Your Mind And Your Heart Will Break Watching Russian Doll, Which Is One Reason I Love It

 

The season finale of Saturday Night Live will be forever noted for being the episode where long time cast members Kate McKinnon, Pete Davidson and Aidy Bryant gave misty farewells. Even that hadn’t been the case I would have still watched it for the presence of Natasha Lyonne who at the very least is clearly the diamond that McKinnon and Bryant have been. In her opening monologue, Lyonne remarked that she starred in Russian Doll on Netflix and added: “Because those are two words you want to be associated with right now: Russia and Netflix.” For understandable reasons, that got one of her biggest laughs of the night. That being said, there are four words that right now you want associated with Netflix: Russian Doll and Natasha Lyonne.

I’ve just finished watching the second season of Russian Doll. I watched seven episodes in about a month, which as anyone who reads this column knows is my equivalent of binge-watching. I’ve heard critically divergent opinions of the series: The New York Post thought it was a wonder, while New York Magazine thought it was too complicated. I’m still trying to figure out where I come down, but my emotional reactions are is that it is a wonder of a series. It may not make a lot of sense to a viewer, but that’s not necessarily a drawback because to Nadia and Alan, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to them. You can read this as a metaphor for life in general or if you’re narrower minded maybe how the series views itself. What I do know is that Season 2 was ultimately purely hysterical and incredibly painful, often in the same scene.

We spent most of the season following Nadia, who had been using the subway to travel back to the 1980s, as she try to fix everything that was wrong with her family by finding the gold Krugerrands that her mother stole from her grandmother before she was born and has led to hardship ever since. This led to Nadia traveling to Budapest, both in the present and during World War II, her occupying the body of Leonora, her mother (yes Chloe Sevigny did get some more to do this season) and eventually her grandmother too, being inside her mother’s body and having conversations with her anyway, having long conversations with the younger version of her spiritual mother (Annie Murphy, showing infinitely more range than she’s allowed to do on Kevin Can Go F…. Himself) and eventually while still in the body of her mother, giving birth to herself. And even that wasn’t the weirdest part of the season.

Alan (Charlie Barnett) her own time-traveling soulmate, has been going through a similar journey. Like her, he has been spending his time in the body of an ancestor, only for him, it was his mother in 1962 East Berlin. Alan seemed less concerned about the fact that he was in the body of a woman, who was clearly have some kind of sexual relationship with a fellow (male) student, or by the fact that he seemed to be enjoying being in the middle of a Communist controlled country. There has always been a part of Alan that likes routine, and I suppose being part of a dictatorship really applied to him – so much so that when he learned that he’d been helping that student and his friends’ tunnel out of East Berlin to West Berlin and freedom, he actually tried to stop them. The fact that he used an argument that the Berlin Wall was going to come down in 27 years anyway probably wouldn’t help his case. Alan spent much of the season arguing whether or not it was his lot to change history or not change it.

Nadia kept trying her hardest to change it to the point that in the final two episodes, she took the infant version of herself back into the present. She came back just in time to learn that Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley)  who has been suffering from increasingly poor health all season, had suffered an embolism in her lung and was dying. When she got to the hospital, it became clear that time was beginning to collapse. She kept encountering version of Ruth and her friends in an advancing timeline, ended up in a morgue where she encountered infinite corpses of herself and Alan. Alan began to see the similar deterioration…and in the end, they ended up back where they started: in the bathroom of the time looping party where the series began.

It is a measure of how utterly broken Nadia seems to be that she genuinely seemed willing to let the universe collapse upon itself than grow up the way she had before. Eventually, it got to the point where she kept seeing multiple versions of Ruth climbing the stairs that she realized she had to fix things. (Though, just to be safe, she and Alan left via the fire escape.)

The second season finale showed just how badly things were going. Nadia and Alan ended up in the subway, unable to find the same train that has been taking her to and from the past. Eventually, they had to walk down the tunnel to find the train – only to learn that now it was going to the future…and horribly, to Ruth’s wake.

Just as in Season 1, Alan and Nadia ended up being separated halfway through the finale: this time falling through a sewer into another tunnel. Nadia was given a choice to grab the Krugerrands or her infant self and she chose the latter. Alan didn’t have a similar decision, but he still ended up in a void where his mother was waiting for him.

As we learned this season Alan never knew his mother. In a way he was only able to share with Nadia in a time of utter desperation, he revealed how fundamentally broken he is, how unable he is to make even the most elementary decision that ‘look so easy for everybody else.’ His mother didn’t have any answers for him, but just told me that he was ‘her perfectly perfect little boy’ and that was enough to get him going.

Nadia had a similar talk with Nora, this time in the subway. Nora asked her simply: “Would you still have had me as your mother?” And it’s clear that Nadia would, because she handed ‘herself’ back to Nora. She also got a chance to say goodbye to Ruth in the past the way she never would in the present. And in the last scene, we saw Nadia walking confidently through the streets of New York to David Bowie, into Greta’s apartment for Ruth’s wake, speaking among her friends and perhaps inevitably, back into that bathroom, looking at the mirror.

Some of the complaints I have heard about Russian Doll’s second season is that it was too complicated. I prefer to look at it as ambitious. And I have always preferred a series that tries to be ambitious and fails than yet another reboot or traditional procedural.  A more realistic complaint might be that the second season runs twice as fast to end up back in the same place: that for all the time traveling and body traveling, both Nadia and Alan end up back where they started with nothing gained. But the thing is, that’s discussed more than a few times during Season 2, with Nadia admitting as much in the fifth episode when, after everything she’s done to make sure her family gets its fortune back, she just ends up with the same Krugerrands. She ends up telling the young version of her mother that. The fact that she’s willing to break the universe to give herself a better future may seem to give lie to that, but honestly, how many of us would do the same given the opportunity? There are so many dysfunctional people throughout history who were willing to destroy everything to make up for their own complexes – the major difference being, they had the power and wealth to do it. Are we supposed to believe the meek and mild might not want to do the same thing given the chance?

I’m not sure yet whether Russian Doll will make it on my top ten list this year or if it is truly a masterpiece yet (that will depend how it ends whenever Lyonne and company get the third season done). Nor am I even willing to admit that the series deserves an Emmy nomination for Best Comedy (though to be fair, there’s going to be a lot of great competition) What I do know is that Lyonne is one of the great talents of our time, and that walking her stride purposely through the streets of New York, whether in the present or the past, wearing a long coat and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth, always with a brilliant line of sarcastic dialogue about anything, has created in Nadia one of the great characters in TV history. I know the next one has been cast already, but if it’s at all possible I would like to nominate Lyonne for the first American Doctor Who. She’s already got the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff down cold, and after decades of seeing relentlessly cheery doctors, male and female, it would be a burst of fresh air to see one who looks at the breakdown of entropy and seeing younger versions of herself with utter deadpan. (I can just seeing looking at the TARDIS for the first time: “Bigger than it looks. Is it rent-controlled?”)

 As someone who can’t say what Netflix’s future looks like any more than Nadia can see what hers will be, I’ll just say this: if it can continue to produce shows like Russian Doll, maybe it won’t collapse the same way the world seems to do at the end of every season of the series. Hell, maybe Lyonne can make that the plot point for the final season. She’d make it fun.

My score: 4.75 stars.

 

Remembering One of Ray Liotta's Greatest Performances: Narc 20 Years Later

 

 

When I learned of Ray Liotta’s sudden passing on Thursday, like so many of us my thought went back to his most famous film: Martin Scorcese’s masterpiece Goodfellas. I thought of the fates of the cast of that movie. Joe Pesci won an Oscar, revitalized his career, and had a successful decade in movies before disappearing for from acting for a second time. Robert DeNiro, whose career had been an autopilot for the previous few years, managed to get it back on track, and spent the next decade doing some of his greatest work. Lorraine Bracco earned a Supporting Actress and a successful actress before she got her role of a lifetime as Dr. Melfi. Paul Sorvino officially became one of the great character actors in both film and television.

