But most promising of all, I think, are the curveballs the episode throws. I like how out-of-nowhere Wendy’s decision to reclaim custody of Ezekiel is; that makes it hard to pin down as just another plot beat and makes it seem more like the product of a personal decision. I also like how Uncle Ben seems like…not such a bad dude! He’s a fine confidant for Wendy, who tearfully tells him about the affair she had that helped blow up her marriage (“It fuckin’ sucked” is her verdict after the fact), and a halfway decent suitor for Ruth, who like I said actually smiles at the dude. (It says a lot about Julia Garner’s talent that she can make her character scowl in like forty different expressive ways, to the point where you might not even notice she’s never happy until, all of a sudden, she is.)
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Three: “Kevin Cronin Was Here”
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Two: “Civil Union”
As a title, Ozark pegs the show to a unique location. It has a nice oddball ring to it as well. But if this show were looking for another name, A Series of Unforeseen Events would work pretty well. Every time Marty and Wendy Byrde do…well, pretty much anything, some other unexpected thing comes back to bite them in their collective ass.
“Ozark” thoughts, Season Three, Episode One: “Wartime”
These strongly delineated characters, and the performances behind them, keep the show afloat. As Marty, Bateman is all quiet cynicism and resignation; he always seems to be struggling just to get through the day, and his volume never rises above a four. Linney’s Wendy alternates between chipper, we-can’t-lose plan-making and peals of derision when her saturnine husband tries to shoot her down. And Garner, the real star of the show, portrays Ruth as a woman who always has to keep proving herself, sometimes succeeding, sometimes lapsing into impulsive outbursts of anger when someone accuses her of falling short.
You can string a lot of story between these three opposing poles, that’s for sure. They’re sturdy, they’re easily recognizable, and they play off one another beautifully. (It’s impressive, in its way, for the show’s auteur Bateman to continuously take a back seat to the more dynamic performances of his leading ladies.) The Redneck Riviera setting and the tangle of competing criminal enterprises give the show its own unique flavor, too. Yes, the show has its obvious precedents and its storytelling tics, but I’m still glad the Byrdes are back.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Six: “Wexler v. Goodman”
Somewhere along the line, the Kimmy Wexler who refused to get in that car became the Kim Wexler who, despite being kept in the dark (literally, thanks to director Michael Morris and cinematographer Marshall Adams’s obscurely low lighting) by Jimmy McGill, decides to get in his car anyway. And we know where Jimmy’s headed.
I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Caul Saul for my Patreon.
“Westworld” thoughts, Season 3, Episode 2: “The Winter Line”
In fact, this is the second Westworld episode in a row in which entertaining the audience seems as important as, or even more important than, confusing the audience. There are the usual fake-outs and surprise reveals and questions about where (and when) the characters are, sure. But there’s a surprisingly warm rapport between Maeve and Sizemore on one hand and Bernard and Stubbs on the other. It’s the kind of vibe that lends itself to amusing banter, but it’s also an opportunity to show us characters who care about each other, instead of the show’s usual every-droid-for-himself approach.
Likeable characters aren’t everything, but they serve as strong anchors for a mind-bending narrative—just ask John Locke, Starbuck, Agent Cooper, or Mulder and Scully. Maeve and Bernard aren’t in that illustrious company just yet. But they’re a lot closer than they were an hour ago.
I’ve been enjoying Westworld‘s more direct approach this season. I reviewed last night’s episode for Rolling Stone.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Five: “Dedicado a Max”
Once again there’s a cycle of shittiness; once again there’s a person who thinks they have both the right and the power to decide exactly where the wheel stops.
I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.
Pro Wrestling in Empty Arenas Is the Weirdest Show on Earth
Are professional wrestlers just the world’s most muscular theater kids? To quote wrestling legend “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who appeared on last night’s episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw: Hell yeah.
Broadcast live without an audience for the first time in history, both Monday Night Raw on the USA Network and last Friday’s episode of Smackdown on Fox stripped wrestling down to its bare essentials: a ring, a microphone, and wrestlers to use both. The result was less like the WWE’s usual played-to-the-rafters gladiatorial spectacle and more like tech week for a black-box production. It showcased the performers at their weirdest, wildest, and most, well, theatrical.
I wrote about the strangeness of wrestling without crowds for Vulture.
“Westworld” thoughts, Season Three, Episode One: “Parce Domine”
Holster your six-shooters and hitch your horses: After a two-year hiatus, Westworld is back — only it’s barely recognizable as Westworld anymore. Taking last season’s scattered segments set outside the Delos corporation’s theme-park system and stretching them out to (almost) an entire episode, the sci-fi brain-teaser’s season premiere (“Parce Domine”) introduces its new main character: the real world. It’s part Black Mirror, part Battlestar Galactica, and, on the whole, a major improvement.
