Breaking Bad review: Season four, episode one. written in haiku.

In three seasons past,

no one would want to be Walt White.

Now, it's much worse.

Another small point of pride becomes a thing of the past.

There was a time when I used to say, "Sure, I'm a nerd, but I never watched Doctor Who."

Well... I can't say that anymore.

The 21st Century version(s) of the Doctor have an advantage over the 20th Century versions.

It's called a budget.

I've started watching the first season of The New Who and I have to say, three episodes in, it's pretty good. Christopher Eccleston plays the mysterious alien timelord, and he's got a sweet way about him and a great goofy grin. When he tells the girl who will become his sidekick that he's an alien, she replies "You sound like a bloke from the North."

"Lots of planets have a north." he answers, a little put off.

So in the first episode, they save the world. The second episode takes place five billion years into the future when the world ends, and the third episode takes place in 1869. In Cardiff.


What's so all fired interesting about Cardiff in 1869? Well, Charles Dickens is on tour. And who do they get to play Dickens? Simon Callow, the terrific British actor who was so good in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Angels In America, Shakespeare In Love and No Man's Land and so many other roles, including Charles Dickens several times.

Callow should never be mistaken for Simon Cowell, the British blight on humanity most famous for American False Idol. I wanted to make that clear.

Even if the episode were complete bollocks, and it's not, Callow's presence pushes it up a couple notches.

If you have Netflix, you can get many of the recent seasons of Doctor Who on streaming video. I haven't watched them all, but it's a hell of a lot better than that nonsense from the 1960s that some people have a fondness for, caused by misplaced nostalgia and the onset of senile dementia.

Matty Boy says check it out.

The cruel, the stupid, the cruel and stupid. That's infotainment!

Let's agree on something. There are real problems in the world.

Let me put forward my view. TV isn't helping.

I don't watch Bill O'Reilly's show. I gave it a view for a few uninterrupted minutes on a YouTube clip once and I tuned in on during the Iranian protests when innocent bystander Neda Agha-Soltan was killed to see what the Fox News take was on the crisis.

From these unedited clips, my take on O'Reilly is that he's stunningly dim-witted, incompetent at his job and massively full of himself.

To make himself look better, he brings on guests like Ann Coulter, who has all his traits but perhaps a little more so. This week during a segment on the Japanese disaster, Ann came up with the remarkable statement that the modern scientific consensus is radiation is good for you.

As I said before, real problems in the world. TV isn't helping.

If I have any part of this wrong, please enlighten me.



And just to be fair and balanced, let me bring up The Ricky Gervais Show on HBO. Several years ago Gervais and his friend Steven Merchant started making podcasts that were incredibly successful, and last year they were turned into a cartoon show on HBO. The show has been picked up for a second season and when the first season DVDs appeared on Netflix, it had that sure sign of a hit, the VERY LONG WAIT label.

The show consists of Gervais and his friend Stephen Merchant mocking a not very bright man named Karl Pilkington.

It is the worst piece of shit I have seen in ages.

Gervais is allegedly on my team. He's an atheist, I'm an agnostic, yadda yadda yadda. I've laughed at some of his stuff, notably parts of The Invention Of Lying. I dislike embarrassment comedy, so I am not a fan of any version of The Office. But listening to these shows, you get to hear the real Ricky Gervais and he is a miserable excuse for a human being. Being trapped in an elevator with him would be as much torture as being locked in that same elevator with Coulter or O'Reilly.

If you get through to the end of one episode of this dreck, you are either a stronger person than I am or more sadistic. I'll let you decide which.

I had a similar experience with Kathy Griffin as an entertainer. I saw some of her performances, thought she was funny in a mean sort of way, laughed because I disliked her targets.

I then watched her reality show. She's mean to everybody.

I talked to a friend who dealt with Griffin professionally once and said it was an experience she will never repeat.

But let me repeat.

Real problems in the world. TV isn't helping.

I can give multiple examples to back up both these statements.

To quote my friend Victor Manjarrez, we don't deserve to survive as a species.

Is it me or is it them (or him)?

In the spirit of "Ok, I'll give it a try", I got the first DVD of the first season of Modern Family from Netflix because I had heard so many positive reviews.

I made it through five episodes and turned it off.

For good.

This is embarrassment comedy. I hate embarrassment comedy. Characters you are supposed to like are there to embarrass themselves over and over and over until something allegedly funny happens. That is the modus operandi for the fat kid in the family on the left, the dad in the family in the middle and the fat gay guy on the far right.

There are some good comedies in the past that went too far down that road and pulled out of the tailspin. I remember when I used to watch The Odd Couple when I was a kid and for what seems like about half a season, every episode would end with Felix not having a shred of dignity left. Too many George Costanza focused episodes on Seinfeld were that way and I stopped watching when the show originally aired, though I came back to it in re-runs.

I doubt I'm coming back to Modern Family. It's just painful to watch for me, but I will admit it's my prejudices that make it unacceptable.


