comics, I was initially high on it. It offered fresh insights on some of the much smaller players in the comic book world, and looked at it with imagination. But year by year and series by series, each one began more dismal, derivative, and worst of all dull. When Arrow finished its run after eight seasons, I could barely bring myself to care.

Riverdale was much more of the same. Initially, I thought that its dark look on what was usually an overly pastel series was refreshing and engaging. But it didn’t take much work for them to become way too bleak. I left in the hiatus of Season 3, and have not been back since. So, really watching a spinoff of this world, albeit one set in a fictionalized version of New York seemed like yet another waste of time.

Or so you’d think. Because I knew of the character Katy Keane in whatever world she fits in, I decided to focus on the actress playing her: Lucy Hale. Two years ago, I became briefly enamored with the serio-comic Life Sentence, an engaging series that featured Hale as a lead who was diagnosed with cancer, seemed about to die, then went into remission – which revealed all of the cracks in her family that her illness had painted over. I admired its pluck, but it didn’t have anywhere near the luck of its lead character – and, of course, it wasn’t based on a comic book or supernatural series, which on the CW is automatically two strikes.

Hale plays the title role: a store window and buyer at Lacy’s (it’s the Archie world; everything’s a wink to reality), whose secret desire is to be a fashion designer. Her only family was her mother, who died when she was very young, so she’s made her own family. There’s her boyfriend, KO, an aspiring boxer. There’s her roommate, Ginger Lopez, an aspiring Broadway dancer whose also a drag star. There’s Pepper Smith, a gossip columnist and would be club order, noveau riche and cash poor. Into their world comes Josie McCoy (Ashleigh Murray from Riverdale) the lead singer of the Pussycats, who has left ‘the murder capital of the world’ to try and become a pop singer. She runs into a talent producer named Alex Cabot, who seems to be the man of her dreams, professionally and romantically – except that he has a twisted relationship with his sister.

What I find most encouraging about Katy Keene is the utter lack of darkness that possesses. In the opening minutes of Riverdale, Cherry Blossom’s twin brother was found shot dead, and we learned that Archie had been having an affair with his music teacher at the time. We’re three episodes into Katy Keene and the darkest thing that’s happened so far is that KO accidently set their apartment on fire when he learned their oven was more of a closet. The majority of the struggles are more of the life struggles of trying to make it in New York. This may be very low key for the era of Peak TV, but that’s part of the series charm. Especially for one on the CW where literally every choice seems to deal with the fate of mankind.

The other thing I like about this series is that it’s actually light-hearted. Considering that the DC series basically became unfathomably message-like after awhile, and so much of Riverdale’s comedy was gallows humor, I find much of the action on Katy Keene to be fun. One could see the foursome living in the apartment as the equivalent of the next generation of Sex and the City (only they actually talk about their careers and families as well their relationships) and that this version of New York is far more realistic, even as it fictionalizes nearly every possible name. (Ginger auditions for the hip-hop musical Jefferson!, to take the most obvious example) I’ve been wondering when someone taking all these shows from comic books would remember that they could remember to make a joke every now in then.

Katy Keene is not perfect, by any means.  We’re still working on learning the backstories of the people other than Katy, and its still working on bringing up adversaries that are worth a damn. But it has the abilities to make these emotions ping. It hurt when Katy finally decided to break up with her boyfriend of five years and all that he stands for because they want different things. What’s more, this series will actually have the time to pull things off – the series was renewed for a second season before the first one even began. I’m not expecting greatness, but I am getting fun, and for a network that utterly made mincemeat of Nancy Drew before it started, I’m actually encouraged. Just please, can we hold off the inevitable Riverdale crossover until next year? Keep the shine for a little bit.

My score: 3.5 stars.

A Great Series Comes To A Close: Homeland's Final Season

When I was giving a list of my greatest shows of the decade, I pointedly ignored Homeland. That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought it was an incredible series at times – mainly in the first two seasons, but often it was quite exceptional when it managed to finally cut loose the remainder of the Brody storyline. (I may write about the series in more detail later on) But trying to express what made Homeland brilliant often seemed askew in a world situation that seems to mirror fiction far more than reality.