I’m back on the Westworld beat for Rolling Stone this season, starting with my review of tonight’s season premiere. I liked it more than I thought I would!
“The New Pope” thoughts, Episode Nine
When it finally happens, the meeting of the Young Pope and the New Pope is an anticlimax. It’s not the confrontation, the clash, the climax promised by the opening credits, which feature Sir John Brannox leading a procession from the right-hand side of the screen while Lenny Belardo strides across the beach in his skivvies from the left, presaging a showdown in the center that never arrives. It’s just Pius XIII in the garb of a simple priest, walking into a room where John Paul III waits for him. It happens so simply and so quickly I didn’t even realize what I was looking at.
And that’s just one of the ways that the season finale of The New Pope, one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, defies expectations.
I wrote about the finale of The New Pope for Vulture. It was a pleasure and a privilege to write about this extraordinary show, the best thing about which I can say is that it was worthy of its predecessor.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Four: “Namaste”
On Better Call Saul, the devil is in the details. This has been true if not from the start then at least from the early going, when it became clear that co-creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan were out to depict the show’s thriller sequences, whether of the legal or action variety, as matters of tradecraft. It has this in common with The Americans, which though it faltered slightly with its too-generous ending always rooted the espionage antics of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in utter tedium. If Mike Ehrmantraut took a brake from painstakingly studding a garden hose with nails long enough to watch the Jennings dig a hole to exhume a dead colleague practically in real time, he’d certainly relate.
I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.
We’re living an apocalyptic Stephen King novel (in reverse)
When I think about Stephen King’s The Stand, which I have done with some frequency since I first read it in 1994, there’s one passage that always leaps out at me. It’s a description of the novel’s villain, Randall Flagg, a bad guy with such a magnetic presence that King would reuse him across nearly a dozen other books and stories in various guises. In The Stand he’s effectively the Anti-Christ, an ancient, grinning, denim-clad psychopath with magical powers. With little or no knowledge of who and what he really was, Flagg wove in and out of 20th Century America’s violent fringe movements — he was a member of the group that kidnapped and brainwashed Patti Hearst, for example — before emerging to lead a totalitarian nation-state based in Las Vegas (!) after a weaponized flu virus wipes out over 99 percent of the world’s population.
It’s during this phase of his life, which we experience in the pages of The Stand, that Flagg takes unto him his bride, a schoolteacher named Nadine Cross, who for reasons unclear (to her, him, and the reader) had been destined all her life to wind up in his clutches. During the grotesque and violent consummation of their relationship, his human shape melts away, revealing the demon beneath. This shatters Nadine’s sanity, but it also provides her with piercingly clear vision of this supposedly all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful entity’s chief limitation: He’s a moron.
…and now it was the shaggy face of a demon lolling just above her face, a demon with glaring yellow lamps for eyes, windows into a hell never even considered, and still there was that awful good humor in them, eyes that had watched down the crooked alleys of a thousand tenebrous night towns; those eyes were glaring and glinting and finally stupid.
Forgive me for the oft-repeated comparison I am about to make — I am but a writer of thinkpieces, and such is our lot — but does that sound like anyone you know?
I wrote about Stephen King’s The Stand and Our Present Moment for the Outline.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Three: “The Guy for This”
Like its predecessor, the third episode of Better Call Saul‘s fifth season begins and ends with images of waste. At the start, we witness the fate of the ice cream cone Saul was forced to discard on the sidewalk at the end of the previous episode, as ants shot in extreme closeup approach, detect, swarm, and devour it. This isn’t the first time the extended Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe has utilized insect imagery to make a point about its characters; cf. the fly in the meth lab with which Walt becomes obsessed in the famous Breaking Bad bottle episode “Bug,” or Walt’s stint using an exterminator company as a front for his cooking operation in the show’s last seasons. Connoting both insectoid coldness and verminous corruption and filth, the utility of this imagery in regards to narratives of men slowly succumbing to crime and cruelty is obvious.
I wrote about episode three of Better Call Saul season five for my Patreon.
“The New Pope” thoughts, Episode Eight
I could go on, and on, and on. It’s that rich a show. It’s a show rich enough to actually merit the comparison to Twin Peaks that all “weird” shows get—it’s that accomplished and sophisticated, that bold, that sexy, that sad. And for a brief moment in this shitty world, it transported me with its belief in the power of love to make the world less shitty. For me, it turned “love thy neighbor as thyself” from a dimly remembered concept from Catholic school into an imperative, into a beacon of hope that such love is still possible. I don’t even know what to say about a TV show that can pull that off. Thank you, I suppose?