Only Ray Liotta never seemed to quite find the superstardom his co-stars did. His early career had featured truly great performances: an iconic role as Melanie Griffith’s psychotic boyfriend in Something Wild had earned him a Golden Globe nomination and prior to Goodfellas he’d starred in another landmark role as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams. But Goodfellas seemed to get him typecast in mostly villainous roles (Unlawful Entry, Turbulence) or leads in terrible family films that he was unsuited for (Corrina, Corrina, Operation Dumbo Drop) Occasionally he would find a decent film, such as Cop Land or HBO’s The Rat Pack, but the lion’s share of his post Goodfellas’ film were painfully beneath his potential. This trend continued for much of the new millennium, staring with Hannibal and an endless series of pretty lousy action films such as Smokin’ Aces, In the Name of the King and revolver. And there were some pretty disastrous films where he trashed his reputation such as Wild Hogs, Observe and Report, etc. Only in the last ten years was he beginning to turn his career in the right direction, mostly in smaller films such as the undervalued Brad Pitt film Killing Them Softly and Kill the Messenger. In the last three years, it looked like a full fledged comeback was finally coming with his work in the undervalued TV cop drama Shades of Blue and the final season of Amazon’s Hanna and of course his work in The Many Saints of Newark, The Sopranos film prequel, which brought him back to his roots.

What makes me wonder about Liotta’s potential was that there was a brief period in the early 2000s when it looked like another comeback was coming. In 2004, he had a memorable guest stint on the ER episode ‘Time of Death’, playing Charlie Metcalf, an angry man whose early diagnosis of stomach pains masks far greater problems. We follow the minutiae of his treatment and we learn that he has wasted his life as both a husband and a father. Rather then go through with advanced treatment that will not work, he decides to sign a DNR. It was a magnificent performance on a series that was seriously flagging at this point, and Liotta deservedly won an Emmy for Best Guest Actor in a Drama.

Peak TV’s drain of Hollywood best actors into television had not truly begun yet, so it is possible Liotta took the job because he was having trouble finding work. That said, I still don’t think he would have gotten the job had it not been for a film that came out two years earlier that had critically improved his flagging career and shown what brilliant potential he had. That movie was Joe Carnahan’s independent film Narc.

Narc isn’t a masterpiece the same way that some of the other films I’ve reviewed for this column are, though it should be noted it was highly regarded when it came out in 2002. The Independent Spirit Awards gave it three nominations, Liotta for Best Supporting Actor, Carnahan for Directing and cinematography. There was some discussion at the time of its release of Liotta being a contender for an Oscar nomination,  but the category, already overburdened with several great character actors (including Christopher Walken for Catch Me if You Can, Ed Harris for The Hours, and the eventual winner Chris Cooper for Adaptation) was too crowded for Liotta to sneak in. And the film itself, while very good, isn’t nearly at the level of so many other procedural films at the time. What makes Narc unique and work well even now is the fact that had two of the potentially greatest actors of all time in its lead roles. Liotta’s potential was never realized due to bad career choices; Jason Patric, who had the co-lead, turned away from Hollywood after a brilliant start.

Few actors career have begun with more potential than Jason Patric’s.  One of his first roles was in the cult classic The Lost Boys. In 1990, he starred in the noir masterpiece After Dark, My Sweet which Roger Ebert listed as one of the greatest films ever made. The next year he appeared in another brilliant procedural Rush, where he played the lead detective investigating the drug culture in Texas. He and his partner, memorably played by Jennifer Jason Leigh, become first lovers, then hopeless addicts. After these two brilliant performances Patric began to slowly extract himself from the Hollywood system. (His role in Speed 2: Cruise Control was no doubt a major factor in that decision.)  Narc was the first film he had made in four years.

In the opening sequence of the film we see Nick Tellis (Patric) chasing a drug addict holding on to a baby. We never see the direct result, but we see the consequences: him before a review board, him at home unable to sleep, him refusing to go back to work. As a bone, his superior offers him a chance to get back to work investigating the murder of an undercover named Michael Calvess. Nick tells him to go to hell. That night, he looks at the file and while he’s going through, he sees pictures of the man’s infant son. The next day, he agrees to take the case, but he has a condition: he wants the detective’s former partner Henry Oak (Liotta) to work with him, despite the fact the man had a reputation from IA (justified: as the first time we see Oak, he’s in the process of beating a suspect) and has been specifically banned from working this case.

In their first conversation, both men make a clear mark of what this case is about: that it has nothing to do with the fate of the murdered cop but protecting the LAPD. Oak makes his position very clear: “The only thing you gotta know about me is that I’m gonna get the fuckers that killed Mike. If that means breaking every point of procedure, then they’re broke.”

The nature of the investigation and what it reveals I will leave for the viewer to learn for themselves because in a sense that’s not what made Narc a very good film. What made it shine was the work of Liotta and Patric who were both playing against type and close to it. A decade after Goodfellas, the slim and clean-shaven Liotta had disappeared in favor of a bulkier and bearded version. What hadn’t changed was that his anger was quiet and reserved. Patric had a handlebar mustache and looked just as world weary as he had in Rush. He rarely raised his voice through the first half of the movie, but we can tell he’s just as angry as Oak, he just hides it a lot better than him.  

Tellis’ character has a wife who is several months pregnant. He’s worked undercover before and she makes it clear well before the investigation begins that if he takes on this job, she isn’t going to be around when the baby comes. Tellis can’t even explain to Oak why it matters so much to him to investigate this case – he doesn’t want the promotion and in the early minutes of the film, it’s clear he would have been happy never seeing the LAPD again. Oak had a wife who loved him much who died of cancer, but he admits in a conversation halfway through the film that as much as he misses her, he became a better cop after she died. Tellis has a relaxed form of justice; Oak has no problem with the rules being broken. In a scene that features some of Liotta’s best work, he delivers a long story about how he ended up rescuing a little girl from what was sure a fate worse than death. Things like that; he ends his story, “has nothing to do with rules and procedures and everything to do with right and wrong.” 

I don’t know if Carnahan was trying to justifying every major misstep that have led to so much corruption and unethical behavior in the LAPD back then, never mind two decades later, with Oak’s speech, but it was troubling to watch then and is even more so now. The only thing that modifies it slightly is that may be as much of an explanation as we’ll ever get as to why so many police have lost their way. Oak is the definition of a cop who believes at his core the ends, however horrible, justify the means. The deeper we get into the investigation of Calvess’ murder; you get the feeling that was at the core of what happened.

Many of the critics of the era compared this film to Training Day, the hardcore action film that Denzel Washington won his second Oscar for the year before. If nothing else, I believe that Narc is by far the superior film. Training Day in my opinion is one of the most overblown and utterly farcical films ever to receive recognition from the Academy, an action film that doesn’t even bother to disguise that it’s about something deeper. That Washington ended up winning for it was due to the Academy’s misjudged sense of timing than any single element of his overblown performance (though, to be fair, they had no idea how many more chances Washington would get in the future)

To be sure Narc isn’t much subtler than Training Day; we see countless scenarios of violence throughout the movie. But unlike Training Day where every aspect of violence seemed to be solely for putting overkill on top of overkill, at least there is a purpose to what we see. Yes, both films are fundamentally about a good cop and his shadowing one far worse, but it’s being directed towards some kind of truth. And though the endings do have a certain similarity in Narc, you get a sense of tragedy in the final moments. Some might argue that it makes much of what we’ve gone through seem self-defeating and purposeless. But the revelation also gives a larger sense and why everything we see has happened and the true tragedy that has unfolded.

Narc was Carnahan’s second film and sadly he has never realized the potential that came from it, mostly wasting his time on action films like Smokin’ Aces, the film version of The A-Team, the most recent remake of Death Wish and a forgettable Liam Neeson film The Gray. He hasn’t done much better in television, though in the first season of The Blacklist showed some of his potential, including the modern classic ‘Anslo Garrick’.  (He left the series after the first season) Perhaps like so many writer-directors, he only showed what he was capable of a single film which demonstrated both brilliant action, superb direction and a capability to get the best work out of your actors. I have no doubt there will be countless people trying to assess the filmography of Liotta in the weeks and months to come. Narc is my recommendation for a no-doubt forgotten film that shows us just what he was capable of when everything came together.

 

Our Latest Jeopardy Champion Is Having A Long Run, But Is He As Good The Ones So Far This Season?

 

This evening what seems to be becoming an almost ho-hum occurrence on Season 38 of Jeopardy happened. Ryan Long became the fifth player so far this season to win eleven games on Jeopardy. For those of who have been following the series at least champions could play until they were defeated, we’re trying to assess what that means for the series as a whole. When Ken Jennings drew his line in the sand at way back in 2004, it would take another eleven years for Matt Jackson to become the fifth player to reach double digits in games won. In the seven years since then, nine players have managed to reach at least eleven wins. What does it say about Jeopardy that five of them have done so in the last eight months? That is a question for another day.

What is clear from watching Ryan Long play is that while he is clearly a very good Jeopardy player, he is not nearly at the level of so many of the Jeopardy champions this season. Admittedly Matt Amadio and Amy Schneider have set the bar incredibly high for Jeopardy champions this year. But even if we were to cast a wider net compared to all the players who have won ten games so far in Jeopardy’s run, it’s pretty clear that Ryan is, sad to say, pretty close to the bottom. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. There are quiet a few players who’ve won fewer games that Ryan to this point, but have won slightly or even greater sums of money.

