The Last Season of Saul Will Be More Than Good, Man: A Final Reassessment of Better Call Saul

As Better Call Saul finally begins in sixth and last season, there have been the inevitable reassessments of it. While most critics still believe its one of the greatest series ever made, there are those who gently critique it, saying it has passed its prime or that some of the seasons were slow going. Before I begin my review of Season 6, Part 1 (back to that in a bit) let’s take a look as why these criticisms are actually the series great strength.

The largest critique that came from some critics particularly in the early days of the series was that it was just going to be a series that dwelt on one of the least interesting characters in the Breaking Bad-verse with some Easter eggs thrown in for the loyal fans. I felt that way initially, until I realized what Vince Gilligan was going to do and in effect, has done masterfully. Breaking Bad was a brilliant series, but because Walter White was at the center, it never filled in the blanks on so many of the backstories of the characters that surrounded him. True Saul Goodman would have been the most unlikely of them, particularly considering that Gilligan was initially planning a more comic series. But the more we looked into the background of Saul…or as we’ve come to know him, Jimmy McGill, we’ve learned that the actual backstory behind him was comic and tragic at the same time.

In Ozymandias, Breaking Bad’s (and in many way, Peak TV’s) finest hour, Walter calls home and delivers a long rant in which he blames Skyler for everything that has happened saying: “You never believed in me.” (Like everything Walter said, it was a complete fabrication but at his core he meant it.) While that never applied to Walter White and his family, it definitely applied to Jimmy and his: Chuck (Michael McKean is still missed) was the man that Jimmy looked up to his whole life and did everything to support – until at the end of Season 1 when he learned that his brother had no faith in ‘Slipping Jimmy with a law degree.’ The cold war between them lasted two seasons, with both sides landing vital blows all the way through. And when Chuck died at the end of Season 3, his last message to Jimmy to embrace the monster within clearly resonated. There are still signs of the basically good person that Jimmy tried so hard to be, but when Jimmy fundamentally put on a line of complete BS to get his law license back at the end of Season 4, embracing Saul Goodman, we knew the path he had chosen.

On The X-Files, Gilligan’s greatest success prior to Breaking Bad, many of his monsters often used their supernatural abilities to punch above their weight. That has been the case for Jimmy/Saul all the way through. Left to his own devices, he probably would have been satisfied as a small time grafter, but larger forces – specifically Gus Fring and the Salamanca’s got him in their web early and in pursuit of a payday, he has kept getting more and more entangled. Breaking Bad seemed to indicate that Saul had the acquaintance of so many of the players – particularly Mike Ehrmantraut. Now it’s clear that from the beginning, all of them have looked down on him, and that he is just another pawn. If he’d never met Jesse or Walt, his doom was probably going to happen at some point – he might be a shark in the legal waters, but in the New Mexico drug war, he was barely a goldfish.

Another major critique about Saul is that it has at times moved far too slowly. I find this more a critique of the era of binge-watching and Shondaland demanding instant revelations rather than the drip-drip-drip that we get from Gilligan. (Breaking Bad may have become popular on Netflix, but it would never have been the kind of series that would have worked by Netflix.)  Just as some people thought the deliberate pace of the first season of Breaking Bad was frustrating in comparison to the boom-boom-boom of the Pilot, Better Call Saul has been moving at a leisurely pace so that the viewer can find the rewards as, piece by piece, we get more of the story. Gilligan once referred to this as water gradually eroding a rock, and in that sense, we have seen the formation of so many familiar faces. We’ve seen how Jimmy tried to win the favor of Chuck, and then embraced the conman that was at his core. We’ve seen how determined Gus Fring has been in his war with Hector Salamanca; how he doesn’t think death is good enough for him. (There was a lot to be said for him reviving Hector while he had his heart attack, nursing him back to health over the fourth season…and then stopping the care just before he could completely recover.) We have seen that for all Mike’s tough exterior, he has a soft spot and a sense of honor and loyalty that you didn’t the competent fixer we saw on Breaking Bad was: he is utterly loyal to Nacho through the course of the series, we saw the friendships he built with the head of the team building the superlab and we know just how much it hurt him to execute an innocent life. The fact that these stories feature so many cameos from Breaking Bad (Laura Fraser as Lydia, the head of Madrigal, Mark Margolis as Hector, Gale Boetticher, the chemist that got caught between Walter and Gus) isn’t the point of them any more. They’re not the reason we’re watching Saul any more.

And now as Better Call Saul enters its final season, we know things are actually going to get far darker for Jimmy and his loved ones before Walter White ever got his diagnosis.  Jimmy and Kim finally thought they had managed to escape the threat of Lalo (the incredible Tony Dalton) in the season finale. But Lalo continued to prove that he is by far the most dangerous and crafty of the Salamanca clan. (Fact: if Lalo had been in Albuquerque when Walter started cooking, neither he nor Jesse would have survived the first season. Gus is clearly unsettled by him). Nacho (Michael Mando) is deep in cartel territory and just managed to escape a shootout by the Cousins. (He didn’t try to run them over because as Hank Schrader learned, that just seems to piss them off.) And now it seems very clear that Kim, who is truly completely Jimmy’s soulmate, has finally been corrupted by her inner Saul. The half drunk plan she had to get back at Howard (Patrick Fabian) to get the Sandpiper payout that Jimmy has been working for since Season 1 is actually in motion now. We’re still not sure of the details yet, but its pretty clear that Kim has not only embraced her dark side, she’s actually better than Jimmy – or Saul – ever truly was. In one of the brilliant moments of the entire Breaking Bad verse, Jimmy has now gone back to the Kettlmans, the mousy treasurer and his ruthless wife who Jimmy tried to steal a million dollars from and gave back for Kim. Well, they’re out of prison now and running a tax service. When he approaches them near the end of the second episode of the season premiere, Jimmy tries to use the carrot. Kim listens for two minutes, and then abruptly uses the stick. How she chooses to do it I won’t dare reveal, but it is a master class in which she does the right thing for the wrong reason. When they leave the office, Jimmy says: ‘Wolves and Sheep’ and its pretty clear which one of them is the wolf.

In a sense the ending of Better Call Saul is already written – it has been a work of art that Gilligan and his writers have managed to make us forget that Gus, Mike and Saul are all going to meet their fate because of Heisenberg. By this point, however, I think all fans care about is what happens to everybody else. What happens to Nacho, the dealer who just wanted a good life for his father and became a pawn between Gus and the Salamanca’s? What happens to Lalo, who clearly is clever and brutal enough to survive a mercenary strike? And most of all, what happens to Kim? She isn’t in Omaha in the future and we never saw her in the present. And we all know there’s a lot of collateral damage in the world of Breaking Bad. Women and children get murdered all the time just for knowing the wrong people.

Gilligan is unfolding the final season of Better Call Saul in the exact fashion he did with Breaking Bad: two parts of roughly the same number of episodes. There will be seven now, and six in July. This is deliberate: AMC chose this splitting the final season in two for Breaking Bad and because of that the series, which had floated around the Emmys for four seasons, took the Best Drama prize the last two years it was on the air. And make no mistake; Better Call Saul deserves as many Emmys as the former for its final two years, if not more.

You see it in the work of Bob Odenkirk, still struggling to maintain the façade of Saul in all his cons, bursting with energy when it comes to making a scene at a club, defiant in the face of cops questioning his integrity – and then sitting in silence in a darkened courtroom afterward. You see it in Jonathan Banks, trying his hardest to maintain a balance of loyalty to his employer and his friend and going darker than even he imagined. In an unforgettable scene, he draws a line with Gus and looks death right in the face. You continue to see in Giancarlo Esposito, continuing to put up his front with the cartel and his mortal enemy Hector. In one of the best scenes in the series, he pretends to make peace with a grieving Hector and walks away certain Lalo is alive. (Margolis himself deserves an Emmy nomination for his work in the season premiere when Lalo calls him; there is a moment when we see grief, then joy on a frozen face and then the plotting begins.) And you see it in all the actors who we have come to know over the past five seasons – particularly the extraordinary Rhea Seehorn, who at this point we can no longer tell if Kim’s love for Jimmy has corrupted her or if, just as in Walter, the potential for evil was in her all along.