On the other hand, when dealing with harrassment, the law takes into account the allegedly reasonable hypothetical person.

I believe the allegedly reasonable hypothetical person reading David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla will finish the book in a near suicidal depression.

If the deeply unhappy Mr. Mamet ever commits himself, any competent mental health professional will take away his belt, shoelaces and anything sharper than a plastic pocket comb.

I've known a few writers from Hollywood, and they are an embittered bunch, not without cause. But Mamet turns cynicism and disillusion into an Olympic sport in this book. He's written and directed some of my favorite movies of the past twenty five years, but apparently it is all ashes in his mouth, which he gladly shares with anyone who is fool enough to venture into spitting range.

Let me share with you the best thing in this book. Technically, since it's a cover blurb, it's not in the book, but it's the line that drew me in, and I repeat it here to keep others from making the same mistake.

"David Mamet is supremely talented. He is a gifted writer and observer of society and its characters. I'm sure he will be able to find work somewhere, somehow, just no longer in the movie business."
-Steve Martin

Avoid this book at all costs. Your mental health is too valuable and so is your time.

Mad Men, Season 4:Episode 4, The Rejected

I can be a very finicky TV watcher. I can't even begin to list the well-reviewed TV shows that I gave up on. Going the other direction, I was a loyal watcher of several shows that crashed and burned in the ratings. That said, I am currently in love with the fourth season of Mad Men. Like with Breaking Bad, I wanted to watch the most recent season in real time without springing for the ridiculously priced "basic cable" option that is available where I live, so I got the season on iTunes. Unlike Breaking Bad, whose third season I enjoyed very much, I find myself watching episodes of Mad Men twice before I comment on them. As usual, this post will have spoilers after the first photo, so you have been warned.

I'd also like to note that I ripped these pictures off from Tim Goodman's blog at sfgate.com.

If you watch the show, you know Don Draper is to Mad Men what Jimmy McNulty was to The Wire or Tony was to The Sopranos. You'll also know those other shows were filled with interesting and rich characters, and while Don's personal and professional life certainly play a prominent role in the most recent episode, it's Peggy and Pete who really steal the show this week.

In the very first episode, Peggy and Pete felt like plot devices. Peggy Olson was the new girl, so she was there to have things explained to her, which meant also explained to us viewers. The plot gimmick at the end of the first season where she didn't know she was pregnant felt contrived to me, but the show has did a great job of pulling out of what could have been a tail spin. Now, she gets to be young, successful and independent in New York in the mid sixties. This episode was directed by John Slattery, the actor who plays Roger Sterling. Roger quite often gets the funniest line in the episode, but this week it's Peggy who gets the topper. She goes to an odd artistic party at the invitation of Joyce, an assistant photo editor at LIFE. When Joyce kisses her at the party after giving her a drag on a joint, a surprised Peggy says "I have a boyfriend." Joyce comes back with "Yes, but he doesn't own your vagina." Peggy, ever the nice girl, smiles and says "No, but he's renting it."

With as dark as this season has been, a show titled The Rejected promises serious misery. Though there are characters who have a rough time in the episode, most notably Don's secretary, it was great to see Peggy and Pete have some triumphs that may actually be long term.

Pete Campbell's growth as a fleshed out character may be even more remarkable than Peggy's. Even when he was on Angel, Vincent Kartheiser lived on his sneer as much as Kristen Stewart from Twilight lives on her bitten lower lip. But this episode puts many obstacles in his way and he overcomes them like an adult would, and also gives him chances to play a character who is truly happy and not really used to it.

A conflict comes up and he's going to have to dump his father-in-law's account. He takes the news from the other partners at first with his usual bad humor, but the meeting with his father-in-law takes a completely different turn when the older man lets slip that he knows his daughter is pregnant, a piece of news Pete is not yet aware of. He doesn't sulk or whine. He's surprised at first, and then he's happy. He treats his wife like she's the woman he loves. He shows a lot of reserve (his father-in-law calls him a "high WASP"), but you can tell he's enjoying himself and the good news for his family.

He and Harry Crane have lunch with Ken Cosgrove, one of the young men at the old Sterling Cooper who did not get called to make the move to the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Ken was always so cheerful and talented in a modest way, but he's a much more bitter individual now. He accuses Pete of talking trash behind his back, and while Pete at first denies it and some of the accusations might not even be true, he apologizes and the relationship looks to be mended. Besides Ken being more jaded than before, the most shocking thing in the episode is him slamming McCann Erickson, an ad agency that still exists. Ken says he hadn't seen so many retarded people in the same building since he went to work one day with his mom, a nurse at a Vermont state hospital. In one way, it's the standard non-politically correct speech from the sixties the show captures so well, but to blast a company that still exists was startling, even if it is talking about the company's situation forty five years in the past.

