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.

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.

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.

“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.

I will be covering this season of Better Call Saul at my Patreon, starting with my thoughts on the season premiere.

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.

I wrote about Better Call Saul, “difficult men,” and the purpose of prestige TV for my latest column at the Outline.

Weird ‘Flix, but okay: 2018 saw a certain streaming behemoth finally achieve the approximate cultural reach and clout the Big Four broadcast networks still enjoyed as recently as a decade ago. Unfortunately, the level of artistic quality and risk-taking roughly followed suit.

But even the algorithm-assisted return of TV monoculture—you can have any flavor you like, as long as it’s a flavor our data indicates you’ve enjoyed before—couldn’t stamp out the hard-earned gains television has made as an art form since Tony Soprano woke up that morning 20 years ago. Shows predicated on the idea that challenging your audience is a vital part of entertaining that audience, even if it’s an audience you have to will into existence in the process, are still out there.

Television can still make even a jaded viewer sob with sorrow and joy, recoil in suspense and terror, stare in silent (or shouting!) awe at the sheer emotional and aesthetic audacity of it all. Between them, the eight shows below did all that for me and more.

8. On Cinema at the Cinema (Adult Swim)

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. But comedy is about making people laugh, which turns characters in comedies into joke-delivery mechanisms rather than characters in the fully developed sense from which we derive value in drama. So it takes a lot for a comedy to make my list of the best the medium has to offer.

In the case of On Cinema, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s byzantine saga of atrocious human behavior in the guise of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie-review show starring two idiots, here is what it took: Tim, the right-wing hedonist host whose endless series of jilted wives, abandoned children, unwatchable action-movie side projects, unlistenable alt-rock and dance-music spinoffs, disastrous alternative-medicine experiments, near-death experiences (including toxic shock from unsterilized acupuncture needles, malnourishment from an all-drug diet, and incineration after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in the storage locker cum VHS-tape library he’d been reduced to living in) culminated in a mistrial for murder after 20 kids died from smoking his tainted vape juice at an EDM festival. The subsequent tenth season of his movie-review show (“On Cinema X”) saw him caught between the diktats of the show’s snake-oil sponsor and the civil judgment won by the family of one of his victims.

Somewhere in there, he and Gregg may or may not have awarded Solo: A Star Wars Story their coveted Five Bags of Popcorn seal of approval; between Tim screaming obscenely about the district attorney (against whom he mounts a quixotic electoral campaign) and Gregg prattling on about how Tim Burton won’t answer his letters, it’s a bit hard to tell. Heidecker and Turkington have played out this shaggy-dog joke for years, anticipating (not kidding at all here) both the rise of Donald Trump and the role that aggrieved nerds would play as his cultural vanguard. The result is maybe the best thing the extended Tim & Eric universe has ever produced. Long may they rant.

I named the eight best television series of the year for Decider. I believe in all eight of these shows very deeply, which is why it’s just a top eight and not a larger, rounder number. I hope you enjoy them too.

10. Westworld: “Do the Strand” by Roxy Music

Few shows have been as guilty of music-cue abuse as Westworld. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s leaden and labyrinthine sci-fi parable has folded an entire Spotify playlist of classic alt-ish rock songs into its narrative via instrumental arrangements by composer Ramin Djawadi. Give a listen to his best-in-field work on Game of Thrones and it’s painfully clear he can do much better than player-piano Radiohead or Japanophile remixes of Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” or whatever.

This is what makes Westworld’s in-world cranking of Roxy Music’s boisterous 1973 hit “Do the Strand” so remarkable. Blasted at full volume by James Delos (Peter Mullan), the Scottish founder of the Westworld theme park (and, unbeknownst to him, one of its core artificial-intelligence experiments), glam rock’s answer to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” sounds as unexpected in the dour songscape of this series as Delos’s “dance like no one is watching” behavior looks. Yet Bryan Ferry’s hedonistic lyrical promise of the next big thing — “There’s a new sensation, a fabulous creation” — and Brian Eno’s retro-futuristic flourishes as the band’s in-house effects guy fit Westworld’s themes like they were engineered in a lab to do exactly that.

This is always one of my favorite pieces to do: I wrote about the 10 best music cues of 2018 for Vulture. Definitely stick around for Number One.

But this review, the last of this extraordinary season of television, isn’t, not just yet. There’s one more scene I want to discuss, one I believe is key to the entire thing.

Between the library dedication ceremony and the appeals hearing, Jimmy joylessly participates in a meeting of the charitable foundation Chuck set up to fund scholarships for promising young students with an interest in law; his spot on the board is one of the few things the elder McGill left him. Writers Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz and director Adam Bernstein take an innovative approach to the proceedings: Within a second or two of each student beginning to answer one of Howard Hamlin’s jovial questions, they crash-cut away to the next one, as if the nature of what they’re saying means nothing compared to the nature of the process itself.