It was inevitable that Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul would enter the stage in the final episodes of Better Call Saul; it’s remarkable that at this point, it almost seems inconsequential. We know how their story ends. What the viewer wants to know by now is how Saul’s ends. The opening minutes of the season premiere were not, like every previous one, in black and white and in the future. Rather we came to realize that we were seeing the life that Jimmy/Saul had built being assessed and dismantled by the government for all his actions in Breaking Bad. By this point in the series, we actually know by now that Saul was on the radar of the feds long before he met up with Jesse and Walt, and if the last shot of the second episode is any indication, it may be in motion already.  Jimmy McGill couldn’t escape his destiny and neither could Saul Goodman. But is the final chapter truly written?  How many bodies will end up falling before it does? And will the piper - or the reaper - finally call for Saul?

My score: 5 stars.

 

In Case I Haven't Made It Clear, I Love John Oliver and Last Week Tonight

It’s astonishing in retrospect that I’ve been writing criticism for more than a decade, and yet somehow have never written a single article on my favorite late night comic of all time: John Oliver. I’ve loved him ever since he made his debut on The Daily Show way back in 2006, when he was making jokes about the kind of forums that were being held at the Holocaust Convention in Teheran and Bernie Madoff converting to Islam when he finally went to prison (‘B’nai Brith can still get him even from here!) When Oliver officially guest hosted the Daily Show in the summer of 2013 (while Jon Stewart was filming Rosewater) he demonstrating the enormous gifts for self-deprecation he had even then and the enormous capabilities he had to manufacture laughs while he was doing so. (It didn’t hurt that Anthony Weiner was trying to run for mayor of New York City, which led to the discovery of his texting pseudonym ‘Carlos Danger’. It’s an easy joke, but Oliver had a lot of fun with it.)

When, like so many great Daily Show alums, he left to fly solo the only question was format he would take – would he try a daily broadcast as Stephen Colbert (and later Larry Wilmore would) or would he try something more limited to a weekly broadcast (as Wyatt Cenac and Samantha Bee would end up doing) He chose the latter, and spent the first few months of 2014 in what would be his trademark self-deprecating style, utterly denying the urgency of watching it. (This is something he still does in his ads. “Appointment viewing,” he said recently, “if you have absolutely no other appointments. Seriously. At least try to sleep first.)

It may help that Oliver is British, and as he puts it their entire nationality is built on self-deprecation, but that may part of the reason Last Week Tonight has been such a success ever since it debuted in the summer of 2014.  By my count, at least a third of every episode is spent mocking every aspect of his show and his own personality. He did so just last night by reading complaints about him from the web asking why he’s still on the air, and that added: “Believe me, I don’t know.” He also feels more than free to bite the hand that feeds him. AT & T has been one of the owners of HBO for much of Last Week’s run, and he has spent a lot of time cheerfully scalding his ‘business daddy.’ When they divested of HBO a few weeks ago, he thanked them by raising both his middle fingers and saying: “That’s two more bars than you’ve ever given anyone!” He has also frequently mocked the HBO line of programs that have been his lead in for years – when Game of Thrones was in its final weeks, he cheerfully told viewers that HBO was ‘fucked’ when it left, he has frequently bashed series like Euphoria and Entourage, and is more than willing to turn on HBO Max well before it premiered. It should be mentioned he’s an equality opportunity mocker of entertainment: he’s had no problem going after other so-called phenomena like Emily in Paris and Ozark.

More to the point, Last Week’s format is fundamentally different from not only any other late night comedy show, but practically any other so called ‘news shows’. And that’s because, despite the title, Oliver doesn’t real devote much of his half-hour to the previous week. He will give a brief summary of the high and low points of the week, mostly political, but usually that only takes up five to seven minutes at the top of the hour.  And to be clear, after eight years of watching the series, he may be the least partisan person in all of late night. Yes during the Trump administration, he spent more than a few series berating everybody who ended up in the White House and ran more than his share of stories about the scandals involved.  But he has fundamentally gone after Joe Biden’s administration and the Democrat Senate with far more ferocity – and it must be said, even-handedness – than anyone else. During the evacuation of Afghanistan, he was more than willing to critique not only how the withdrawal was handed but Biden’s own remarks about it during the Obama administration. He has also been more than willing to critique him for his votes in the Senate and his stance on crime.  Don’t get me wrong: he hates the Republicans with a passion and hilarity (his Dr. Seuss mockeries of Ted Cruz are always favorites) but he will not let anybody off the hook. And he never forgets.

But fundamentally, Last Week Tonight isn’t about American politics or indeed America. He has devoted shows to the politics of Mexico. Brazil, China, Taiwan and even countries you would think were irrelevant to discourse, like Belarus. He has spent a lot of time covering Brexit before, during and now that’s it happening. He has covered the movement of fascism across the globes and genocides across the world. And he does all of this by entertaining you.

Similarly, while he has often discussed every aspect of systemic racism and the flaws in the criminal justice system, he does this in ways you might not expect.  He has covered nearly every problem with the justice system – the flaws in forensics, sheriffs, DA’s and the problem with public defenders. This year alone he has covered the flaws in the appellate court system and just last night, the problems with police interrogation. And he always finds angles that the average viewer may not be unaware of – last night he pointed out that basic technique for interviewing and interrogation is fundamentally flawed, and that only in the United States are police allowed to lie to suspects while interviewing them. (Knowing this has actually made me want to update a couple of blogs I have on police procedurals which I will do at a later date). Similarly he finds that there are areas of life that racism has permeated we may not be aware of – I had no idea, until a segment he did last year on hair about just how complicated the issue of styling or products really is for African-Americans and other minorities. I hadn’t even heard of the CROWN Act which has recently passed Congress or knew why it was important.

Now I realize that there are those who would chastise comedians like Oliver for daring to view themselves in the ‘white savior role’, something Oliver himself would be the first to deny he is. The thing is he’s actually accomplished a lot in his show, compared not only to other comic, but to Congress. His first year on the air, he exposed the flaws of net neutrality to the world, showed everybody that there might be something they could do to get rid of it – and it worked!  (Of course that was during the Obama administration, but unbowed he brought the issue about again in 2017 and recently it’s been voted down.) He exposed the almost cartoonish corruption of the International Soccer organization FIFA on an early show, and not long after there were a spate of resignations. When Mike Pence was Vice President, he reacted to his position on homosexuality by writing a children’s book featuring Pence’s rabbit Marlon Bundo to raise money for LGBTQ+ causes. The book quickly sold out.  And in a major piece on the problems with debt in America, he formed his own company, bought up $15 million worth of it from thousands of Americas, and forgave it. Yes, he says he did it in part to overtake Oprah’s record for a charitable give away, but this was much more significant than giving away cars to a studio audience.

And while you watch Oliver you will invariably be entertained by just about everything he does. He spent much of the 2020 season, seeming to sexually entice Adam Driver to engage in S and M, which paid off in the finale when Driver called him and chastised him for what he was doing. He spent much of 2021 with a running gag of being able to summon George Clooney by snapping his fingers, something he did at the end of the season which involved him summoning celebrities who had no idea who he was.  He bought five wax dummies of former Presidents and used one of Warren Harding in a trailer for a biopic (which featured among others Laura-Fucking-Linney) He’s performed musical numbers in which he begged a slap suit by posting as many outrageous claims as he could in five minutes.  And while he did much of 20220 and 2021 in a blank white void, he found a way to make that fun too – in the last few episodes of that period; the void developed a personality, and typically, berated Oliver for his abilities to host. (When Oliver went back to his studio audience, the void sang Empty Chairs from Les Miz and quickly uttered that the Queen had Princess Diana killed, a conspiracy theory that John Oliver has been joking about for years and did so last night.)