Ryan in his first ten games has won $183,801. Limiting our scope to the last five years, there are numerous players who have done far better than Ryan. Last season alone, two female contestants Mackenzie Jones and Jennifer Quail won more money in eight games that Ryan has in eleven (I’ve updated his score to include tonight’s victory):

 

Mackenzie Jones: $205,808

Jennifer Quail: $230,800

Ryan Long: $209,300

 

Going back further, there are players who have done even better with fewer games.   In 2010, Tom Nissley won $235,405 in eight games. That same year Roger Craig, one of the greatest players in Jeopardy history won $230,200 in six games (though to be fair, in one of those games, he broke Ken Jennings one day record with $77,000) Larissa Kelly back in 2007 won $222,597, also in six games. Even going back to the ‘dark ages’ after the five game rule had been removed, the first player to win seven games, Tom Walsh, managed to win $184,900 – which was more than Ryan won in ten.

Now, to be clear, I don’t mean to diminish Ryan’s performance in any way: anyone who manages to win eleven games on Jeopardy is a great player. But based on his performance over the last two weeks, it seems that compared to so many of the great Jeopardy champions we’ve seen this year alone, Ryan Long has also been extraordinary lucky.

To state the obvious, he hasn’t been nearly as dominant as Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider or Mattea Roach have been this season. This started with his first victory where he came from behind to become champion. His next two victories were ones where he was pursued vigorous by one of his challengers and as a result he had sizable paydays: $24,000 on Game 2, $27,000 on Game 3.  Since then, however, the wins have gotten simultaneously a bit easier, but the payouts, paradoxically, have gotten smaller. On Wednesday and Thursday, he had runaway games. but in both he got final Jeopardy wrong and in both cases, the payoff was small ($12,900, the former case; $10,000 the latter.) On Monday, it wasn’t a runaway game and nobody got Final Jeopardy right. On that day, his payout was about $11,000. He managed to cross the $100,000 threshold on his fifth game. It took him until his eleventh win to cross the $200,000 threshold, which is by far the poorest record of all the players who managed to make as far as eleven wins. (Jonathan Fisher, right now the ‘forgotten’ super-champion got that far in his ninth win.)

Is Ryan a great Jeopardy player or just a very lucky one? No one makes it as far as eleven wins without having a good amount of the latter: there are always categories that go your way, Daily Doubles that work for you or against your opponent; Final Jeopardys you answer correctly and that your opponents gets wrong (as would be the case in today’s come from behind victory for Ryan.) What is clear is that compared to all of the big winners this season, and indeed almost every player whose won at least eleven games, Ryan is, sad to say, bringing up the rear. At this point, he’s averaging about $19,000 a win. That’s a good number and a very respectable one: I have no doubt there are countless competitors on Jeopardy who would be fine winning $19,000 in one appearance, much less eleven. What this figure does show is that compared to all of these players Ryan is simply not nearly as dominant as any of them, certainly not Amy Schneider or Matt Amodio.

I have to tell you that there’s a certain admirable quality to this compared to some of the super-champions we’ve had this season. Unlike so many of the greats, including Ken Jennings and James Holzhauer, Ryan has to work for his wins in a way that most of them just haven’t had to. He’s gone into Double Jeopardy with small leads or in second or third place, and he has to try a lot harder than most of his opponents. This adds a certain level of suspense to much of his matches, and while I’m certain that Ryan himself would be far happier to go into Final Jeopardy with ten or twelve times his nearest opponent, you have to admit that it makes the games far more interesting to watch. Earlier this year I noted a letter writer in TV Guide who complained that watching players like Matt and Amy play made the game uninteresting because the winner was clear often by the end of the Jeopardy round. One certainly can’t say the same for Ryan’s matches, he’s had to battle for every single win and he knows that on at least a couple of occasion so far, pure luck is the only thing that has kept him on the show to fight another day.

So yes, it’s going to be a lot harder for Ryan Long to end up winning the same kind of money that even the super-champions of this extraordinary season have managed to accumulate. (That assumes, of course, that he wins again on Monday which with Ryan is not a sure thing.) But in a larger sense Ryan has managed to do something that none of those previous super-champions have managed to do: really make you wonder if he will win every day. I’m sure he’d wish it were otherwise but this is a unique position for so many of the great champions to have, and if nothing else, it makes his Jeopardy matches  a lot more interesting and entertaining.

 

This is The End of An Era. When We Said Goodbye to the Pearsons, Did We Say Farewell to the End of Broadcast Drama?

 

Last night, in a typically emotional fashion, millions of viewers said goodbye to Kate, Kevin and Randall as well as the rest of the always expanding Pearson clan. For three years loyal fans of NBC’s magnificent This is Us have known the end was coming, and after flashforwards at the end of every season since Season 3, we’ve known that the goodbyes were going to be agonizing.

The final season was, as almost every season of This is Us has been brilliant and excruciating often within the same two minutes. By the time the fifth season ended, we were already preparing for what seemed to be the most heartbreaking moment of all: watching the Pearson clan gather around the deathbed of the matriarch Rebecca (Mandy Moore, the series too frequently unheralded guiding light.) The season finale had already dropped two very painful bombs: the fact that Kevin (Justin Hartley) was not going to marry the mother of his children and the fact that Kate (Chrissy Metz) was at some point going to leave Toby (Chris Sullivan) the man who had seemed to be her soul mate since the series premiere and remarry.

And as you’d expect, the final season had moments that were always painful. By far the most agonizing moments were the slow motion breakup of Kate and Toby, which began when Toby moved to San Francisco for a new job that led to a long distance relationship that slowly eroded, then shattered the two’s marriage. The fate of this relationship made it very hard for me to watch the final season of the series: that a love that had been tested by so many things over the past five seasons: skittishness on both sides, a miscarriage and a pregnancy that left with them a blind child, Toby’s determination to get healthy to be around for his son, and his supporting Kate through so many ambitions – would finally collapse. Considering everything the Pearson clan has been through over the history of the series, I really hoped that there was just some way that Kate – who has taken her share of grief over the course of the series and who had more than her share of struggles – could get through her problems with Toby. I’m not saying I was pleased altogether with the resolution, but in retrospect it may have been a message that the writers have been playing with on and off with both Kevin and Kate: the two of them were so focused on the happiness of Jack and Rebecca’s marriage that its ghost had haunted every relationship they would be in. Perhaps in that sense, they were trying to say that even if your parents have a seemingly perfect marriage, there are no guarantees that finding the perfect mate guarantees the same for you or even that the most likely contender is going to be the one you end up with. Toby seems to have accepted that to when he had an exchange with her in the opening minutes that even though their marriage didn’t work out, he wouldn’t change a thing.

Kevin spent a lot of Season 6 struggling as well; taking the role in a reboot of the series that made him famous for the benefit of his children, still struggling to find happiness, and try to secure his bond with his uncle Nick (Griffin Dunne). Watching him try to be a good father has always been a struggle for him – the shadow of his parents has hanged heavily over him – and he has spent the entirety of the series trying to find love. Finally, the night before Kate’s wedding, through the guidance of the increasingly diminishing Rebecca, he reunited with Sophie, his childhood sweetheart who in a way he has spent his whole life his chasing. It’s worth noting, thought, that by far his biggest accomplishment was managing to get Nicky back into real life, something that would have seemed absolutely incomprehensible when we met him in Season 3.  One of the most touching moments of the finale came when Nicky just before Rebecca’s funeral, in his typically sarcastic fashion ‘blamed’ Kevin for dragging him back into the real world. “You really screwed up my life,” he said with a smile and its telling that one of the final shots of the series – Nicky happily playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey with his grandnieces and nephews – was one of the most powerful moments of the series.

We have always worried the most about Randall, played for six incredible years by that genius Sterling K. Brown. At the beginning of the season, we saw him with Beth saying that three of his parents were dead and his fourth was dying. As Rebecca continued to wither away, we have watched as Randall increasingly deteriorated emotionally: who can forget the very first flashforward we saw back in Season 2 when he said: “I’m ready to see her.”  When the final episode opened, we saw Randall finally facing the inevitable after nearly a decade. Beth (give Susan Kalechi Watson an Emmy nod, please!) did her gentle mocking of him, saying he’d start going to funerals of other people’s parents or hanging around by his tombstone and he looked immersed in gloom. But in a beautiful moment Déjà, the child he fostered and has become the integral part of Randall’s life told him he would have a grandson and that they would name it William, after Randall’s birth father. “I never met him,” Déjà told him, “but I know him thanks to you.” One truly joyous moment came as Randall dissolved into delight that he would finally have a boy in his life.