I reviewed this past Monday’s extraordinary episode of The New Pope for Vulture.
My Favorite Movies
If you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, every week you’ll get a new piece on one of my favorite movies. Here’s what I’ve tackled so far:
- All That Jazz
- L’Avventura
- Barry Lyndon
- Casino
- Darkon
- Eyes Wide Shut
- Heavenly Creatures
- Hellraiser
- Hellbound: Hellraiser II
- The Lord of the Rings
- Lost Highway
- Manhunter
- The Master
- Natural Born Killers
- Nightbreed
- Star Wars
- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
- To Live and Die in L.A.
- Velvet Goldmine
Subscribe, read, enjoy!
Movie Time: “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie”
There’s a wrestler in AEW by the name of Adam “Hangman” Page, who works a cowboy gimmick by way of Red Dead Redemption iconography. (One of his finishing moves is called the Dead Eye, presumably after RDR‘s targeting system.) During one of his promos a few months back now, he promised one of his enemies that in their upcoming match he’d see Page do some real “cowboy shit.” Ever since, fans have chanted “COWBOY SHIT! COWBOY SHIT!” when Page takes the ring or uncorks a successful offensive maneuver. It’s charming.
It’s less charming when I think about “cowboy shit” as the animating force and raison d’être of Vince Gilligan’s El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.
It occurred to me that despite writing about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul for years, I never wrote anything about the BB sequel movie El Camino. Well, over at my Patreon, now I have.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Five, Episode Two: “50% Off”
Tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul begins and ends with images of waste.
I wrote about the second episode of Better Call Saul Season 5 for my Patreon.
“Better Call Saul” thoughts, Season Five, Episode One: “Magic Man”
“Gene Takovic” lives in a gray world, black and white and rich, grainy gray. He is the future self of Saul Goodman, who was the future self of Jimmy McGill, who was the future self of “Slippin’ Jimmy.” All roads lead to Omaha, Nebraska, where “Gene” toils as the manager of a Cinnabon and hopes he will not be exposed as the accessory to mass murder that he is. The world he inhabits, as shot by director Bronwen Hughes and longtime director of photography Marshall Adams, is a lot like the way imagine the world to look when you put on the One Ring. It’s a world of murk and shadow, with light that adheres rather than illuminates. It’s a dead world.
“The New Pope” thoughts, Episode Seven
I want to close these thoughts on this exceptional hour of television by noting that Lenny says something interesting about heaven to Eva and the doctor. After whispering his detailed knowledge of the place into the ear of their son, who weeps a single tear after hearing it, he later explains that heaven is exactly like Earth, “except it’s not the same, because in heaven, we glimpse God.” On a smaller, less cosmic scale, I think this is what The Young Pope and The New Pope offer audiences. This is a very real world, a world of cigarettes and sex, politics and personal grievances, dead dogs, dead brothers, sick children, sickened parents. Except it’s not the same as our world, because on The Young Pope and The New Pope, we glimpse … not God, I suppose, but Art. That’s close enough.
I wrote about the seventh episode of The New Pope for Vulture. This was some TV, boy howdy.
‘Better Call Saul’ Gets the Point of Prestige TV
If the antihero with a guilty conscience is a fantasy, then it takes its place among beings from other forms of fiction animated by the unrealistic, the supernatural, the fantastic: dragons, zombies, alien invaders, masked slashers, haunted hotels, mad titans, sinister doppelgängers, xenomorphs, terminators, predators, you name it. No one holds the unreality of these entities against the works they inhabit, or at least no one should. No, we accept the unreality in exchange for what these things can reveal to us about our own lives — how they give us an imagistic vocabulary commensurate with the outsized and enormously powerful emotions we feel, emotions too strong for the vocabulary of everyday reality to properly convey.
And what do Saul Goodman and his difficult peers enable us to address? Our own guilt, our own shame, our own regret, our own conviction that had we been a better person in this or that moment, our lives and the lives of those we care about might have turned out very differently. Much maligned for allegedly teaching us to sympathize with the devil, the prestige-TV protagonist instead invites us to take a ruthless inventory of ourselves. On a much larger canvas than we ourselves possess, they play out the dramas of conscience we ourselves face on a smaller scale. That’s what they’re there to do: not to encourage us to give real-world bastards a pass, but to drive us to look at our own bastardry, however minor or major it may be, with fresh and unblinking eyes.