I usually don’t like it when the same series or actors wins awards year after year – much as I loved The Daily Show under Jon Stewart’s regime, after five or six awards I thought the Emmy voters were getting lazy.  Similarly there are a lot of good competitors in Late Night Variety and I hope that one day Seth Meyers or Stephen Colbert breaks through (or Desus and Mero get nominated). But I don’t fundamentally object to Last Week Tonight winning for five consecutive years. The format may be fundamentally the same as it was when it started (though honestly I do wish he’d do more interviews; the ones he did with Anita Hill and Monica Lewinsky in years past showed he still hadn’t lost his touch) but you can’t really argue that its not the same show twice. Oliver deals with issues that we will not see on most cable news (something he has been berating for a long time) or indeed find on our own volition. These are issues that people like me need to know a lot about. And if we’re going to learn about them, it’s good that we’re learning them from a man who delivers the message by cheerfully reminding that he played Zazu in the ‘bad’ version of The Lion King.  He takes his subjects seriously, but never himself, and he despite saying he only gives grim news, he actually has done good things. That’s more than we get from most people, much less a late night comic who still can’t understand why anyone should watch his show.

My score: 5 stars.

 

 

 

Constant Reader Book Of The Month April: The Unexpected Everything and Morgan Matson's Well Ordered Universe

 

I have dealt with some fairly dark books for the first two entries in this series, so for the next few I’ll try to focus on some lighter – but no less worthy – subjects.

As someone who loves TV, I have always been fond of the crossover, ever since Lennie Briscoe first met John Munch in Baltimore in the meeting of Law and Order and Homicide. I’m equally fond of any form of media that admits that they share a similar world – the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Greg Berlanti’s Arrow-verse are among the most prominent today. And for those of us who read many of the same books by the same author for years and decades on end, we frequently encounter the characters from one novel ‘passing by’ in another novel by that same author.

The most prominent example of this is, of course, Stephen King, whose literary world occupies so many universes that volumes have been composed to keep track of them as his novels have grown. I have to admit that over the years many of these crossovers often leave me feeling more depressed than having gone through so many of the original novels. I read and reread It so many times as a teenager that I actually thought it my favorite novel – until I read books such as The Tommyknockers and Dreamcatcher which essentially told us that the epic battle the Losers had fought was in vain and that Pennywise was still haunting the sewers of Derry. Similarly, I wasn’t exactly thrilled to get through the mess that was The Dark Half and then read several subsequent novels to learn that after Thad Beaumont defeated George Stark, his wife took the his children and left him, he became a full-fledged alcoholic and his sanity deteriorated to the point he eventually killed himself.  Like so much of King’s fiction, when you find his Easter eggs, they are inevitably rotting and stinking up the joint – and that’s without including The Dark Tower series.

Another novelist that does this with a far lighter touch is the romantic writer Emily Giffin, whose Something Borrowed and Something Blue  engaged the stories of Rachel, who has an affair with her best friend’s fiancée in the former and Darcy’s story in the second novel, which fills in the blanks. Both novels do end happily for everybody involved and at a certain point, these two best friends even make up. This has been a starting point for much of Giffin’s fiction, which while focused primarily in New York, also visits Atlanta and Texas, with cameos from characters throughout her work permeating, some obvious, some so subtle you can miss them unless you read carefully. Giffin’s work is worthy of a series of movies, but Something Borrowed was a critical and box office bomb and is unlikely that we will see that.

I have found over the years that there are many young adult novelists who tell stories that take place involving friends of characters in one novel or the other. But one of the ones whose work I have come to admire the most over the last few years is Morgan Matson. You’re going to need a little history before I get to the point.

Matson made her literary debut with Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour, the story of Amy Curry, a teenager whose father is dead and who is moving cross-country from LA to Stanwich, Connecticut. She finds herself traveling with Roger, a young man who has undergone a similar loss and who convinces her to go off the beaten path and take, well, an ‘epic detour’. The novel ends with Amy finally arriving  in Stanwich, and essentially Matson has never left it.

Matson’s novels often vary widely in tone. Second Chance Summer tells the story of Taylor, a teenage girl (yes, they are the center of almost all of Matson’s works; keep reading) whose family gets the devastating news that their father is in the final stages of stomach cancer and has only a few months to live. The family goes to their vacation house to try and pretend to have a normal summer before darkness falls. On the other end of the spectrum is Save the Date, the story of how on the weekend of Charlie Grant’s sister’s wedding, everything that can possibly go wrong not only does but does so exponentially. It plays almost entirely as pure farce for most of the run….before a twist that ultimately reveals that everything the Grant family has been dealing with this weekend is child’s play compared to the trauma that must not face. (There is far more to both these novels, but I’m going to stay vague because I may very well review one of them at a later date.)

All of Matson’s novels are brilliant, but if I had to pick a personal favorite, it is the one that I read first: The Unexpected Everything.  It may not be Matson’s best work, but of all the ones I have read, it is the one I have found myself rereading more often then the rest, partly to see if there is more to discover, mostly because it’s so much fun.

The novel centers on Andrea Walker, the daughter of the Congressman who represents Stanwich. Five years earlier, he was the front-runner for Vice President when Andie’s mother developed cancer and he had to drop out. After she died, he and his daughter have basically lived their lives on separate paths. Now there is a fundraising scandal involving one of his aides, and it is looking like he will be forced to resign.

Andie, who has spent the last five years trying to keep her head down, has been trying to put this backburner by focus on the fact that she will be leaving for Baltimore on a summer internship in a few days. Then the day after the scandal breaks, the offer is rescinded and not subtly. Less because she is worried about her college transcript and more because she can’t picture the summer at home with her father (there is an early scene with them eating pizza that leaves a hole in your heart) she blindly opens a flier and finds herself applying to taking care of pets, which will mostly involve dog walking.

While Andie’s familial situation is dire, she has managed to survive with the help of her circle of friends. There is Palmer, the bold and brassy youngest child of the Alden family who has spent the last few years in love with Tom, an aspiring (and relatively successful) actor. There are Bri and Toby, two friends who are so joined at the hip they are often mistaken for the other (even though they look nothing like) Both share a devotion to film: Bri is madly in love with old movies; Toby was exposed to romantic comedies at a young age, and her friends all thing it has warped her sense of what love should really look like. Rounding out the group is Wyatt; the slacker musician who everybody likes and Toby has determined is her soulmate, despite all evidence to the contrary.

In the middle of her job, Andie encounters Clark and his enormous sheepdog, Bertie. Andie, who is usually the instigator of all of her romantic relationships, spends a couple of sessions trying to ask Clark out before he does. It helps matters that unlike the rest of Stanwich, Clark doesn’t know who she is. (Indeed, it isn’t until their first date that they both learn their actual full names.) Furthermore, Andie doesn’t know that Clark is actually C.B. McAllister, author of two best selling fantasy novels that have left the world waiting for the trilogy to be completed. (Some may find this an obstacle impossible to overcome. I grew up reading the YA novels of Gordon Korman, who wrote his first best selling novel at the age of fourteen. Matson isn’t talking out of school here.)

Andie is someone who has spent her entire life staying just above the surface and giving people what they think they want – and she doesn’t like committing; the average length of her relationships is three weeks.  She doesn’t understand why Clark doesn’t seem to like her, and the date goes badly. She goes to the Orchard (a Matson youth hideout) and is hanging out happily with her friends, when Clark calls her utterly panicked. Bertie has eaten chocolate, and he’s scared he’ll die.  Unable to reach her bosses, Andie goes to Clark’s home and they spend the night treated Bertie (inevitably, this leads to Bertie vomiting on her)

With nowhere else to go, Andie finds herself doing something she’s never really done with any boy: having a real conversation. She finds herself doing what you do with strangers: sharing secrets you can’t tell your friends. She doesn’t know how to deal with her father, and she’s not sure he cares about her anymore. Clark tells her that the house is one he is borrowing from his agent, that he lives in Colorado, and that the underlying condition of the house-sitting is that when the summer is over, there had better be a book at the end. Something he doesn’t think he can do as he’s undergoing an epic case of writer’s block. (We see excerpts of both ‘novels’ as epigraphs throughout the book.)

The night ends with Clark asking Andie on another date, but when Andie returns home her father is furious because after her date with Clark, she never called him back and has been gone for a day. Andie reacts by storming out, only to be dragged home by her father an hour later, telling her friends she’s going to be grounded for a very long time.  When he tries to berate her, she wants to bury it but finds she can’t let it go and utterly unleashes how neglectful a parent he has been for five years, how her life has been destroyed by the scandal too, and how she doesn’t even know if he loves her anymore.