After all the interviews have concluded, Howard is prepared to offer the fund’s three scholarships to the three highest vote-getters. Then Jimmy interrupts. It was he, he says, who voted for the student who only received a single vote. “That’s the shoplifter,” one of the other board members replies, referring to the girl’s run-in with the law from a few years back. Jimmy points out that it’s precisely that experience that gave her an interest in the law in the first place, and that both her academic career and her personal essay have borne out the promise they’d be ignoring if they let that one event define the kid’s life.

Which they do. The three winners take home the scholarship, and young Kristy Esposito, shoplifter, gets the shaft. But when Jimmy races toward her outside the office to speak with her, we don’t know that yet. He breaks the news, and does so with gusto. “You didn’t get it. You were never gonna get it… You made a mistake, and they are never forgetting it. As far as they’re concerned, your mistake is who you are. It’s all you are.”

But she has an option, he tells the flabbergasted kid: beat them. Cheat. Cut corners. Hustle. Don’t play by the rules. Be smart. Be hated. “You rub their noses in it. You make them suffer… Screw them! The winner takes it all.” She walks away, the effect of this warped monologue on her uncertain.

Then a surprising thing happens. Back down in the parking garage where he used to loiter in his days working for Howard and Chuck’s firm, Jimmy’s car breaks down… and then he breaks down too. “No, no, no,” he sobs, crying for real for the very first time this season. Is he mourning his brother? The notion that his brother was right about him all along? The notion that he’s right about the hopeless odds facing him and the scholarship kid and anyone else who’s less than perfect? The idea that he’s become a person who shouts at children, encouraging them to become dirtbags and do whatever it takes to get one over on the so-called good guys? The fact that the law doesn’t benefit everyone equally, and that some people will get away with everything no matter what? That the law can be fooled? That amoral monsters can wield it as they see fit? That his life, and the lives of everyone he cares about, are slowly sliding into disaster?

Good questions, aren’t they? After the events of the past few weeks, weeks in which Better Call Saul aired its best season ever, do they sound familiar?

I reviewed Better Call Saul’s backbreaker of a season finale for TV Guide. A great season of television.

SPOILER WARNING

People believe what they want to believe. That’s as true for the audience of Better Call Saul as it is for the characters. Chances are good that as you watched Monday’s episode unfold, you assumed disaster would befall Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and his German construction crew. You likely pegged Werner (Rainer Bock), the gentle team leader who misses his wife of 26 years and always refers to Mike with a kindly-sounding “Michael,” as the victim. You probably thought Kai (Ben Bela Böhm), the cocky young demolitions expert who’s butted heads with Mike over and over, would be the culprit.

So when Werner goes back down into the subterranean depths to check on a faulty fuse laid by Kai the night the team is scheduled to blow up one last gigantic rock with dynamite — a rock spraypainted with “WIEDERSEHN,” the German word for “goodbye,” no less — you were probably nearly as nervous as Werner himself. Note: The episode is titled “Wiedersehen,” and it was written and directed by Breaking Bad top dogs Gennifer Hutchison and Vince Gilligan, respectively. You’ve heard of Chekhov’s gun? This is like Chekhov’s arsenal.

But it was all a bait and switch; indeed, the entire German subplot might have been. Werner fixes the fuse. The detonation goes off without a hitch. The teammates toast to a job well done, with Kai himself pouring a cold one in Mike’s honor.

Now the goalposts get moved once again. Could Werner, who all but begs Mike to be allowed a brief trip home to visit his beloved wife but puts on a brave face once Mike declines, be despondent enough to kill himself? His lengthy goodbyes during the extra phone call he gets allotted instead of a vacation indicate that yeah, he just might be.

Instead, the owlish little guy sabotages the security cameras, cuts through the padlocks, evades the security team, and escapes the secure facility where he and his team have lived in seclusion for months. He’s fleeing home… and given what we know about his drug lord boss, he’s risking not only his life, but Mike’s, the guards and the entire construction crew’s in the process. He may have disabled the cameras, but the real blindspot was Mike’s, believing his friend knew the stakes and could be trusted not to do anything reckless. On this show, trust doesn’t get you very far.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. I liked unraveling this particular multi-episode fakeout.

Even the most well-oiled machine needs a trip to the shop for a tune-up now and then. Better Call Saul, I suppose, is no exception. This week’s episode, “Coushatta,” is the first time that the show’s tremendous fourth season has hit any significant storytelling hiccups. They’re hardly deal breakers — the show is simply too good for that at this point, it seems — but for once, it felt like Jimmy McGill and company are playing for time.