When we left Carrie at the end of Season 7, she had just been freed after more than seven months in captivity of the Russian government, in particular Yevgeny (Costa Ronin, playing a completely different kind of Russian than he did in The Americans)  the conspirator who nearly undermined the Keane Presidency throughout the last season. Carrie is still recovering from more than six months without her medication, and is now considered by her own government a compromised operative. It doesn’t help matters that she can’t remember much of her own time as a prisoner.

Everyone believes she is a danger, but her mentor Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin, still a pillar of strength) can’t help it. Still serving as the National Security Advisor, he is in the middle of peace negotiations in Kabul, most of it with the same people who led the attack on the Afghani embassy at the climax of Season 4. He needs Carrie, who was section chief there to try and find a way to make peace work. And in a level of his own desire to negotiate, he finds himself dealing with Hassam Haqqani,  the Islamic terrorist who, because of his abduction of Saul and attack on the embassy, has become the head of the Taliban. He must also deal with the manipulations of Tasneem the Afghanistan government head who was the puppet master behind so much of the double dealing that lead to death and destruction in Season 4. And even though Carrie seems to be better suited for what is going on here, it doesn’t help matters that Yevgeny has appear in Kabul, determined to pull her own strings.

In many ways, the final season of Homeland has so many of the elements that made the series great. We are back in Afghanistan, site of so much real world chaos and some of the most searing drama in the series – the kind which causes Carrie to leave the CIA in the first place. We are dealing with Russian manipulation of truth, which was very effective both last season and in so much of Season 5. And in the most daring move, we are dealing with the story that started the whole series – the possibility that ‘an American prisoner of war has been turned’. The fact not only that the one in question in Carrie, and that she can’t even say definitively what happened to her, adds yet another layer to work that has already garnered Claire Danes two Emmys. The possibility for a great conclusion to the series is all there. What worries me is the fact that the story line of trying to bring about peace in the Middle East was at the center of the final season of the other legendary Howard Gordon series 24. And that became a balls-up very quickly.

The things that give me a little more confidence is that Gordon and his staff seemed to have learned their lessons, not just from 24 but through the past decade that they have writing for Homeland. They no longer think that Islam equals evil, or that the geopolitical situation can be resolved with a well-placed bullet.  Carrie, Saul and all the other characters live in the world of ambiguity, something that barely existed in the world of Jack Bauer. And Homeland is much more character driven than anything else. The big question in the final season is not whether peace will be achieved? It’s whether Carrie will betray Saul. And that would break my heart far more than anything else that happens.

My score: 4 stars.

The Sinner Just Keeps Getting Creepier In Season 3

Even in the era of Peak TV, the police procedural may be the genre that has changed the least. Dick Wolf and Jerry Bruckheimer have slowly but surely drained most of the imagination out of it, PBS keeps bringing it back to historical times, and even the most imaginative cable versions settle more on style than anything else – for all the stylistic flourishes, True Detective often seemed more concerned with the darkness of the main characters than the actual mysteries.

For that reason, The Sinner stands out like a beacon – a battered, broken one, but still a light. Centering around Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman in a role he was born to play), and mostly centered around the small upstate town of Dorchester, every season has essentially begun the same way. A murder takes place. We see the actions leading up to it, and we see the killer commit the crime. Harry is called in, basically to fill out the paperwork, and slowly he finds out that there is a deeper meaning to something that seems cut and dry. In Season 3, he is called in to an automobile accident that killed the driver and left the passenger alive.  We meet the passenger in the opening minutes of season premiere. His name is Jamie (Matt Bomer, a revelation) he’s a private school teacher with a wife days away from giving birth. On the surface, he seems to have the perfect life. Then five minutes into the premiere, Nick shows up.

Everything about Nick seems off somehow. There seems to be meaning behind everyone of his lines, and whatever he says unsettles Jamie. But that’s nothing compared to what happens when Jamie survives the crash. One could easily come to the conclusion that he’s suffering from some kind of shock or PTSD. But there’s something much darker in his behavior. It’s clear from the last episode that when the two were growing up, Nick brings out the worst in people, and there is some part of Jamie that craves that kind of behavior. The part that makes you think that surviving the car crash may be the best thing to befall him over the course of the series.