Utterly floored by this, later that day, her father invites her out for ice cream, and in a move that utterly stuns her, apologizes for his behavior and offers to try and spend the next few months trying to rebuild their relationship. A lot of this does involve negotiation - including the terms of the grounding – but Andie feels optimistic. Then Clark shows up for their next ‘date’ – with flowers and an audio copy of his first book – and her father gently reminds her of the grounding. However, she lets him walk him back to his car. Clark expresses his fear that he might not have any stories left in him, and Andie finds herself doing the only thing she can think of – starting a story for the two of them to tell. Naturally, the chapter ends with them kissing for the first time.

In the hands of a less confident novelist, the story would end right here. The Unexpected Everything has these critical scenes all happen well before the book is even at its halfway point. Matson continues to let the story unfold on three parallel tracks: the burgeoning romance between Clark and Andie, the rebuilding of Andie’s relationship with her father, and Andie’s relationship with her friends with Clark’s introduction to them. What makes this novel genius is that Matson treats all three relationships with an equal level of significance that leads to some of the novel’s funniest and best sequences.

Much of the humor comes in the process of Clark – who seems intimidated by her friends in the early stages – becoming a part of the group. This starts simply with Clark and Tom engaging in all-night movie marathons where they discuss the most important question of our time: What is the plural of Batman?  One of the most hysterical sequences in the novel unfolds when Andie finishes reading – or rather listening to – Clark’s books and becomes extremely angry at how the second book ended. I’m not sure what is funnier in this sequence: Andie’s anger at how Clark killed of a character, Tom’s reaction to this, or Clark’s when he tries to deal with Andie and Tom’s rage and then curiosity.

The longest chapter of the novel centers on a scavenger hunt. They are a tradition in the Alden family and one of the things that Andie has been looking forward to all summer (it was actual the first bright spot she could see to her internship being cancelled). Andie and Toby end up being paired together and Toby is determined to win because one of the prizes could be ending her summer long bet to only use emojis in any conversation she has with anyone. (Many of the sections of the novel involve text conversations among Andie and her friends; by the end of the book you will simultaneously never want to see an emoji again and only want to text this way.) This sections ends up interlocking all three relationships in a way…and though we don’t know it at the time, a critical event happens whose full import we don’t learn until much later.

I consider the scavenger hunt a tour de force and the highlight of the book.

As the summer approaches its end, many critical things happen. The reader may be able to foresee some of them, and will also have a fairly good idea how they’ll be resolved. I’ll just that say that Matson does tie everything together in perhaps the most surprising way possible, and that while the ending is satisfying, not all of them are happy. One relationship that the reader has become invested in (not the one you may think) is broken irrevocably and while it may well be for the best for both the characters involved, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt us – or Andie – any less.

If you only read The Unexpected Everything once, you will find it utterly delightful. If you read it after having read the rest of Matson’s fiction – or like me, re-read it after having done so – you’ll be utterly delighted at all of the Easter eggs from what I might well call the Stanwich Literary Universe. Amy Curry, the heroine of Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour is mentioned as a successful actress who attended the local high school. We meet the Edwards children when Andie comes to walk their dog (though Matson never identifies them by name, but you’ll recognize the dog). But the novel that is referenced most clear is Since You’ve Been Gone. The story refers on multiple occasions to Emily Hughes and Frank Porter the couple who was at the center of that novel, and who are now according to Andie the high school’s ‘Golden Couple’. (Andie had a crush on Frank the previous summer. High school in a small town.) During the scavenger hunt, Andie runs into Emily at Captain Pizza (which is also a vital part of Matson’s world) and unable to come up with a plausible excuse tells her why she wants the menu. Emily’s friend Dawn says: “So you’re checking items off a list? What’s that like?” If you’ve read the previous novel, you will not only get why Dawn said it, but why Emily rolls her eyes and makes a remark about pizza fumes going to her friend’s brain. Nor are the people the only Easter eggs involved: Tom spends most of the summer rehearsing Bug Juice for the community theater, a play that is important to Since You’ve Been Gone, the Stanwich Art Museum is critical in several novels, and in a bit of foreshadowing we learn that Andie’s father is very fond of the antic in the comic Grant Central Station – something that will be at the center of Save the Date.

Later novels by Matson will reveal bits and pieces about the fate of Andie Walker, her father and how her relationship with Clark and her friends work out even after she leaves Stanwich for college. Matson has said repeatedly that she doesn’t write sequels to her works, but given the interconnectedness of all of her novels, even though I wouldn’t mind a sequel to Unexpected Everything, I don’t need one.  Right now, I’m looking forward to reading her most recent novel Take Me Home Tonight, which involves two Stanwich students who end up spending a night in New York, but nevertheless find that they can’t escape the Stanwich Literary Universe. And the more of Matson’s work I read, the happier I am that I found it in the first place

Did Law and Order Help Skew The Perception of The Criminal Justice System?

The ‘reboot’ of Law and Order – one that was neither asked for nor, based on early reviews, particularly worth the viewers’ time – has raised many questions from critics. In the era where police practices are increasing coming under national scrutiny, many wonder whether the police procedural, part of television almost since the founding of the medium, time has passed. Some people - not all of them TV critics -  wonder whether these procedurals have led to a perception of the police that has made so much of the behavior we’ve learned over the decades about corruption and false convictions and the shootings that seem to come every week accepted as the cost of doing business. To put it in the kind of phrase that Jack McCoy himself might use in a different  context, does Law and Order have blood on its hands?

The answer is…complicated. Like everyone else, I have watched the endless reruns on Law and Order for so long, I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t at least one cable channel perpetually broadcasting them. And in one sense, it’s hard not consider a lot of what we see on Law and Order as the best PR the NYPD ever got. But when you watch so many of the best episodes of the original series – which in my opinion cover the 1990s – you don’t get the picture of either the supercop or the ruthless prosecutor. What you get in so many episodes, particularly in the first two or three seasons where the camerawork seemed to be have more washed out tones then they did later on, is a group of professionals trying to work within a justice system so flawed, they can barely keep up. I am reminded particular of Dann Florek’s world weary Donald Cragen, the Lieutenant in the first three seasons or Chris Noth’s perpetually cynical Mike Logan, one of the most beloved characters in the entire franchise (probably even now after everything we’ve learned about Noth’s personal behavior) trying not to take the bloodshed personally, but mourning the losses of the occasional innocent victims.

And in the early seasons of the series, so many of the people who worked in the DA’s office seemed to be hanging on to misguided idealism in the face of a broken justice system. There’s no possible way the constant departures and arrivals of new cast members could have been arranged this way, but as so many of the ADAs ended up leaving the DA’s office, you got the feeling that they were departing before they were eaten alive. Paul Robinette (Richard Brooks, who was in the first three seasons) and Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell) both left the District Attorney’s Office to become defense attorneys. Claire Kincaid’s (Jill Hennessy) character was memorably killed off at the end of Season 6, but in the episodes leading up to it, there had been repeated hints that she had become tired of the problems with her job and wanted to resign. Even Ben Stone (the troubled Michael Moriarty), the first DA the series had was a man of conscience and justice and his character ended up resigning because he believed his relentless pursuit of the former had led to a reluctant witness’ death.

So for the first half of the series, I basically believe Law and Order whatever its flaws, did believe that its characters were troubled by their actions and trying to follow the justice system. The same certainly can’t be said for any of the spinoffs that have followed in its wake.

Before I begin going through SVU, let me state the obvious: sexually based offenses, however heinous, were not considered special. The flagship series had dealt with, by my count, at least two dozen episodes that dealt with rape, assault, or sexually based murders.  Law and Order treated them the same as every other case that came through their doors, even when those same cases directly affected the regulars. This was true in two of the very best episodes. ‘Helpless’ in Season 3, dealt with Elizabeth Olivet, the police psychiatrist (the always undervalued Carolyn McCormick) being threatened and then raped by her OB-GYN.  As the detectives investigate, they learn this doctor has a history of sexual violence and in the final moments, it is revealed that he is a full-on predator with more than fifty assault victims coming out of the woodwork. In Season 5’s ‘Bad Faith’, Logan is forced to confront his childhood assault by his parish priest, another sexual predator who did the same to many of his own friends and as we learn in the final minutes, his own son. Neither is treated with remorse by either prosecutor, but they don’t particular treat either with any less ferocity than they do any other murderers they are prosecuting. Nor did the flagship series stop investigating sexual assaults and murders just because SVU was around, though they were more occasions for crossover episodes than anything else.