[…]

The opening letter-writing montage is set to as impeccable a deep cut as ever, in this case Les McCann’s funk-inflected barn-burner “Burnin’ Coal”, but the music feels like an excuse to make the filmmaking less interesting, not an impetus to get innovative. Better Call Saul obviously thrives on depicting the tedium of crime in an innovative way, but there’s nothing particularly interesting about a series of straightforward shots of a guy writing postcards on a bus as a hot piano tune plays. If the cinematography had been bolder, sure. Hell, if they’d gotten rid of the music entirely, and just let us sit on that bus with Jimmy for five minutes, soaking in the repetition of it all, that would have worked too. The choice the show made, neither fish nor fowl, feels like junior-varsity Saul at best.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide. It was the first one this season that felt less than essential to me, but it’s still Better Call Saul. I’m proud of that analysis of the musical montage, for what it’s worth.

Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) are living separate lives together, and Better Call Saul is using every trick in the book to prove it.

“Something Stupid,” the seventh episode of the show’s outstanding fourth season, kicks off with a musical montage set to the song of the same name. Made famous by Frank and Nancy Sinatra, it’s a meticulously constructed tune, its verbose lyrics and complicated two-part harmony embodying the fear of being really close to someone but holding back because you’re worried about revealing you’re more into them than they are into you. (It’s made slightly awkward by the fact that Frank and Nancy were father and daughter, but this is the Nicole Kidman/Robbie Williams version, so no harm done.) It’s one of the most astute soundtrack selections in the history of the BCS/Breaking Bad universe, and that’s saying something.

The imagery accompanying the song is equally effective. Using a split-screen effect — one that takes a few seconds to get going so that at first all you see is half a screen before the second image kicks in — it chronicles Jimmy and Kim’s daily routine. They brush their teeth, eat breakfast, go to work. Kim moves into her new office as a partner in the firm of Schweikart & Cokely; Jimmy plays handball against the window of his empty cellphone store. Kim racks up commemorative trophies for Mesa Verde branch openings and clients for her sideline as a pro bono public defender; Jimmy piles up visits to his parole officer and stacks of cellphones for sale to his less-than-legal clientele.

But the split screen stays in effect even when the two are right next to each other, eating dinner or getting into bed. Sure, Jimmy might reach across that black bar to pour Kim some wine, or Kim might stretch a leg across to drape it over Jimmy as she sleeps, but it’s always there. And in the end, after the song fades away, Kim’s side of the split screen fades away too, leaving Jimmy alone in the dark. Writer Alison Tatlock and director Deborah Chow conveyed the slow death of a relationship in the form of a music video, basically, and it’s beautifully sad to watch. A later scene, in which Jimmy wows everyone at Kim’s company party with his gift of gab except for Kim herself, only underscores the initial point.

I reviewed episode seven of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. This show can take your breath away with what feels like no effort at all.

I’m in awe of Mike Ehrmantraut, the way only a guy who has to make plans days in advance to do the dishes watching a senior citizen smoothly transition into running OpSec for a billion-dollar drug cartel can be. Sure, Mike (Jonathan Banks) is a guilt-ridden murderer who blames himself for his son’s death and will eventually die in disgrace, but in the meantime his hyper-competence is an absolute joy to watch when you’re feeling less than competent yourself. And despite being a comedown from the lethal tension and emotional turmoil of recent episodes, this week’s installment of Better Call Saul (“Piñata”) offers this particular pleasure in bulk.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide. Like I said, it’s kind of a time out from the mounting terror.

It probably goes without saying, but at this point Better Call Saul never takes a day off when it comes to quality. This show is humming along like a freight train, gliding effortlessly yet with unmistakable power from moment to moment, scene to scene, sequence to sequence, character to character, episode to episode. Its destination is death. As Saul (Bob Odenkirk) himself puts it in this episode’s cold open, “Quite a ride, huh?”

I reviewed episode five of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. This is the best show on television at the moment.

“He wanted me to talk. I talked.” God, did he ever.

Titled “Talk” after this characteristically terse bit of dialogue from Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), the fourth episode of Better Call Saul‘s fourth season continues the show’s ongoing study of how vivid a picture it can paint of the moral collapse of its characters in as few brushstrokes as possible. Mike, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), and even Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) spend the episode essentially taking turns sliding a few more rungs down the ladder toward their respective eventual fates. For Jimmy and Mike, this means a life of crime that will end in disaster when they’re drawn into the orbit of one Walter White a few years later. For Nacho and Kim… well, we don’t know what happens to them, not yet. But this installment makes the case that they’re just as broken down as their Breaking Bad co-star counterparts, and seemingly just as unlikely to be able to put the pieces back together.