Harry wants to understand, but with each successive season you really wonder how much each new case takes out of him. Indeed, the first time we see Harry, he is being gently recommended by one of his colleague that the time might have come for him to retire. His daughter, who we see for the first time, isn’t exactly wild about the fact that he lives by himself in a house way out in the boondocks where he has to walk around just to get cell service. Harry knows this job is draining him, but he can’t turn away from it. We see in his half-hearted attempts to get along with his daughter and grandson that he just isn’t suited for being a family man, and we know from previous episodes, he isn’t much of a friend. The job is all he can cling to.

The Sinner is by far one of the creepiest series I’ve ever seen. Every time you dive into its puzzle box, you get a look at a layer of human nature you don’t know if you want to comprehend. Chris Messina, one of the great actors of television, plays Nick as if there is something in him that doesn’t care about life. At one point, we see him and Jamie standing on top of a building, looking as if jumping was the easiest thing in the world. Just how close to the surface is the idea of oblivion, and what would it take to bring it out in us?

It’s always hard to tell where this show is going in the early episodes. We still don’t understand the connection between Nick and the artist whose land the accident ended up taking place on. But there is something malevolent and fascinating about The Sinner that continues to draw me in. There’s something that we don’t want to see, but like Harry, we can’t look away.

My score: 4.25 stars,

Jim Carrey's Back, and We'e Not Kidding

One of the most wonderful experiences of 2018 was Showtime’s delightful dramedy Kidding. Jim Carrey played Jeff Pickles, a host of a children’s show somewhere between Mr. Rogers and H.R. Puffenstuf, where Jeff’s indelible imagination had made him beloved by children and parents for 30 years. But behind the show, Jeff was in a world of pain. One of his twin son’s Phil had died in an auto accident six months before. He had separated from his wife Jill, and she was seeing an anesthesiologist from the hospital she worked at. His remaining son Will was starting to smoke pot. And his father Seb (Frank Langella) was doing everything in his power to keep all of his feelings at bay, while keeping his son’s ‘brand’ alive. It hardly comes as a shock that he finally snapped in the season finale, had a nervous breakdown while lighting the nation’s Christmas tree, and reacted to the knowledge that his wife’s boyfriend (Justin Kirk) had probably started his son on dope by running him over.

It may have taken more than a year for Season 2 to premiere, but the show takes up a mere minute later, with Jeff trying desperately to save the man he ran over, trying to cover the fact that he spent the last several months living in the house next to his wife without her knowing, and  trying to rebuild things with his family at Christmas, all while trying to uphold the duty of Mr. Pickles. And as always, Jeff’s strict moral code – the one that he has been pushing children to live by for thirty years – is his undoing. Despite everything his beloved sister Deidre (Catherine Keener, a marvel to watch) tells him to avoid doing, he finds himself telling his wife what happened  rather than try and keep everything he’s dreamed of.

Jim Carrey built his career in the 1980s and mid 1990s playing rubber-faced comics who expressed their hostility toward to the world with cartoonish antics, and then much of the following decade playing dramatic roles which tried to reign the madness in. Kidding is the first thing that I’ve ever seen him do where it exposes the rubber faced antics as the mask for a deeper level of pain and anguish. ‘To the outside world I’m cheerful, but inside I’m Mt. Saint Helen and its 1980” he said at one point last season. This is a man who in the opening minutes of Season 2 we saw get married by the Dalai Lama, mainly because he considered him an ideal, and in a way the series gives us a rare insight into just how truly agonizing it must to be a celebrity. It’s an extraordinary performance worthy of Emmy consideration.