So why did Dick Wolf make SVU the first spinoff of Law and Order? I think Wolf and his writers just wanted to excuse to look at vengeance more than they did justice. They actually gave the game away in the first season: there was no regular DA during that season, except for occasional cameos by Angie Harmon’s Abby Carmichael, who seemed there less to ready the defendants for court and more to give tacit approval of the convictions to come. There would be ADA’s in future seasons of SVU - Stephanie March and Diane Neal spent much of the first ten years going back and forth – but they were never given the same personalities as so many of the other prosecutors on Law and Order and indeed were written out and back in with so little justification that you got the feeling that for all intents and purposes the prosecutors were stick figures.  There have been a lot of ADAs in the last several seasons but the trials on SVU were never given the same significance they were given on Law and Order. I think Wolf and his writers are sending a subtle message: the justice system doesn’t work in favor of these criminals.

And I say that message is subtle because of how the detectives – particularly Christopher Meloni’s Eliot Stabler treated almost every potential suspect who was unfortunate enough to end up in the interrogation room. In the entirety of Law and Order, it was an aberration to see a suspect being touched, much less manhandled during an interrogation. In SVU, not only was it the rule, it was tolerated which is horrible enough but is worse when you consider: a) the commanding officer for Stabler and so many detectives was Cragen, who’d spent the first three seasons keeping detectives in check and, b) one of the detectives on the squad was Homicide’s John Munch (Richard Belzer) a veteran of a show that, for all its flaws, spent its entire run with a similar hands off policy.  The message was very clear and has been underlying SVU even a decade after Meloni was written off: these people deserve it. Even if they’re not guilty of the crimes they’re investigating, they are predators, rapists, sex fiends. They deserve a beatdown just for existing. (This message was carried even further, sadly, in Wolf’s next major police procedural Chicago PD in which the cops don’t even bother to focus their violence only on rapists.)

Criminal Intent is a harder show to peg. There aren’t so much violations of justice here, but the fact is the series is centered on locking up the criminal more than anything else. The reason I’ve never been quite convinced in belongs in the Law and Order franchise proper is that it rarely even went by the basics of either series. The justification for its existence was that these were ‘the worst criminal offenders’ and in all honesty, the crimes were barely a notch on some of the things in the original or SVU. Essentially, Criminal Intent was a series to focus on the NYPD equivalent of Sherlock Holmes: played alternatively by Vincent D’Onofrio for much of the series run, Chris Noth for a few seasons to relieve D’Onofrio and Jeff Goldblum for a few seasons near the end. They were given support by female detectives: Kathryn Erbe, Annabella Sciorra for awhile, Julianne Nicholson and a few in between. None of the investigators had any of the realism that you would find in Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe or the lion’s share of detectives on either series: they seemed more the equivalent of human encyclopedias capable of picking up minute details that any other cop would need a team of CSIs to notice.  Did Dick Wolf create this series just to do his own version of Columbo? I honestly don’t know. What I do know is two separate things: in comparison to Law and Order or SVU, Criminal Intent’s run was relatively short: ‘only’ ten seasons. And it wasn’t nearly as popular as the other two when it came to ratings; after six seasons, it left NBC and spent the rest of its run on USA. That’s an impressive track record for any other series except one designed by Dick Wolf.

I also know that this show didn’t even bother going through the motions of the format at all. It did start out with a prosecutor: Courtney B. Vance as ADA Carver. (The fact that Criminal Intent utterly wasted one of the greatest actors of all time is another reason I never like it.) But practically from the start of the series, the trial was, if anything, smaller than it was on SVU when it happened at all. There were barely any scenes in the courtroom, which made sense: it was all about the magic of the detectives. Vance’s character was given less to do, and by Season 5 he left the series. Not long after the series stopped even with the pretense of being in the courtroom.

In the 2000s, there followed those rarest of things: unsuccessful Law and Order spinoffs. Trial by Jury a spinoff supposed to center on courtroom was there and gone by the middle of the 2005 season. (Jerry Orbach, who’s iconic Lennie Briscoe, was supposed to be a lead, died in the first few episodes. Given the ratings, it might not have made a difference even if he’d lived.) In 2010, the quintessential New York series tried an LA department (a bit hard to fathom, but there’s a UK version that lasted six seasons.) This series staggered from the beginning, particularly with its actors. That being said, there was one key change halfway through that may speak to a larger sense about how Wolf viewed the criminal justice system.

Halfway through the series Alfred Molina’s character, a cop turned DA, ended up going back to be a criminal investigator. Now it could have merely been a cast shakeup to get interest in a flagging series. Thing is, I remember the ads and I remember Molina’s character saying: “Now I’m getting justice with a badge and a gun.” That’s a scary message to come from a former prosecutor no matter how you try to slice it. The fact that the series was soon cancelled doesn’t change that face.

I haven’t followed Organized Crime, the most recent and successful spinoff of Law and Order, but based on the few episodes I’ve seen, it really doesn’t play close to the formula. It’s serialized, like basically every series on TV these days, and it deals with the pursuit of a crime boss. The closest equivalent to it that I can think of is the 1980s classic Wiseguy, which featured a lot of undercover work to bring down crime bosses. Back then, the series was ahead of its time and still does seem brilliant viewed even now. Organized Crime, by contrast, basically seems an excuse to give a beloved character his own franchise, and based on what I’ve heard about Christopher Meloni’s work, an excuse for Stable to embrace his inner monster. It is notable that in this series, trials are practically unheard of and the major case that the series had spent all of Season 1 building too – the murder of Cathy Stabler by Dylan McDermott’s mobster character -  more energy is spent throwing vitriol at his defense attorney (Raul Esparza) who worked for the DA’s for several seasons. Years of friendship are cast aside, and after the case ends in a mistrial Olivia Benson, who worked along side him for years and who he must have pulled her and her detectives asses out of the fire, tells him: “I don’t know who you are anymore.”

Honestly that’s how Wolf views the defense attorney and criminal justice in particular. His shortest run series, in addition to Trial by Jury, are Chicago Justice an attempt to add a look at law in every aspect of his world in Chicago and Conviction, a series set in New York’s world of prosecution and public defenders. Because for all the lip service the voiceover gives to the ‘criminal justice system’ in every episode of Law and Order, the message that one takes from so many of the series in the Law and Order franchise is that criminals don’t deserve justice.  They deserve beatings, imprisonment and being the ‘victims’ of vigilante justice. I can’t tell you how many episode of the series – even the flagship one – that have ended with the criminal being shot by a family member or a loved one, often in the courtroom itself.  Wolf may argue for the people being represented, but he much prefers it when the people carry out ‘justice’ in their own right.  Law and Order may have revolutionized the police procedural, but in the eyes of Wolf, there’s a part of him that still wishes we were in the Wild West, where the only law and order that mattered were by those who carried the guns and used them the fastest.

 

Abbott Elementary Is The Sitcom TV - And The World - Needs Right Now

Even in the era of Peak TV, I have rarely noticed two series that can be truly regarded as masterpieces debuted within weeks of each other. (Granted, I have a more reduced scope than most critics, so that may be on me.) Yet in the opening months of 2022, two series which have the potential to be among the greatest of the new decade have finished their first extraordinary season. I already spent much of the first quarter of the year praising to the rafters HBO’s period drama The Gilded Age. And now, I shall do the same for a series that couldn’t more be its polar opposite except in quality, ABC’s brilliant new comedy Abbott Elementary. And the latter couldn’t have come at a better time.

There have been warning signs the past few months the network comedy might be going into its death spiral. NBC didn’t even bother to have one at the beginning of its fall schedules and it’s been awhile since we’ve had a truly great one. Then this December, Quinta Brunson, the writer/star brought us Abbott Elementary and gave it the jolt it desperately needed.  Brunson has combined two very different structures – the workplace comedy and the working-class comedy. There have been some truly great ones of the former – Parks and Recreation and The Office are considered classics, but for all the genius behind both, you couldn’t ignore the fact that they were predominantly white.  As for the working class comedy, those have become even scarcer and most have been revivals – The Connors is the most successful, but it’s essentially a revival of Roseanne.