I reviewed this week’s doom-laden episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide.

If experiencing anxiety-induced nausea while watching is the mark of a great television drama, then Better Call Saul is an all-timer. Bearing the bittersweet title “Something Beautiful,” this week’s episode feels like writer Gordon Smith and director Daniel Sackheim issued themselves a challenge before filming: Just how many different ways can we drop our viewers’ hearts into the pits of their stomachs? I, for one, am having a hard time recovering long enough to write about it. So, y’know, great job!

I reviewed this week’s alternately scary, surprising, and sad episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide.

Kim Wexler’s turn in the spotlight, meanwhile, sees actor Rhea Seehorn turn in her best work on the series to date. At the start of her sequence of scenes in the episode, she quietly watches Jimmy’s manic new morning routine, and the question of whether the man she loves is trying to put on a brave face or has genuinely been broken by his brother’s death plays out silently behind her eyes.

Next, she travels to the offices of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, the firm to which she, Jimmy, and Chuck alike once belonged. She’s there on Jimmy’s behalf, to sign off on the final details of Chuck’s estate, for which his old partner Howard (Patrick Fabian) is the executor. After she exchanges awkward but sincere pleasantries with Chuck’s ex-wife Rebecca (Ann Cusack), you can see her slowly build up and then release the energy to have a full-fledged freakout on Howard for his behavior.

It’s not just Howard’s participation in laying out the terms of Chuck’s will — which as far as Jimmy’s concerned amount to a kiss-off payout of five thousand dollars, a chance to claim any objects of sentimental value from the wreckage of his burned-out house, a seat on the board for a scholarship fund she accurately asserts Chuck would never have been caught dead awarding to his baby brother himself, and a posthumous letter for Jimmy’s eyes only — that bothers her. It’s his post-funeral visit to their home, when he laid out his theory that Chuck committed suicide. “I thought I owed it to Jimmy to tell him,” Howard says in his own defense… but as Kim points out, he didn’t extend this same dubious courtesy to Rebecca.

Tears in her eyes, voice breaking, and covered in visible bruises from her car accident that make her look as beat up physically as she is emotionally, Kim bellows that Howard told Jimmy that his brother deliberately burned himself to death “to make yourself feel better, to unload your guilt.” “Kim, I don’t think that’s fair,” Howard says, taken aback. “Fair?” she all but screams in response, before laying out all the extremely unfair pain that both the terms of the will and Howard’s (in her eyes) self-centered handling of Chuck’s death would put Jimmy through.

“What can I do to make it better?” Howard asks, all but begging to be told what to do, as Fabian gets teary and shaky-voiced himself, his sincerity obvious. “Nothing,” Kim spits. “There is nothingyou can do. Just stay away.” She leaves him standing alone in the office, looking for all the world like a man who’s just been given six months to live by an oncologist. Which, perhaps, isn’t that far from the mark. The deadly battle between Jimmy and Chuck is slowly killing them all.

But the most moving moment from Kim and Seehorn alike comes at the end of the day, when Jimmy returns from his farcical job hunt, bearing takeout and churning out smiley platitudes about getting solid leads and even rejecting an offer that “wasn’t a perfect fit.” As they sit down on the couch to eat and watch an old movie, she shoots him a look that is pure love, pure pity, pure desire to see a person she cares about come through his current ordeal intact. When she moves in suddenly to kiss him and have sex, it feels like the only way she can express how much she wants him to feel better. Words simply aren’t up to the task. It’s one of the realest moments of acting I’ve seen on television all year.

I reviewed this week’s excellent Better Call Saul for TV Guide. The show is digging deep into its core cast right now, and TVG is letting me go long on it, bless them.

Cinnamon rolls, stacked one spiraling wad of dough on top of another, shot in black and white like something out of modern-art museum’s permanent collection. An overhead shot of an ailing man getting wheeled through a mall on a gurney, dissolving into bright white as they pass through the doors to the outside world. The uncomfortable tedium of lying in a hospital bed as unfamiliar people poke and prod your body in an unpleasantly intimate way. The feeling that you’re just one fake ID or bogus social security number or nosy cab driver away from finally taking the fall you’ve deserved to take for years. Then a transition into the present day that begins with burning cinders, floating across the screen like snowflakes from hell.