So after all of the heartache that we have been through this season – and this doesn’t even include ‘Miguel’ where we finally learned Miguel’s story just before he died and ‘The Train’ where we saw Rebecca’s final journey as she went to her death meeting everybody who had been a part of her life, finally ended in bed with Jack – what was the final episode of This is Us about? Honestly, it was as emotional as all of them in that there was so much ordinariness to it. We got to see an utterly ordinary day in the Pearsons childhood. Randall’s mathletes was cancelled, so the Pearson spent a day around the house. Kevin and Randall were gloomy, but Kate was excited. When the rain disrupted their fun, Kate seemed to notice that things were changing. Kevin and Randall stormed off to their rooms because of their feelings about trivial things. Kevin confessed to his mother that he couldn’t do a pull-up and he was embarrassed of looking bad in front of the girls. Randall confessed that his event hadn’t been cancelled but he was being punished because he was teased by someone and reacted badly. (I’m not sure what was funnier: Randall’s going to the worst case scenario, something the adult Randall did or Jack’s reaction: “It’s hard to punish a kid who gives a far harsher one than I ever could.) It ended with Jack teaching first Randall and then Kevin how to shave, mentioning almost casually about how you never notice the big moments when they happen. It was a simple ordinary day for the Pearson – and based on what we saw, probably the last memory Rebecca had before she passed.

In the final minutes, we got a sense of what the Big Three are going to do with their future: Kate is going to continue helping musician and starting hating other blind rock stars ‘like her son.” Kevin is going to open a non-profit for veterans. And Randall, who backed into a political career way back in Season 3, announced casually that the DNC was sending him to a state fair in Iowa – which anyone who has a casually following of politics knows that the bread crumbs for a Presidential run. (For the record, Randall’s life story is infinitely more interesting than Young Rock’s already.) Kate then asked the question: “What if we drift?” – not unreasonable considering that there bond has been their parents more than anything throughout the series. But anyone who watched everything the three of them have gone through for six seasons knows that, no matter what divisions they go three, petty or more serious, they will always come back to each other.  The Big Three then quietly gave their projections of Jack’s chant for them, the one that has always moved us throughout the series, and then watched as they began to mock each other like all siblings should.

There is a real possibility that the series finale of This is Us is more than the end of just one of the most powerful dramas in television history. It is conceivable – perhaps even probably – that we may have seen the very last commercial and award winning drama that network television will ever do. When This Is Us was nominated for Best Dramas by the Emmys in 2017, it marked the first time in five years the Emmys had nominated a series for Best Drama since The Good Wife in 2011. There is a fair amount of blame to be laid at the fate of the Emmys ridiculous bias towards cable and streaming over the last decade at the cost of ignoring broadcast dramas, but the fact remains that for most of the 2010s, broadcast television more or less surrendered the fight on that front.

This is Us was a revelation in that sense, in more than the fact that it was a broadcast nominee. In the era of Peak TV, most critically acclaimed television dramas on every platform settled on an antihero based series (some females did share in that) or increasingly serialized dramas built around a mythology. This is Us was the first nominee for Best Drama since Friday Night Lights to center its story on fundamentally good people and happy marriages. All of the Pearson clan were flawed to an extent, but all of them were nice, warm people you want to spend an hour with. You cried a lot with the Pearsons because you wanted good things to happen to him and there was so much suffering, and while there was a mythology at the center - how did Jack die? What happened to Uncle Nicky? What’s going on with the flashforwards – they were radically different from the ones on shows like Westworld and Handmaid’s Tale because they were human mysteries not about solving a puzzle. (Also, they were mysteries the characters knew the answer to, only the audience didn’t, and the audience got let in.)

I think that, along with the high quality of the performances and writing, have led to a higher degree of recognition for awards over the past five years. It was nominated by the Emmys for Best Drama four of its first five seasons (and really it should have been nominated over The Handmaid’s Tale and Ozark in 2020) and has won a lot of acting awards over the years. The lion’s share of them has been in the Guest Actor category, but it’s hard to argue that veteran character actors Ron Cephas Jones and Gerald McRaney didn’t earn them by now. It’s also won Best Dramatic Ensemble from the SAG awards in 2018 and 2019 and has received many nominations from the Golden Globes and the Broadcast Critics Awards over the past five years (Brown has been the only cast member to win either, but the latter has been willing to acknowledge the talents of Hartley and Metz on multiple occasions, something the Emmys have never done.) I hope that the institutional memory of the Emmys holds out this summer and gives as many nominations to the series as possible, including Moore for ‘The Train’ and Milo Ventimiglia who has been tragically under-recognized.

So here’s a bigger question: regardless of how the Emmys decide to treat the show this season, will This is Us be the last broadcast series ever nominated by them for Best Drama? I have to say I’m not optimistic. If anything, the quality of shows from the networks has diminished even more since 2016, which most series being procedurals or more convoluted mythology based series. Add to that that are even more competitors in streaming and cable competing, the odds grow even thinner. But the thing is when The Good Wife came to the end of its run after five consecutive season of brilliant work being ignored by the Emmys in favor of series like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones, I wrote not long after it ended that we would likely never see a broadcast drama ever nominated again. I wrote that in May of 2016. This is Us premiered that September. That’s one lesson we learned loud and clear from the show: no matter how you plan things, you never know what awaits us in the future.

As Better Call Saul Ends, We Look at The Characters Who Brought us There: Part 2: The Breaking Bad Characters and How the Series Gave the Dead New Life.

In one of his first scenes in Breaking Bad, after Walt and Jesse have mangled an attempt to take him prisoner, Saul assesses the two of them as the criminals they are and offers to become their Tom Hagen. As we learned during his stint on Breaking Bad and just as clearly on Better Call Saul, there are two big problems with that both of them pertaining to the same idea. On Breaking Bad, no one – certainly not Walter – truly took his advice seriously even when it was in their best interests. And on both shows, unlike Tom, Jimmy/Saul has never had the stomach for the truly horrific things that the criminals he associates with are capable of. This was brought home very clearly in a scene this season where Mike finally had a scene with Kim in which he told her that he had guys following her and Jimmy to keep them safe because Lalo Salamanca was actually alive. When Kim asked why he told her and not Jimmy, his answers spoke volumes: “I think you can handle it better.”

In many ways, this is the tragedy of Saul Goodman even more than the fact he threw away whatever goodness he had in him. The criminals that he spent so much of his time helping and protecting him never respected him any more than everybody in the ‘legitimate’ legal world did. They thought he could be useful from time to time, but at the end of the day, they had no more respect for his intellect or abilities than Walter White ever did. Throughout Better Call Saul, Jimmy has constantly tried to use Mike as someone who he could consider a partner and Mike has always treated him with disdain. It is possible that in some way Jimmy was trying to win the respect of this man for his criminal capacity the same way he was trying to earn Chuck’s for being a good attorney. And neither man could see that he had value in either capacity.

One of the great treats of Better Call Saul is how the writing has managed to accomplish something that you’d think was impossible: forget the inevitable consequences that wait so many of the characters. This should have been particularly true for Mike Ehrmantraut, who for much of Season 1 just seemed to be there as an Easter egg rather than any practical value. But thanks to Gilligan and the awe-inspiring work of Jonathan Banks, not only have we forgotten that much of time, the series had done something that Breaking Bad never could, and that’s flesh out so much of the backstories of the characters that we saw on the previous series.

Ever since we learned why Mike is in Albuquerque in the first place – he was running from the murder of two corrupt cops who murdered his own son – we’ve had something we never felt for him on Breaking Bad: sympathy and understanding.  On the incredible ‘Five-O’ (which I was listed as one of the 50 Best Episodes of TV a few years back), we learned that Mike was a corrupt cop carrying guilt for having forced his straight and narrow son on his path, which led the police he worked with to nevertheless kill him out of worry.  To see the coldly efficient fixer crying in front of his daughter-in-law was one of the most powerful scenes in the entire canon (and I still don’t know why Banks didn’t get an Emmy for that performance).

Since then, we have understood that for all his cold efficiency, Mike does have a loyalty and compassion in him. He has begun his work in the illegal market in order to earn money for his widowed daughter and orphaned daughter-in-law. This path led him to Nacho, and by extension to Gus Fring (we’ll get to him in a second). Mike may be a killer, but he has a moral compass than he has tried to use to remove true monsters. He tried to kill the Salamanca’s before Fring intervened, and he has spent the past three seasons trying vainly to get Nacho out of the path of the battle between Fring and the Salamanca clan.