Abbott Elementary takes on both of these and adds the element of race that is almost invariably left out – the series takes place at one of the poorest schools in Philadelphia, and it makes it painfully clear in every episode just how much work all of the teachers have to do just to get by. They are constantly struggling for funding for basic things like supplies and electronics, their efforts to try and get extracurricular activities for their students are things they have to do themselves on almost every level, and fighting for their kids is one of those things they try not to care about but do.

This could be the grist for the fourth season of The Wire but Brunson and her cast go out of their way never to show despair and to make us laugh. Janine (Brunson) has far less reason for optimism or hope than Leslie Knope, Amy Poehler’s character that she has been compared to in some reviews, but she has the same level of determination. Unlike Leslie, Janine’s is grounded in realism. She’s been at this job long enough not to believe in the goodness of everyone around her, and that she’ll have to fight for everything. The thing is she’s prepared to do that.

All of the characters have a realism that goes beyond the surface level cliché you might have thought there were going into the series. Jacob is Janine closest friend and one of the few white members on the faculty. For much of the first few episodes, he seems like he was going to be a cliché of the white ally trying to hard. Then we learned, inadvertently, that he was gay, something Janine didn’t know. There followed an amusing side quest where Janine tried to force her ‘work family’ to reveal their secrets, which in true Abbott Elementary style, led to her being humiliated. But in the aftermath, Jacob revealed why he’d hidden his sexuality and that it was because they were close – he didn’t want to reveal his feelings about her long-term relationship because he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. (More on that later.) Jacob had shown layers throughout the seasons, particularly on his developing friendship with Barbara (Sheryl Lee Ralph) the elder stateswoman of Abbott. The scenes where they work on growing a garden were among my favorite of the first season.

Barbara herself continued to grow in change. We had some funny storylines about her not being able to use technology well and being unable to adapt to using her moral codes. But we also got some very moving segments about her and her adult daughter, who lives in New York and works in business. They have a mostly good relationship, but it’s been clear in a couple of episodes that it’s problematic. Janine still clearly sees her as mentor-mother figure and it’s been hard for her to accept someone else taking her place. But their bond remains strong and Ralph’s work is a constant joy.

Perhaps the most constant source of laughs is, of course, Ava. Dazzlingly played by Janelle James as a woman who cares more about being on the Internet then doing anything remotely resembling her job (which she blackmailed the superintendent into getting), Ava could have just been used as a source for laughs when the series needs it. But Brunson is more balanced than that. In one episode, Janine was leading a dance group and Ava offered to help. Janine was clearly surprised, and then upset, when the class began to avoid her mundane routines for Ava’s flashy ones. She was also being cautioned by everyone that Ava would never follow through on the routine. Sure enough, on the day of the performance, Ava was very late and the viewer expected that she had flaked out. Then Ava showed up, with her very unstable grandmother, who has been having trouble getting used to the senior living center she was in. It was a moment of depth that Ava and Janine talked about. Ava led the performance which was perfect, and Janine covered for her with the faculty. The credits scene at the end where they did their own dance off was both funny and a little touching – what is becoming the perfect balance for Abbott Elementary.

The series has spent a great deal of the first season trying to build a balance between the job and the personal. It has been clear that ever since Gregory arrived, against his will, as a teacher at Abbott that there was an attraction that he clearly feels for Janine that she is either oblivious too or is ignoring because of her long-term (and weren’t their jokes when the rest of faculty found out) relationship with Tariq, a musician who specialized in anti-drug performances. Brunson hasn’t exactly tried that hard to make Tariq worthy of Janine – he is focused on his goals, treats Janine like a doormat and clearly has a higher opinion of his talents as a musician as a man. But he’s not entirely two-dimensional – whenever we see him performing or around Janine’s students, he genuinely seems to care about them and put focus on them with dedication. Then again, this may be the point – Brunson is probably suggesting Tariq is childlike himself.

In another show – perhaps like The Office where Jim kissed Pam on the eve of her wedding - Gregory would have forced the issue by the season finale at least. Instead, Brunson had Jacob gently point this out halfway through the season, and had Janine come to the realization on her own in the season finale ‘Zoo Balloon’. On the class trip to the zoo, Janine spent much of the episode trying to deal with the issue that Tariq had finally achieved his dreams, but was planning to move to New York without even thinking about what she wanted.  She spent much of the episode projecting her issues on to other people, particularly a first-grader who seems scared about next year. When the child disappeared on her, she ended up finding him in the title Zoo Balloon and by persuading him not to be afraid, finally forced herself to end her relationship with Tariq. Even though we knew it had to happen for her and the series to progress, Brunson still managed to break your heart doing.

The season finale featured everything that has made Abbott Elementary great. Ava arranged the class trip to zoo without getting permission from the school board because she wanted to go to the zoo. Barbara dealt with the idea of a reptile that’d been at the zoo as long as she’d been teaching on hiatus as a sign she needed to retire. Then when the crisis with the missing child happened, she did what she did best: she took charge, told everybody where to go and what to do, and helped resolve it. She walked away feeling like her old self.  And in one of those subtle moments that show the series has depths that so many don’t, there was a minor subplot where the custodian was left behind with children with no permission slips. He turned their time there into a mini-version of The Breakfast Club. In the last credit sequence of the year, he took an essay they were supposed to have written about superheroes – and it was revealed that to these kids, their teachers are real superheroes. It was one of those moving moments that the series does so well (followed by a punch line I wouldn’t dream of revealing, save that it has the same deflating nature that a comedy like Parks and Rec would use).

It is becoming harder and harder to make a truly great comedy series – harder still make one that has as much heart as it does humor, as the nature of even the best comedies today is to have too emphasis cynicism. I didn’t even notice that Abbott Elementary may be the first shows I’ve seen on a broadcast network that doesn’t have a single straight white male in the cast, and there haven’t been many in guest roles either. It doesn’t need any and trust me, you won’t be complaining about their absence. .  I was over the moon when Abbott Elementary was given an early renewal from ABC for a second season. This is the best network comedy series I have since The Good Place debuted in the fall of 2016. And just like we needed that comedy series at that time, we need a series that shows the balance of people doing the best they can at thankless jobs with few resources at their disposable and doing it not by being superhuman but by being human. No one at Abbott Elementary, the school, is used to getting rewards. Everyone at Abbott Elementary the series will be getting a lot of them, sooner rather than later.

My score: A+ (sorry couldn’t help it) 5 Stars.

 

Want to Appreciate Dramas About White Male Antiheroes? Try Watching Series About Actual Ones: Or, Why We Don't Need Super Pumped

 

In my early review of Super Pumped: The Rise and Fall of Uber, I told my audience that while I found the series well acted, I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. Well, that turned out to be a falsehood. I ended up the lion’s share of the remaining episodes anyway with a kind of grim fascination; unable to look away the same way can’t avoid watching a slow-moving car crash. The series told me quite a few things about Uber, as well as certain things about limited series. Let me share what I learned, so you can make your best assessment.

Over the past several years, Showtime seems to have been specializing in limited series about the rise and fall of men behind powerful companies. In 2019, The Loudest Voice featured Russell Crowe as Roger Ailes. Super Pumped first season deals primarily with Travis Kallanick, the force behind Uber. Some time in the next couple of years, Season 2 will show us the story of Mark Zuckerberg.

Loudest Voice and Uber are technically well-done series. Both feature generally brilliant writing and direction, and super-acting from the leads on down. In the latter, we see great performances from Joseph Gordon-Levitt cast brilliantly against type, Kyle Chandler as Bill Gurley, the investor who gives Uber the seed money to get started, and several excellent character performances, from Elisabeth Shue as Travis’ mother, cameos by gifted actors such as Richard Schiff, Hank Azaria and Uma Thurman as Arianna Huffington.  We get to see the rise of one of a now ubiquitous company, all of the horrible things they did in order to rise to power, and how Travis’s behavior became increasingly toxic and was eventually forced to resign. So in the narrowest of senses, Super Pumped fits the definition of the traditional Peak TV series combined with the path of a traditional biopic like, say, The Social Network or The Big Short, to use to appropriate films.