But the entire show has a feel to it that is unlike anything even in the age of Peak TV. The world of Pickleboro Falls is filled with songs and puppets and surrealism that we can’t picture, which is even remarkable considering that the force behind it – Deidre – had been undergoing her own level of pain for even longer than Jeff has. (Her husband is gay, but refuses to accept it, and her daughter is going through a mess of psychological traumas). In the second episode of the seasons, Jeff undergoes surgery and ends up in a live-action version of his creation, and its one of the most unique experiences you’ll ever see in any format – musical, funny, painful, and leaves Jeff with the clear message of just what a monster his father has been to him all his life.

Yes, it’s not a show for children. By definition almost nothing on Showtime is. But Kidding is an utter rarity in the world of television. For all his flaws, Jeff is trying so hard to live up to the ideals he set for children and to be a role model, not only to his family, but to yours. (It’s telling that when Jill invites Jeff’s family to the hospital, they treat her with utter contempt, but remark how much they admire Jeff.) In a world where so many of the leads on TV pride themselves on being assholes, it’s moving to have a series where the central character doesn’t like it when other characters say that word. When Jeff breaks his own vow for the first time in the season premiere, there’s genuine hurt because he knows how badly his sinned. That’s awareness that Tony Soprano or Walter White or hell, Ray Donovan never had. If this is the brick that a post Homeland/Shameless Showtime wants to build off of, they could do a heck of a lot worse.

My score: 4.75 stars.

Is Showtime Purging Its Identity?

It probably wasn’t noticed in the midst of the last few days sturm und drang, but last night Showtime announced that Ray Donovan, a series that could be considered one of its signature shows since 2013, would not be returning for an eighth season.

I write this article not to praise Ray Donovan – on numerous occasions I wrote that I considered it one of the weakest series on television, and Showtime in particular, but to recognize that this doesn’t seem to be a proper burial for it. The cast and crew had no idea that it was coming – they seem to have ended the seventh season on a cliffhanger – and they seemed to have been planning that their eighth season would be the final one. This is a trend that Showtime that has been more guilty of than say, HBO – I’m still bitter that they canceled Masters of Sex without a proper ending – but in the case, it seems to talk of a broader issue that has been afflicting the network in the last few months of 2019 and the beginning of this year.

Last year, they were very clear that Homeland’s eighth season would be its last one. They had even delayed its premiere until this Sunday to make this clear. They also announced a couple of weeks ago that Shameless, the longest running series in their network’s history would be coming to an end with its eleventh season. I’m not complaining about either series end – Homeland more than deserves to come to a conclusion, and if anything, Shameless has been on the air at least one season too long –but I am beginning to wonder that, with the cancellation of so many of its signature series, Showtime is in the midst of an identity crisis.

HBO underwent a similar issue near the middle of the last decade and came through on the other side – if anything, it seems to be coming with more original and entertaining programming now that its free of Game of Thrones. But its harder to tell what Showtime is going to be like with so many of its name programs disappearing in rapid succession.

A lot of this may be due to a certain level of controversy that has plagued the network in the last year. William H. Macy, the lead of Shameless, has been stained in relationship to the college admissions scandal that ensnared his wife, but somehow not him. More seriously is news from behind the scenes. Earlier this year, SMILF, a comedy series that genuinely had the ability to be a big player for the network for years to come, was abruptly canceled after rumors surfaced that star-creator Frankie Shaw was responsible for harassing many members of her cast. The Affair, which also ended last year, has now come under a cloud of its own. In the fourth season, Ruth Wilson left the series under unknown reasons, and there are now rumors floating that the showrunners forced Wilson and many of the other characters to perform excessive nude scenes that many objected to. These are not the messages that a network needs about the people working there.

For all that, Showtime seems to be in a solid place when it comes to TV. Many of its current shows – On Becoming a God in Central Florida, Kidding, City on a Hill and Black Monday have serious awards buzz around them, and Billions and The Chi have already developed staying power. But with these cancellations, they seem to be developing problems that could be deleterious to their future work environment. And given their habit of killing shows far more prematurely than some of the more patient networks – there are still people pissed that United States of Tara and Brotherhood are gone - one wonders if the future for the network is bright. Then again, given how dark the nature of Showtime is on its best day, perhaps the darkness is where it wants to stay.