And for all the coldness we have seen with Mike throughout both series, Better Call Saul has gone out of its way to show that he is not made of stone. He tried on a couple of occasions to pursue a romantic relationship with the member of a bereaved family group, he became friends with Werner, the architect behind the superlab and despite the fact it isn’t in his best interest, he has done everything in his power to keep Jimmy safe, particularly in the climax of Season 5. All of this is done for a truly moral compass: he loves his daughter-in-law and granddaughter and really does want them to be taken care of. (The scene where he monitored his granddaughter as she watched the stars and pretended to be in Tennessee on business featured was one of the very best scenes Banks’ has ever done.) But it has always come at a cost. When he found that he had to kill Werner at the end of Season 4 rather than risk exposure to Lalo, it was clearly one of the hardest things he ever did given how hard he took in the beginning of Season 5. He tried everything he could to save Nacho, even when he knew he was doomed this season, even going so far as to have a gun to his head at one point. On Breaking Bad, Banks was raved about for the quiet menace that emanated from this ‘senior citizen’. On Better Call Saul, we’ve seen that Mike was a human being who has always had to make harder choices and that he has spent years burying the pain for the murders he has caused.

 

(By the way, here’s the time to deal with perhaps the one ‘flaw’ in this prequel series that everybody points out: Kaylie, Mike’s granddaughter was only three when she appeared on Breaking Bad and is clearly at least six or seven now. Two things: credit Gilligan for taking the fundamental idea of the prequel – younger versions of beloved characters – and ignoring that part of it. Only Bob Odenkirk has made an effort to appear younger by dying his hair brown. Every other actor has ignored it, and good for them. It’s always looked cheesy when familiar characters appear in prequels to movies years after the fact – I’m reminded in particular of Anthony Hopkins in Red Dragon ­– and the makeup teams’ usually useless attempts to make characters look years younger. Gilligan is interested in how the characters became who they are; cosmetics are not part of it.

Second, in the case of Kaylie, I actually think ignoring the timeline has helped the series. It’s one thing to have Mike playing with a toddler and giving him the appearance of being kind-hearted. Watching him talk to his granddaughter with genuine affection and clearly in a playful matter shows a heart and soul that just wouldn’t have worked if he was standing over a toddler. End of minor quibble.)

 

When Gus Fring showed up at the beginning of Season 3, it would have been easy for everybody to say: “Oh, it’s just an excuse to bring Giancarlo Esposito back.” But just as in the case of Mike, we have learned far more about the nature of Gus and through him, that there are very human elements behind the discipline that we saw him exercise so precisely during his two and a half seasons on Breaking Bad.

To be clear, a lot of that has been to demonstrate how ruthless Gus was in the beginning, even more determined to have a cold revenge on Hector (Mark Margolis) for the reasons that we got a very clear picture of during a Season 4 flashback. When Nacho substituted his heart medication in the middle of Season 3 (a plan concocted with Mike) we were understandably astonished to see Fring perform CPR on Hector when he collapsed as a result of a stroke and then spent much of Season 4, aiding in his recovery. Then we saw him stop the recovery before it was complete and we could tell very clear just what kind of monster Gus could be: death was not enough for him; he wanted his nemesis a prisoner in his own body.

But as we saw, this was one of the few occasions where the disciplined man may have outsmarted himself. Because emerging from the cartel was the previously unknown Lalo (Tony Dalton) as bloodthirsty as Tuco and the Cousins, but at least as clever as Gus. Gus put Nacho into Lalo’s crew for an early advantage which helped him, but slowly but surely it became clear that Hector was capable of playing the game at least at Gus’ level. It is telling that Gus truly demonstrated that he didn’t just need Lalo; he needed him absolutely destroyed – and it just how telling how able Lalo is that he was able to survive the slaughter at his compound, because he was just as willing as Gus was to sacrifice as many loyal servants as he could to survive.

Just like the introduction of Chuck  and Kim Wexler have justified Better Call Saul as far as revealing Jimmy’s backstory, Lalo has justified the series spending so much time dealing with the cartel. There is a very good chance that, like Nacho and Howard, Lalo will end up a victim of the war between Fring and Hector, and no doubt in the last six episodes, we will this shocking turn of events. But watching Lalo work over the last two seasons has been one of the great master classes of the entire series.

I said that if Lalo had been around in the early stages of Breaking Bad, Walter White would not have survived the first season. It’s just as clear that the only reason Gus is around for Breaking Bad is because he managed to survive Lalo. Because make no mistake: Gus is clearly terrified of him. When he learned that Lalo was alive in the middle of the second episode, he was unsettled. Given the massive security that Mike has had to assemble just to protect him, the measures that Gus is taken to keep safe, and the way he seems to be dealing with even a moment of inactivity you can tell even as he keeps his always measured voice, Gus is afraid. And when five minutes before the mid-season finale ended, Mike came to Gus and confirmed that Lalo was back in town, Gus was afraid in a way we never saw him before. And it led both him and Mike to do something we almost never saw them do on either series: commit a fatal blunder and lower their guard in the wrong way. Is this the real reason that Gus has been willing to allow Saul knowledge of his existence? Because he knows the cost of his mistake (and we won’t know for a few more weeks the true ramifications) have led to a violent death and he feels the need for atonement as best he can? We shall have to wait and see, but right now that seems as much an explanation as to why Gus is in Saul’s life in Breaking Bad just as why Kim is not in Jimmy’s in that series.

In a sense, we know how Saul is going to end. This was confirmed in another sense earlier this year when we learned that Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul were going to recreate their iconic characters in the final episodes. Or at the very least, we know how it ends for Gus and Mike and for Saul Goodman? We still do not know how it will end for Jimmy. For all the flashforwards that have opened every season of the series (except, critically, this one) we don’t know how far in the future they occur or what Jimmy’s decision is going to be. We know from everything we’ve watched over the past fourteen years that, despite what we may have seen in last night’s teasers, Gilligan doesn’t do ‘happy endings’. However, as anyone who watched ‘Felina’ knows (and there were at least ten million of you that night and countless more since then) Gilligan and his crew do great, satisfying endings. 

The body count will be high no doubt: Nacho and Howard have already died; it is nearly certain Lalo will too, and I’m not going to believe Kim survives until I see it with my own eyes.  The question is: will Jimmy have come to the same grim realization Walter White did when he confessed to Skyler the real reason he became Heisenberg? He probably already has, considering that by the end of Breaking Bad he certainly showed more self-awareness than Walter was willing to at the time.  What will be the final realization for Jimmy/Saul/Gene? What’s the final image we’re going to get? And most importantly, in my opinion, will all of the Emmys that the series has deserved for seven years but has not gotten finally start coming starting this September? It’s hard to say on the last count: there’s a lot of demand for series like Succession, which isn’t in the same creative universe as Breaking Bad or Saul, and Ozark, which has always been at best Netflix’s half-assed attempt to be Breaking Bad. The Emmys have treated the series with the lack of respect that both Jimmy McGill and Saul Goodman have lived their entire lives without getting. But having seen the first seven episodes of the final season, I am just as certain that as soon as they can, the Emmys Better Call Saul.

 

 

As Better Call Saul Ends, We Look At the Characters Who Brought Us Here: Part 1, Jimmy's World

 

As Saul Goodman once said as the battle between Gus Fring and Walter White was reaching its climax: “We are in the end of days.” And that is where we are as of Monday night: the end of the first half of Better Call Saul. The second half of the final season is scheduled to begin airing this July (divided, as we can deduce, to improve the odds of Gilligan and company finally getting some deserved Emmy love) and while we know where many of the characters stories finally end, we’re still not certain of how the rest of them will.

So before we plunge into what will surely be an absolutely stunning final six episodes, I think it’s worth trying to assess what, at its core, Better Call Saul has been about. Not so much how Jimmy McGill, a con artist became Saul Goodman, the Tom Hagen to Walter White, but just what let Jimmy down this path in the first place. And the best way to figure that out, I believe, is to look at the two halves of Jimmy’s life: the path that Jimmy followed when he was trying to be a legitimate, albeit still bottom-feeding, attorney and Saul, the man who, certainly without intending, became the right hand man to the cartel and so many of the worst criminals in Albuquerque.