But by comparison, I found Super Pumped far most unpleasant and deflating than so many of the Peak TV series that a lot of current fans (me included) have bitched about over the last few years.  And that may be because since these series are fictional, the writers behind them are allowed to have their leads take certain paths that lead to fragmental changes to them as well as the world around them. Say what you will about Jason Bateman’s character in Ozark, at the very least he is willing to adapt his plan to try and deal with the outside threats and dangers to the people he loves.

None of that is apparent at all in Travis. Travis is more than willing to call himself an ‘asshole’ – he’s actually proud of it in the first episode. He goes through the founding of his company, behaving arrogantly and crassly to his competitors and people he should consider being his allies. He runs over all his problems – there is no other way.  Anyone who he even considers being disloyal or says anything against him is just another adversary. And he thinks that even the people who can hurt him should just take a knee to him because of who he is. In one episode as threats to his company mount, he finds himself unwilling going through ‘the charm offensive’ in which he goes through the motions of trying to win the press over. During that meeting, one of his allies suggests that they should track down one of the people complaining against them and destroy her on social media. The shocked reporter asks if he wants that off the record and he says no. When the story comes out the next day, Travis is angry – not at the colleague for saying it, but at the reporter, the media and the people who bring it to his attention.

As the threats continue to mount against him, Travis becomes increasingly more of a bully. He refuses to back down from his approaches, forces an ally to break an arrangement because he knows he’ll back down from it, and when things get worse and he is being forced to take a leave of absence, he fires this ally – and then is pissed at him when he is hostile. In the final episode, when it becomes clear he is going to be forced out of the company, he spends the day he’s been giving trying to shore up his allies - most of them people he has spent the series isolating. He tries to win them over not by pretending that he will change or even that things will improve, but by saying that Uber is his company and they need to destroy the invaders. At one point, he even goes to the man he basically stole the idea for Uber from for support and when this man calls Travis out for calling it ‘his company’,  Travis shows no shame and instantly turns on the man he’s been trying to win over. Even when there is clearly no option left for him but to surrender, he is bitter and petty all the way down – he insists that Bill Gurley be forced to resign with him.  He refuses to lose without burning as much of the place down as possible.

Now I realize everything that we learn about Uber – their ways of using customers’ personal information, their toxic treatment of female people in tech, the way the staff underpaid its employees and sacrificed everything in the name of growth – is something the public should know. And it might have been more bearable as a documentary series or a feature film. Why I take a certain offense to Super Pumped is that is masquerades as entertainment the story of a monstrous individual who rose to power and tries to show it as a story of a man who fell from grace. Except…he didn’t. As the final captions show us, everybody who invested or who was a part of Uber, almost every toxic personality involved, is now a billionaire and almost all are still working in the tech industry. Travis Kalanick is still a billionaire and now the founder of yet another start up. Uber has gone public and everyone behind the company was there on the floor of the NYSE when one of the founders rang the bell, including Travis. The reports of all the toxic behavior have become public about everything, but I’m relatively certain it’s a matter of time before we learn more horrors behinds the scenes.  Are we supposed to consider a moral victory that one of the men who sued Travis for publicly berating him for in one of his own cars received a $200,000 settlement? I’m reminded of Gretchen Carlson being hailed at the end of Loudest Voice for getting a $20 million settlement from Fox News. Sounds great, until you learn Roger Ailes got a $26 million golden parachute.

At least when you finish watching a Peak TV series like Breaking Bad or The Shield or Dexter, you walked away with the feeling that horrible person paid for all the awful things they did.  Watching a series like Super Pumped or The Loudest Voice leaves you with the feeling you’d get if Breaking Bad had ended with Walter White beating his cancer, leaving Hank and Agent Gomez to rot in the desert and getting named Federal Drug Czar.

Yes I know. This is real life this is how the world works for the one percent. This is precisely the same reason I can’t tolerate Succession and have long since run out of patience with Billions (which, for the record, was developed by the people behind Super Pumped). What actually makes this more horrendous is Travis is clearly not even appreciated by his fellow billionaires. In one episode, he’s called on the carpet by Tim Cook (Azaria) for everything that’s happening. Rather than offer anything resembling truth or apologies, he keeps leaning on the Silicon Valley and that ‘Steve would get it’. Cook’s expression or tone never changes. When the meeting ends and Travis leaves with a relative slap on the wrist. Tim says: “Yeah, Steve would have gotten you. He wouldn’t have liked you very much, though.” For a man who has spent his entire career trying to be these guys, this is the ultimate twist of the knife. Even at the end, he keeps using them as his models, even though he knows they would neither respect nor even tolerate him.

Series like Super Pumped are essentially docu-series for people who want to see real-life Rich White Male Antiheroes in action. Given the critical success and rabid fan base for Succession and my own fascination with Billions, I can’t exactly argue there isn’t a market for it.  That we need an entirely new anthology series covering the lives of these series is questionable. (At least, they can give an arc of some kind for Kalanick; for all the troubles that Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg are currently facing, they show no sign yet of collapsing…so far.) I will be glad to move on from it and to other limited docudramas featuring the kind of stories we need here. One will take over Super Pumped’s time slot: First Ladies and will feature Viola Davis as Michelle Obama, Gillian Anderson as Eleanor Roosevelt, and Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford. I expect to be more engaged and intrigued by this series, because it features public women who had to live in the world of power and prestige and frequently were unable even to touch it. Their struggles were both larger and smaller than all the ones that so many characters in Super Pumped face and they had far more personal triumphs that in their way affected us just as deeply. I’d rather see any one of these actresses tell their stories than a dozen more of the ones we’ve just seen – and keep seeing – on series like Super Pumped.

Why Do We Still Talk About Fight Club? My Long, Complicated, and Frustrating Relationship With One of the Most Overrated Books and Movies of All Time

 

When I was growing up, I subscribed to that already dying out art-form, a literary magazine. Story was a quarterly publication that published short stories and novellas by up and coming authors. I still have hidden in my room old copies of those journals that I would devour and often reread.

I don’t remember what issue it was in, but around 1995, I read a short story called ‘Project Mayhem’. Fairly Spartan, in roughly ten pages, it told the story of an urban terrorist group run by a man known only as Tyler that had very strict rules and was bent on utter destruction. The last line was: ‘The last rule is, you have to trust Tyler.’

I’ll be honest: I didn’t think this story was any more special or better than any of the ones I read before or afterwards. It did the job that any short story should, but it didn’t show any mastery of the craft or that it could be part of something bigger. I don’t even think that I noted the name of the author at the time, and I’m certain that I didn’t even save the copy of the magazine – which could have been worth of a fortune by now given what the story represents. I moved on to the next issue.

Some time in 1996, I was going through a book store in Penn Station and I saw Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I had long since forgotten his connection with the original story and I had no reason to think this novel was any more special than anything else. I was waiting for a train, so I leaved through it. I wasn’t impressed. It was only about 200 pages, and even then I only trifled with long books. The prose wasn’t particular impressive and it didn’t strike me as imaginative. The blurbs did nothing to impress me; even then, I knew enough to know that you could find critics to say anything about any book. I walked away.

Now at this point, everybody considers Fight Club the movie to have been a cultural sensation. We forget it was a box office bomb and like so many movies in the 1990s only became part of the Zeitgeist after going out on home video. Currently, it is ranked as the twelfth greatest movie of all time.  When I was in college, I took a course in Literature when I had to read and analyze the book and see the movie. I did so again later in a film course I was taking and it was used as a subject of analysis in a continuing education course I took in my early twenties.  At one point when Entertainment Weekly was doing a list of the 100 best movies over its first twenty-five years, I’m relatively sure it was in the top 50, probably higher.  There have been parodies, treatises, even a couple of graphic novel sequels, and its dialogue has entered popular culture. And all of this strikes me as astounding considering that no matter how you look at it, Fight Club is one of the shallowest and least imaginative books and films I’ve either read or seen.  Everything that everybody seems to see in it is on the surface, and there’s nothing beneath but ugliness and grime.