Right from the jump, Better Call Saul‘s fourth season demonstrates why this ain’t your average crime show or anti-hero prestige drama — not even the highly acclaimed one to which it serves as a prequel. Yes, it tells the origin story of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) — aka Saul Goodman, the lowlife lawyer doomed to play a pivotal role in the rise and fall of Breaking Bad’s leading monster, Walter White. And yes, it pivots off many of the artful cinematic techniques that elevated Bad to greatness: nearly abstract closeups, wild shifts in angles and colors and techniques, an unrivaled use of montage and music, to name a few.

But there’s one big difference. We know where Saul is headed: to a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska, via complicity in dozens of murders orchestrated by his client, the dreaded Heisenberg, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The brilliance of episodes like the Season 4 premiere “Smoke,” written by series co-creator Peter Gould, is how much time BCS is willing to take to get us there.

Very excited to be making my TV Guide debut with my review of the season premiere of Better Call Saul. I’ll be writing about it there all season long!

Just how bad will Jimmy McGill break this season? That’s the big question for viewers as “Better Call Saul” returns to AMC for Season 4 on Monday, Aug. 6. Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould as a prequel to “Breaking Bad,” “Saul” stars Bob Odenkirk as its title character … sort of.

“Saul” tells the story of Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer and part-time con man who devolves into the criminal attorney we first met on “Breaking Bad,” Saul Goodman. Figures from both his past and his “Breaking Bad” future push and pull him toward that grim destination, their own stories playing out in parallel.

Given the fiery, tragic finale of Season 3, can Jimmy pick up the pieces and set a straight course? We already know the answer, but the journey is fascinating to watch. And if you need a quick road map ahead of the season premiere, this character-by-character guide should get you caught up.

I wrote a Better Call Saul refresher/cheat sheet thing for the New York Times. Can’t wait for the show to return.

Underdog TV: Better Call Saul, The Americans, & Halt and Catch Fire

Your illustrious co-hosts are back on the television beat for a full episode on three underwatched shows very close to our collective heart: Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul, Cold War spy thriller The Americans, and tech-industry drama Halt and Catch Fire. Those capsule descriptions are entirely inadequate for capturing these series’ depth, heart, intelligence, and skill, of course, and this episode is our attempt to do so ourselves. (Honestly, Stefan is so insightful about all three shows that Sean pretty much takes the episode off other than to chime in with the occasional “I agree,” but he tries his best to keep up anyway!) Note: We kept our conversation SPOILER FREE in terms of big spoilable moments, so if you’re curious about any of the shows but want to know more about them before pulling the trigger, this is your chance!

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Sean’s profile of Halt and Catch Fire for Esquire.

Sean’s recent essay on Better Call Saul for Rolling Stone.

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Best Actor in a Drama
Sterling K. Brown, This Is Us
Anthony Hopkins, Westworld
Bob Odenkirk, Better Call Saul
Matthew Rhys, The Americans
Liev Schreiber, Ray Donovan
Kevin Spacey, House of Cards
Milo Ventimiglia, This Is Us

WILL WIN: Here’s a Drama category in which the absence of Game of Thrones actually doesn’t wreak havoc, since HBO nominates everyone from Peter Dinklage to Kit Harington in the Best Supporting Actor slot. Plus, last year’s winner – Mr. Robot‘s Rami Malek – isn’t even nominated this year, so the field is wide open. Our guess is that the mass appeal of This Is Us gives the excellent Sterling K. Brown an edge over the star power of Anthony Hopkins on Westworld, whose show has plenty of other opportunities to take home trophies.

SHOULD WIN: Matthew Rhys and Bob Odenkirk are both plumbing such depths of unhappiness on The Americans and Better Call Saul that their performances should come with an antidepressant prescription; we’d give either of them the gold, particularly over such “well, we’ve got to nominate these guys again, I guess” choices as Schreiber and Spacey. Let’s go with Odenkirk, thanks to his material’s higher degree of difficulty this year.

ROBBED: Rami Malek won the Emmy in 2016 for his indispensable work on Mr. Robot; this year he wasn’t even nominated. The yeoman’s work that Justin Theroux has done on The Leftovers for years deserved recognition. And while we realize the networks decide which actor is submitted for which character, it’s nutty that Jeffrey Wright got tapped for Westworld‘s Best Supporting Actor and Sir Anthony got Best Actor, rather than the other way around. But tops on the list is Michael McKean on Better Call Saul, delivering a performance of such profound misery that you’ll forget Spinal Tap and Laverne & Shirley within minutes.

The tradition continues: I took a stab at predicting the outcome of all the major categories at this coming Sunday’s Emmy Awards for Rolling Stone. I have no truck with awards shows as barometers of quality, but they can be a lot of fun to analyze like a sport.