Let’s start with the basic premise of the life of Jimmy McGill: he might have fundamentally been a con man, but at his core there were conflicting impulses: the part of him that wanted to make his brother and Kim proud of him, and his basic criminal impulses. The first half of the series fundamentally showed Jimmy battling between the two sides of his nature. There are countless examples throughout the first three seasons of Jimmy trying his hardest to walk the straight the narrow: the way he constantly looked after Chuck during this ailment which was psychological despite Chuck insistence that it was physical, the way he tried to do the right thing during the early years of the Sandpiper class action suit, and his constantly trying to make himself worthy of Kim, the love of his life and his true soul mate. It led him to do some unethical things, to be sure, but at least in the first half of the series, you got the feeling he was at least doing them for the right reason, even if only he considered them the right reason. During the first three years Bob Odenkirk constantly demonstrated that Jimmy had enormous compassion for Chuck. Even when they were in the middle of their hostilities over the revelations that Chuck never believed in him, he still cared for his brother, trying to get someone to look after him when he reached his limits, caring for him on multiple hospital visits when Chuck’s ailment overcame and when Chuck finally seemed on the verge of destroying himself at the end of Season 2, he confessed out of desperation to pull his brother out of delusions. The fact that Chuck, of all people, was doing so just to con Jimmy, does not change that he truly cared for him.

At the core of Breaking Bad was the principle that Walter White was always a monster whose true nature came out when he turned desperate and who was never as smart as he thought himself to be. Similarly, the journey of Jimmy McGill has been closer to the central idea of Breaking Bad – it’s not quite Mr. Chips becoming Scarface, but its close. The problem was that in the legal part of his life Jimmy always thought that the wrong person had destroyed his future and that the right person believed in him. This was actually a decision that Gilligan made early in the series: Howard Hanlon (Patrick Fabian) was supposed to be Jimmy’s nemesis and Chuck (Michael McKean) the man in his corner, but halfway through Season 1 Gilligan decided to switch the roles. This was a brilliant creative decision as it gave both McKean and Fabian brilliant work. The other brilliant decision was that the audience was the only one who realized it; Jimmy has spent the entirety of the series still convinced of the first season plan.

Following Howard, we have seen a man who has always been in Chuck’s shadow, trying to run a firm under the legacy of his father and a brilliant lawyer who he has always idolized. That’s why he chose to not over Jimmy a job when he passed the bar and again when he brought him the Sandpiper suit. But as the series has continued, we’ve come to see just how much pressure has been put on Howard as a result: he spent a great deal of Season 3 trying to deal with the whims of Chuck even as he became more and more erratic, tried to get him to take a graceful retirement which led to Chuck threatened a lawsuit, and in the Season 3 Finale buying him out. When Chuck ended up dying at the end of the season, its been clear that Howard has been reeling under the strain – we haven’t seen the firm that frequently over the last few seasons, but there’s clearly been some downsizing and there have been major personal problems: Howard is in therapy and his marriage is practically for show by now despite his best efforts. On multiple occasions, he has tried to reach out to Jimmy to rectify things because he truly does feel guilty about it.

The problem is, of course, Jimmy has never shifted his opinion of Howard one iota. In the first season, he told Kim that he remembered Howard’s Lexis code: “1933. Same year Hitler came to power.” You couldn’t get a clearer picture of the chip that Jimmy had against Howard. Every attempt Howard has made to reconcile with, he flicks off with disdain. He may have had some issues about the scam that Kim planned to ruin Howard when it was first posed, but he’s been a willing participant all season. If he had any guilt, it was about Kim get involved. He probably would have destroyed Howard for free.

It’s been harder to figure out, ever since Chuck died at the end of Season 3, whether Jimmy’s opinion of his brother has fundamentally changed. What was clear was that Chuck was always convinced that his brother was incapable of it. Part of it may have been a simple case of jealousy. In flashbacks, we’ve seen clear evidence that Mr. McGill clearly favored Jimmy, the McGill mother died wanting to see Jimmy (who had been absent from her sickbed while Chuck had been the good son) and that even Chuck’s wife had a good opinion of Jimmy initially. We never learned what caused Chuck’s breakdown a few years earlier, but what was always clear was that he never really gave credit to his brother for everything he did for him over those years. He constantly rejected Jimmy’s attempts to make right, especially at the beginning of Season 3, which led to their out and out war throughout the third season.

What is crystal clear is that Jimmy has essentially seized on their final discussion, where Chuck essentially told him to embrace the bad man he always was. We will never know if Chuck had lived whether Jimmy would have changed his opinion, but given his major shift in mood immediately afterwards, it’s clear that Jimmy has fundamentally embraced his brother’s last bit of advice. Even his utter rejection for him in his will and the role he left for him, he just shrugged it off and in his last real mention of his brother in Season 4 – when Jimmy used his ‘memories of him’ as one way to con the bar to give him his license to practice law back - it’s clear he’s taken his advice to heart. It’s not a coincidence that Jimmy officially changed his name to Saul Goodman then: he was leaving all the baggage that Jimmy McGill has been given. The fact that there still might have been a place for him in the ‘legitimate’ world was irrelevant: he had decided to follow the wrong person’s lead.

And of course, the most central person throughout the journey of Jimmy has been Kim Wexler. The more we have traveled with Kim over five and a half seasons, two things are fundamentally clear: she is in every way Jimmy’s soulmate and what logic have been the Emmys been following by not even nominating Rhea Seehorn for an Emmy. (You’ve got two chances left; don’t blow them.)

I imagine someday there might me a television category called Breaking Blondes about the two basically good women in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad verse who end up following their morally bankrupt husbands into utter ruin. I have no doubt that the frequent shots of Kim, her face stretched thing and with a cigarette in her hand are meant to evoke similar shots throughout Breaking Bad of Anna Gunn in similar tense situations, most notably in the series finale.

But there is a critical difference between Skyler White and Kim Wexler: where Skyler reluctantly became a conspirator in the criminal doings of her husband, Kim has always willingly been able to embrace the darker side of Jimmy’s nature. We’ve seen this as early as the second season premiere when Kim was willing to get involved in one of Jimmy’s cons, something she has been willing to fall back on to on multiple occasions even when she’s never in love with the end result. As we’ve seen in flashbacks to Kim’s childhood, this may have been something she was born with: unlike Jimmy who had a loving family who provided for him, the only parent we see with Kim is an uncaring woman who seems to be a thief and a con artist herself. (There’s a critical element to one of those flashbacks which I’m going to get too below.)

Also while Skyler does what she does to protect her family, Kim has justified much of what she has done in the service of some greater good. To be clear she has been more than willing to emphasize the greater good in so much of her actions, finally quitting a corporate law firm to become a full-time public defender last season. But at a certain level, we know that Kim has a dark nature, one that is fundamentally darker than Jimmy’s.

The final minutes of Axe and Grind are the equivalent of those of the penultimate episode of Season 2 of Breaking Bad for Kim’s character. In the last minute, Walter standing over the bed of Jesse nudges him which causes his girlfriend Jane to start choking on her own vomit – which he does nothing to stop because he thinks it will solve his problems. In this case Kim is on her way to Santa Fe to realize her dream of getting a foundation to deal with drug case when Jimmy calls her and tells her that the plan they have been orchestrating for the last six episodes is ruined because the judge they’re using to frame Howard has a broken arm. Jimmy tells Kim they’ll reassess and that what she’s doing is more important. Kim hesitates for a second, and wheels the car back to Albuquerque, sacrifices what will surely be the greater good for her own personal gain. One can say that these actions aren’t as bloodthirsty as the consequences of Walter’s, but when you consider the immediate ramifications of Walter’s (which we saw at the end of ABQ) and the long-term ones of Kim, it’s just as dark – and in neither case, did either character hesitate. In essence, Kim truly broke bad that moment.

And as a result of her actions, the destruction was incredible. After the end of their elaborate con, Howard understandably came to Jimmy and Kim’s in the aftermath and tore them apart for everything that happened, drunk but nevertheless enraged. (The fact that one of the last sentences out of his mouth was directed at Kim: “A piece of you is missing” might have had an effect on her in a way no one expected.) And like so many people in Gilligan’s world, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Because Lalo, playing a strategy we will discuss in the next piece, came back inside to talk to ‘his lawyers’. In the most shocking scene in the series so far – and yes, I’m counting Nacho’s suicide earlier this season – Howard was assassinated by Lalo.

This actually brings to me to the fate of Kim. For the entire series, the fanbase has wondered about Kim’s ultimate fate considering there’s no sign of her in Saul’s life on Breaking Bad. On the one hand, I can’t really see Saul doing everything he does in that series if Kim, as has been frequently theorized ends up dead at the hands of the cartel. Considering the final moments of the season finale, that possibility becomes more and more likely by the day.  On the other, she’s not there. And then in the teaser of Axe and Grind, we got something we never get in the Breaking Bad verse: hope.