Start with the book. Part of the reason I think it has such popularity is that it was designed for the MTV Generation; it’s short, most of his vocabulary is either simple or an obscenity and its plot appears smart without actually being smart. Palahniuk has written seventeen subsequent novels after Fight Club, but I know of only one other film that has been made out any of his works: Choke starring Sam Rockwell. ‘

That’s a rather poor track record for a man whose first novel has become a part of pop culture and who has had countless best-sellers since then. Considering how simple so many of his novels are compared to the complexities of Philip Roth and John Irving, it’s kind of bizarre that he has fewer literary adaptations then either of them. You could argue it’s because his novels are so bleak, but we live in the age of the dystopian adaptations for teenagers. No I think the reason almost none of Palahniuk’s other novels have been adapted is far simpler:  they’re all as nihilistic and graphic as Fight Club, but none of them very good and essential all of them have the same message. Lullaby is about a man in a quest to try to follow a beautiful woman to follow a monstrous creature using a culling song to kill across America. Survivor is the story of a suicide cult who is planning to crash the plane he’s in, and is telling his story into a black box. Haunted is a series of short stories about a group of aspiring writers invited to a ‘camp’ that turns out to be a prison. All of them escape, but they’re waiting for enough people to die so they can sell the stories to the media. Others novels in his repertoire you can pretty much tell where they’re like by the title and cover art: Damned, Doomed, Rant, Snuff.  The few pages of them I’ve managed to read are bleak and full of disgusting images with unlikable characters and no hope at all. Palahniuk does not strike me so much as a writer as he is someone who throws his bodily functions on the page and calls it literature. I’m not sure what it says about our society that so many critics praise works and so many readers buy it.

As to the film adaptation of Fight Club, which has no doubt given Palahniuk the continued financial freedom to tear down forests to write works in which he taunts the world for tearing forests, there is even less in it than you’d everyone says there is. I should make it clear I have the utmost respect for David Fincher as a director. I think the two films he did preceding Fight Club were bleak and unrelenting visions that were clever and engaging. Seven remains one of the great thrillers of our time (in his last book on Great Movies Roger Ebert justified calling it a classic) and his 1997 thriller The Game, a criminally under-seen masterpiece featuring Michael Douglas as a billionaire whose life because upended by a mysterious organization, is one of the cleverest films of the 1990s. Furthermore, I think most of the films he has made in the 21^st Century – Zodiac, Gone Girl, The Social Network and Mank – are classic and I’ve expressed on more than one occasion my admiration for his work in TV series like House of Cards and Manhunter.

What makes Fight Club far inferior to all of those films is more or less the fact that Fincher, who often balances his cleverness with subtlety, abandons even the pretense of subtlety for this film. The critical thing about Fight Club to its success as a book was that we couldn’t learn the critical twist until near the end. But throughout the first half-hour, well before the Narrator is supposed to meet Tyler, Fincher is telegraphing Tyler’s present through subtle and not-so subtle edits, leading up to him the two passing each other on an airport escalator. These aren’t subtle hints the way that the way that The Sixth Sense would telegraph its hints about the dead for viewers to see in retrospect: these are blatant references that we shouldn’t take anything seriously. And considering this comes from the man who kept his twist about the killer until he was ready to reveal him in Seven, it seems out of character.

But let’s not blame it all on Fincher: the problem with the movie is the problem with the book. Not the screenplay, the book. Both the movie and the book are very clever for the first half-hour. As we see Edward Norton’s character going to cancer support groups in order to cry, not saying anything so people assume the worse, hugging survivors who assure him its not unmanly to cry- its actually very funny. The arrival of Marla on to the scene, who is clearly a tourist through these groups (I like the scenes where she goes through Laundromats to go shopping) is also funny as she is clearly the most authentic character in the movie. (For all the films flaws, Helena Bonham Carter, completely cast against type, gives one of the best performances of her career.)

We watch Norton go through his daily life – flying from place to place, single serving everything including his friends, working through car accidents, applying the formula for ‘a major car company’ – and all of this fun. As we watch him go through his apartment dealing with things that have bar codes and lines from catalogues, that’s really fun. Even his initial conversation with Tyler is fun. And if the film had stayed in that vein, it really could have been a classic. But as we all know, then Norton’s apartment blows up and so does the movie.

Everything that we’ve seen so far is a subtle satire of life. As soon as Norton and Brad Pitt start living together, subtlety goes out the broken window and becomes a celebration of a toxic masculinity cult. Because no matter how you try to pretty it up: that is what Tyler Dearden is: a cult leader, apparently one so convincing that he manages to convince his followers to obey everything he says even when he will tell them not to obey everything he says.  This is contradictory, considering how everything starts.

. The first rule of Fight Club (and as we all know the second rule) is ‘You Do Not Talk about Fight Club.’ That apparent is also the first rule of Project Mayhem. And despite Tyler making this clear at the opening of every session, both Fight Club and Project Mayhem become national, if not global, phenomena. This is a plot hole that apparently didn’t bother Palahniuk and the writers essentially had Tyler refer to it once and never again.

And what is the message of Tyler? That man is meaningless except when he’s beating the crap out each other. That capitalism is pointless, so we should utterly subvert. Fine when it comes to the kind of billboards he posts, but I’m not sure how urinating and defecating into restaurant kitchen or inserting images of genitals into children’s cartoons does that. And your life has no meaning unless you die, and then your body is something to be thrown away even he was a friend. Everything is meaningless, even him but you follow his orders anyway.  This might be palatable if it came from Brad Pitt’s lips, but as we know it’s all coming from Edward Norton’s.

And I guess you can say all of this might be a brilliant satire if you know: all of the people involved in Tyler’s cult weren’t white men. I don’t remember seeing a single minority in Fight Club, and when Tyler goes to turn himself in the cop is African American and two other cops who are Project Mayhem…handle him. Leaving aside the racial issues of the film (which were even more common twenty years ago) you can’t deny that Fight Club is one of the most sexist movies in history. Like I said, there is exactly one female character in this movie: Marla Singer.  And lest we forget, the flashback begins with Norton saying that everything that happened has to do with her?

Why is that true? Well, my interpretation is that the Narrator called Marla asking for a place to live after his apartment blew up, she refused and so he ended up calling Tyler.  In other words, the plot to destroy America is all the fault of a woman who didn’t want to take in a strange man. A woman who the narrator spends the rest of the movie mocking because she’s screwing ‘Tyler’ and not him (take that in) and then when he learns truth, does everything to save her even though she has no idea what the hell is happening and who like everybody else, dies at the end. You do remember that part right? There’s still a bomb in the basement of the building that Norton’s standing it at the end. He defeated Tyler, but didn’t bother to get out of the building or you know, call off the plot he tried to turn himself in for. Just because the movie fades out before it happens, doesn’t mean he and Marla still don’t die at the end. Hell Fight Club the book has a more optimistic than the movie does.

I honestly believe that if this film had anyone other than Brad Pitt at its core, no one would have watched or celebrated it. It’s also my opinion that Pitt, who has since become a very good actor, has a habit of bringing out the worst in Fincher and Fincher in Pitt. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is in my opinion the absolute nadir of Fincher as a filmmaker, and while Seven is a masterpiece, Pitt’s performance in the climactic moments can be charitably described as problematic. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with Pitt’s work in Fight Club, but is there anything about Tyler that really couldn’t have been played by any other movie star at the time? I have a feeling that while this is Pitt’s quintessential role as a movie star, there’s nothing in his performance that, say, Ben Affleck or Robert Downey Jr. (who would take leading roles in other Fincher films) might have been able to better. Did Pitt think this was a great role because he looked beat up half the time?

In honesty, that is by far the least of the problems with a movie that is clearly one of the most overblown and overvalued films of all time.  There’s nothing to separate Fight Club from movies like Straw Dogs or A Clockwork Orange, movies that are considered artistic masterpieces even though they are glorifications of violence, toxic masculinity and have no roles for women except as objects.  It is another celebration of style over substance, heralded because of its director even though its one of their weakest movies. Even its quintessential quote has no meaning: Despite the fact that there’s nothing there, everybody still talks about Fight Club.