The end of the flashback focused on the license plate of Kim’s mother’s car. Nebraska could clearly be seen on it. We know Vince Gilligan and crew by now: they don’t show anything by chance. Also in that episode, we got our first look at the card for the ‘vacuum service’ that moved Saul and Walter to their final destinations in the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad. And Saul made it very clear in that episode: “he’d be running a Cinnabon in Omaha” and that’s where he is in those black and white flashforwards we’ve been getting at the start of every episode. And as we saw in the one that opened Season 5 when his cover was blown, he seemed very determined ‘to handle it himself.’

I don’t think any of these things are coincidences. Did Kim end up back in Omaha, either willingly or by deciding to disappear before Jimmy? (Given the last moments of the season, there is a very real possibility that, if Kim survives, Jimmy might very well want to get her out of harm’s way.) Is that why Jimmy is determined to stay in Omaha, despite the obvious risks of prison? Is this the way that Better Call Saul will truly end, with as twisted a version of a happy ending as we can hope to get in this world? Gilligan was always the optimistic writer on The X-Files, but he’s gone incredibly dark ever since he started Breaking Bad. Will this be his way of giving a cheerful ending as we say goodbye to the universe he’s created? Given the last seconds of the mid-season finale, it’s hard to think so. But to quote the series he got started on, ‘I Want to Believe.”

(Coda: Just after the fade out, we got the teaser for the final season. It’s a black and white shot of Jimmy and Kim’s empty apartment. There’s a voiceover from Jimmy: “After all that, a happy ending.” That is incredibly unlikely given the world we live in. You have no idea how much I’m clinging to that anyway.)

 

That gives us a look at the world of Jimmy. In the second part I’ll deal with the world that Saul Goodman knew about in Breaking Bad: the world of the cartel that we were more familiar with going into Better Call Saul and simultaneously knew very little about.

 

Season of Atlanta Ends on A Typically Surreal and Glorious Note

One of the questions that have to be boggling the minds of those of us who, like me, are huge fans of FX’s Atlanta: What has been going on with Season 3? The series has always been willing to operate within the world of the surreal, such as with the Season 1 masterpiece ‘B.A.N.’ and the Season 2: ‘Teddy Perkins’ but this season, it’s turned a corner that many of us have been wondering whether creators Donald Glover and Hiro Murai had somehow lost the narrative thread during the long layoff between Season 2 and Season 3.

The critics went into a world of awe over the third season opening: ‘Three Slaps’ an extraordinary work of television that seemed to have no real connection with anything that Earn’s voyages in Europe. But as the season unfolded, what appeared to be a troubling trend began to develop: nearly half of the season was devoted to these bottle episodes and none of them had even the clearest link to what was going on in Europe. And what was recognized as genius in the premiere began to wear on even the most devoted fans. I’ll admit to being troubled as well by this, though it took awhile to take affect: ‘The Big Payback’ struck me as astonishing, ‘Trini From The Block’ had interesting ideas but no payoff, and by the time a black and white episode aired in last week, I was starting to ring my hands. I’d mentioned a couple of times that Glover and company seemed to be emulating Jordan Peele’s version of The Twilight Zone, but by last week episode, I was starting to think they were taking it a bridge too far. Why were we spending so much of Paperboi’s European Tour in America, and not even the real one at that?  And why were we spending so much time away of our main characters, and not following what was by far the most unnerving story of the season: what on earth was going with Van? Why was she in Europe and why was she going on this walkabout that kept leaning more and more into criminality? And where she did she disappear to halfway through the season?

I guess I should have had learned to have more faith in the creators. Because in the season finale ‘Tarrare’ we got an answer to the questions about Van – and may have gotten a clue that the writers haven’t been going on a tangent with all those bottle episodes.

The episode started featuring a character that has appeared on other Atlanta episodes, Champagne: a stripper who Van knew and has spent prior episodes following around. The episode opened with her in Paris with two friends, discussing a $6000 payout one was going to get for a particular sexual act that, if you’ve read anything about Trump’s supposed exploits in Russia, you’ve been deluged with as being a hypothetical. Then Champagne saw Van – only she really didn’t look like her. Her hair was in a bun, her skin looked paler than it’s already light-shade and she was speaking in a faux-French accent. Van acknowledged her, and then refused to acknowledge anything else.

The bulk of the episode followed Van from the perspective of Champagne and her friends, who didn’t know Van and didn’t see anything strange, and honestly didn’t seem to care the weirder things got. And they got weird fast. Van went into a hotel room with Alexander Skarsgard (not even the weirdest real-life cameo from a celebrity this season). She put cocaine on a drug pipe, left his room, and then hysterically yelled at the concierge that Alex was being abusive.

Then we went to a drug deal where she seemed to have the name ‘Tarrare’ and seemed utterly unafraid. She went to a museum where a guard knew her and the unnamed man inside knew her and she asked for ‘the package’. When the man deflected, she attacked him with a baguette that was very stale. Her description of how it became a weapon would be hysterical if the beating didn’t end with blood on it.

They followed her into a restaurant with increasingly frantic Champagne, trying to figure out what was going on with Van. Skarsgard showed up, clearly pissed (and we later saw him a bathroom, frantically trying to wash off his genitals). Then she went into the kitchen, kissed a chef she knew as Marcel, handed him the package, and watched he has began to prepare dinner – which were human hands. Finally as the episode neared its end and Van seemed utterly blasé, mentioning how she had every intention of moving to Paris, Champagne finally asked: “And Lottie?” This penetrated Van for a moment, and when she continued to deflect, Champagne just said: “To eat hands?”

And the façade utterly shattered. Screaming: “Where is Lottie?” Van had one of those searing and utterly brilliant breakdowns I’ve seen, assuring that Zasie Baetz will earn yet another Emmy nomination for her work as Best Supporting Actress. The denouement assured that, and finally revealed what’s been happening.

Van finally revealed the impetus for everything we’ve been seeing. “Things have been off for awhile,” she began and explained that one day she was driving down the highway and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she was on the other side of it. She picked up Lottie and she felt like a fraud. She went to Europe without thinking and one night on TV she saw Amelie and has modeled everything from there (if you look at Audrey Tatou’s character and much of her behavior from the Oscar nominated film, you can see what the writers were aiming at in this episode). Finally feeling safe, she told Champagne that they should go home.

That was the end of the episode…but not the season. In an Easter eggs that we are now used to getting at the end of the credits of Marvel Movies, after the credits finished we returned to Earn in Europe. An airport steward came to him with his ‘bag’ and even though Earn knew it wasn’t his, he still signed for it. He spent the next minute looking through it, finally taking out a framed photo of a family before leaving the room. The man in the photo looked familiar, but it was not until I read comments after the episode that I realized he was the same man, who had been in the boat at the opening of ‘Three Slaps’… and who shot himself at  a motel in ‘The Big Payback.’  Give me a what?

The writers have been coy about what this may mean and as to how all of these bottle episodes may fit in the bigger picture, but it’s now clear they are part of that picture. It also fits in with the surrealistic tone that has filled so many of the episodes of Season 3, not only the bottle episodes and ‘Tarrare’ but so many of the others we have seen to this point. ‘The Old Man and the Tree’, which showed the world where the rich seem to be hiding from the inevitable apocalypse, ‘Cancer Attack’, where the search for Alfred’s phone led to a fan who didn’t seem to exist in the world but knew everything and the stunning ‘New Jazz’ where Alfred’s trip on mushrooms led him on a surreal journey to ‘cancel club’ where he had a discussion with Liam Neeson that made it very clear whatever consequences the culture of racism has in the world.  Many of these same episodes showed Bryan Tyree Henry, trying to accept staying true to himself with the mask of success, doing some of his best work on the series.

We will have to wait until the fourth and final season airs (it may be later this year; it’s more likely to be next year) to see if Glover and Murai can indeed tie this altogether. How much they will need to tie Atlanta together to make sense is an interesting question: despite the rants by some fans online, Atlanta is not Lost, but just a…well, what is it? If Season 3 had proven anything, it’s that Atlanta remains utterly unlike any series on television today. And despite everything that’s happened, it remains one of the very best. No matter how it ends, I will miss it when it’s gone.

My score: 5 stars.

 

If You're Only Realizing Now That David Mamet Represents Toxic Masculinity...You're A Bleeping Moron

The last few months David Mamet, one of the greatest writers in the history of theater and film, has been making the rounds for some, shall we say, controversial comments he’s been making about politics and sexuality. I won’t repeat them, because most of you know what they are by now and doing so will just cause more divisiveness, neither of which is the point of this column. What is the point is that over the last several years and especially recently, there has been quite a lot of commentary saying that Mamet is a misogynist who favors toxic masculinity in his work.  I have the same regard for those people who only now are starting to say that Bill Maher is not a true progressive.

But at least Maher’s case, you could delude yourself with the idea that because some of his views were against Republicans that he had been converted recently. There’s no excuse for thinking similarly about Mamet. In all honesty, if the term toxic masculinity didn’t exist, Mamet could have been credited for inventing it.

Let’s start with a fairly obvious fact: the lion’s share of Mamet’s characters, on stage and screen, are degenerates and criminals. From American Buffalo to Sexual Perversity in Chicago, from House of Games to The Spanish Prisoner, almost all of Mamet’s characters are at the very least con men, if not downright criminals. Some of them may work in film or politics, but…I don’t really have to give a punch line there, do I?

Another fact that should be just as obvious: Mamet’s characters in almost every play and film are all male. In fact, you can search the lion’s share of Mamet’s play and find they have, at most, one female character. There are more in his works for the silver screen, but most of the time they are either sexual objects or women that can be easily duped. And indeed, in the few that have them they have almost always been played by one of his ex-wives, such as Lindsay Crouse (House of Games) or Rebecca Pidgeon (Spanish Prisoner). Most of these are films that Mamet has more control over the production. The ones that are bigger budget may have larger roles for females (I’m thinking of Anne Heche in Wag the Dog) but there is much difference in their importance.

One particular example is The Edge, a film Mamet wrote the screenplay of but that he later considered butchered by the executives. In that film, Anthony Hopkins is married to Elle Macpherson who is having an affair with Alec Baldwin. The two end up in a plane crash and are engaged in a fight for survival with the elements, especially a bear, and each other. Macpherson’s character may be the cause of the animosity, but her role is no bigger than a stick figure at the beginning and the end of the film. Mamet can claim the executives butchered his film; I think his idea of the wife was in the first draft.

 Now this being said, I am a huge admirer of Mamet the writer. I’ve loved many of the plays and films he written over the years, and I think he is one of the great masters of dialogue. That doesn’t mean, of course, that he is not a toxic personality; if we’ve learned one thing over the years in television, it’s that being a genius on the page doesn’t mean that you can’t be a monster to everybody on the set. But in Mamet’s case, it’s always been clear that he believed – decades before it was ‘hip’ – that masculinity is more important than anything, no matter what you are. And this is perhaps clearly in what is likely his most famous work: Glengarry Glen Ross.

Again this is one of the greatest plays in American theater history. It deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for Best Drama and there is a reason it gets Tony nominations every times it’s revived.  Furthermore, the movie version has always been one of my favorite films. It is a master class of acting: Al Pacino deservedly an Oscar nomination and I’ve always thought Jack Lemmon was robbed of one. All the other performances – including those of the controversial Kevin Spacey and Alec Baldwin – are at that level. But when I showed this movie to my parents, their reaction was very different from mine. Both of them thought it was one of the most miserable movies they’d ever seen with no redeeming virtues. I thought at the time, much like with so many other recent great movies, that the problem was generational more than anything else. But looking at certain aspects of the film, in hindsight, there are flaws that I could see deeply affecting their opinion.

First of all, all of the characters in the film are trying to sell real estate lots to people. We never know if the land is legitimate or, like so much else in Mamet’s literature, it’s just another con. What we are aware of is: its life or death for the men in the office, and for most of them it’s not going well.

Now let’s consider Alec Baldwin’s character, the only one written for the film. (In the script, he’s called Blake.) The monologue that Baldwin delivers is one of the most memorable in film history; Baldwin has actually satirized on Saturday Night Live. But consider the nature of it: Blake starts it out by saying that all the people in the office are fired, and that’s the good news. The five minutes that follow basically says that they are all losers and failures and that the only people who are bigger losers and failures are the people they can’t sell the real estate too. Blake argues that they will always be losers and that he will always be better than him because: “this watch costs more than your car.” Then he presents the Glengarry leads as a pot of gold that they will never get. At one point, he makes his message crystal clear for the audience: “You know what it takes to sell? It takes brass balls.”

The message couldn’t be clearer: they’re not real men and they will never be real men. The fact that all of them are clearly older than him doesn’t matter. Whether or not he’s even been a salesman doesn’t matter. The message is clear: close or you get fired. And everyone in the office is so stunned that don’t even question it.

This is only a motivational speech in the sense that it motivates already desperate men to do even more desperate things. Shelley (Lemmon) tries to convince Spacey’s character (the head of the office, closer to Baldwin’s age than anyone else) to give him some decent leads which is futile task. Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin) go to a Chinese restaurant and in one of the most brilliant sequences in history, Moss suggests they robbed the office and when Aaronow doesn’t want to go along with it, convinced him he’s already agreed to it just by listening.

Now I have to get the only character that wasn’t in the office at the time: Ricky Roma (Pacino).  Blake went ahead with the speech even though Roma wasn’t there, and I’ve always figured that was deliberate. Roma was the only member of the team excelling, which by Blake’s definition (and Mamet’s) meant he was a real man. We see Roma essentially engaged in a long pitch to a prospective customer (Jonathan Pryce). Roma doesn’t get to the actual sale until the last line, but watching Roma we see that he views the pitch as a seduction. There is a very sexual nature to both the dialogue and Pacino’s matter, and the method couldn’t be blunter: if you’re going to f--- someone out of their money, you better buy them dinner first. Pacino is doing this, by the way, at a restaurant.

The second act place after the office has been robbed and the Glengarry leads have been stolen. We have been led to think, naturally, that Moss and Aaranow are responsible and the discussions that Roma has with both of them seems to reflect their guilt. Roma’s tone varies with all three men: he treats Moss with disdain, Aaronow with comfort and Shelley with admiration. To be clear, Roma thinks he’s won the Cadillac for the incentive contest, and is being, in his eyes, magnanimous and superior. The main reason he regards Shelley with admiration is because Shelley walks in triumphantly having made a sale of eight units after a bad streak. Shelley’s attitude was rumpled and haggard in the first half of the movie; now he’s cocky and arrogant, treating Spacey’s character with utter disdain. The message couldn’t be clearer: success and money is what makes you a man.

As you’d expect from a Mamet production, there’s a con involved on screen. Pryce’s character comes to the office, wanting his money back. Shelly and Rick start a con where he’s a restaurant owner to try and get him to leave. Pryce is persistent, telling Roma he needs to stop payment, and critically, the excuse given is that wife is made. Roma engages in another seduction, first trying to convince him of his masculinity, then assuring him that the sale hasn’t gone through yet. He’s about to close again when Spacey’s character comes out and, without reading the situation, blows the deal. After Pryce leaves, Roma utterly berates Spacey’s character and once he goes into the office, so does Shelley. It is likely the assault on his masculinity more than anything else that leads Spacey to make a critical deduction about Shelley and, because of this insult from him, he decides to destroy him. (I won’t reveal the nature of the ending because, despite everything I’ve said, I still believe you need to see the movie.)

So to be clear, in Glengarry Glen Ross, masculinity is all, masculinity is determined solely by money, it is determined by exerting it on those weaker than you, and if you can’t do that, you’re not a man. I don’t know why anyone would think the man whose greatest success is this work could possibly have ever been considered a sexist.

Look Mamet is still one of the greatest writers in the English language. Hell, he invented an entire style of dialogue which Roger Ebert once considered one of two writers he could recognize immediately. (The other was Tarentino.) The fact that he happens to now seems to have become something of a monster at this late stage in life and that now critics are starting to question whether they can enjoy his work knowing his views doesn’t change that fact.

A critic for New York Magazine wrote in a review of the current revival of American Buffalo that wasn’t sure they liked the production. The play was good, the performances were excellent, everything worked, but could they in good conscience still enjoy Mamet’s recent appearances on television? It’s like every other work of art. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a great TV show and Crimes and Misdemeanors is a great film. The fact that the creators of both have proven themselves to be loathsome individuals show should not affect your enjoyment of them. It is possible to like the work of art and hate the artist. Difficult Men have pervaded every aspect of life, including every medium. Do I have questions about Mamet’s personality now? Yes. But if I run into Glengarry Glen Ross while channel chasing, I’m still gonna bleeping watch it.

As to the rest of you now ‘suddenly’ discovering Mamet’s flaws: for the past four decades, the writing hasn’t just been on the wall, but on the page, the programs and the silver screen. If critics are only debating it now, there’s been a very willful blindness in this case. Blame him for ruining your enjoyment of the plays, but don’t pretend you haven’t had a clue all this time. It’s the kind of blindness that so many characters in Mamet’s work prey upon. Don’t whine about the sale now.