Pete also gets to shine when he finally gets around to telling his father-in-law about the conflict of interest at the new agency, and pitches the older man on letting Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce take other products with no conflict, the much larger share of the company pie. His father-in-law calls him a son of a bitch, but Pete just shrugs it off. He doesn't whine, he doesn't threaten, he acts like an adult with a stronger hand and he plays the hand correctly. At the end of the episode, we see Pete as an adult in with the big boys, while Peggy is part of the youth movement of the sixties. The script has already made it clear which group really has the power, but to see them look at each other as the two groups split to go have separate lunches is a brilliant touch of sadness and longing. Series creator Matthew Weiner co-wrote the script, so it's hard to say if director or writer deserves the most credit for this episode. Regardless, it worked flawlessly from beginning to end. I find myself looking forward to new episodes with more anticipation than I have felt in a very long time.

Mad Men, Season 4:Episode 3, The Good News

Season Four of Mad Men is now in full swing. The third episode entitled The Good News aired on Sunday, and several of the themes of the new season were expanded upon. I'm going to give a bare bones review, but it will contain spoilers. If you want full-blown reviews with spoilers from start to end, I recommend this post on HuffPo and this one on Salon.

You have been warned.

The first three episodes of season four have dealt with the holidays Thanksgiving, Christmas of 1964 and the New Year of 1965, showing how difficult they have been for the newly divorced Don Draper. The new ad agency is shown as having early success though still financially precarious, but Don's personal life is a mess. He's drinking too much and we see multiple young women not falling for his charms anymore. The plan is for him to spend New Year's in Acapulco, but first he stops off in San Pedro, California to visit Anna Draper (Melinda Page Hamilton), the only person who has known for some time that he is really Dick Whitman. Anna was married to the real Don Draper who died in Korea, and when Dick found out that his identity theft had a victim, he did the right thing and took care of her financially, and "divorced" her when he decided to marry Betty.

This is the first episode where we see Don (or Dick, whatever we should call him when he is with Anna) actually being happy. Since this is a drama, that happiness is short-lived as he finds out through Anna's family that her health is very bad, a secret her sister keeps from her and asks Don to keep secret as well. This seems almost impossible that an adult would be treated this way today, but it actually happened back then, the most famous example being Rex Harrison knowing his wife Kay Kendall had leukemia and the doctors and Harrison keeping the bad news from her because there was nothing to be done.

It was good to see Anna again, though probably not many times more. The show has a habit of having people die off stage, so this might even be her last appearance.

In the third season, it looked like the office manager Joan was going to be written out, but her dream wedding to Dr. Greg Harris (Sam Page) hit some bumps, and she is back as the person running the office at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Her husband is another interesting character who gets short shrift, always a problem with a large ensemble cast, and it was good to see him get some important scenes. His career as a surgeon wasn't fated for success and he joined the Army. Joan wants to start a family, but Greg's uncertain future makes all plans nearly impossible. Still, they get a good scene together where he is able to come to her aid. If the show follows form, it may be a short tender moment before things take a turn for the worse.

Another character who doesn't get many good scenes is Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), the transplanted Englishman who made the new firm possible by firing Bert Cooper, Roger Sterling and Don Draper from their old jobs, leaving all four of them free to start anew. In so many scenes, he's just the annoying partner who counts paper clips and legal pads, but several events in this episode help to turn his already precarious marriage inside out. Don, who decides to return to New York instead of continuing on to Acapulco after finding out the bad news about Anna, befriends Lane for the first time, and the two of them have an eventful evening out. They see a comic, who seeing two men alone at a table in front of him assumes they are gay and begins to rib them. Both Don and Lane take the insults in semi-good humor, but Lane finally shouts, "We're not homosexuals, we're divorced!" In some ways, this foreshadows the new prevalence of divorce on the American scene, which will be played for laughs on Broadway in Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, which will open a little later in 1965.


Mad Men is famous for its attention to detail, so it's more than a little disappointing to find a major anachronism in the show. Besides seeing the comedian, Don and Lane take in a movie on New Year's Day 1965. They debate several film choices they see in the newspaper and almost all of them have release dates in the last part of 1964, so they should still be in theaters on the day in question. One movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, was released a year before, so it's a bit chancy whether it would still be showing in Manhattan after thirteen months, but it's still possible.

But after they look at multiple choices, Don and Lane decide to go to Gamera the Invincible, the only Gamera film shot in black and white. (Yes, I knew this. Yes, I'm a nerd.) Here is the problem. It was released in Japan in November 1965 and in the U.S. December 1966. This amount of research is a few keystrokes on the Internet. I hope this sloppiness doesn't continue.

In the comments of yesterday's post, my blog buddy Fran said that TV quality has suffered as the audience has fragmented. I respectfully disagree. One of the major strides forward in television in the past twenty years or so is having shows where the arc of the main characters is more important than solving the problem of the week. This story telling method has been part of the soap opera tradition for some time, but it is now the standard in hour long dramas, and better writers like Matthew Weiner, who worked on The Sopranos before he became the creator of Mad Men, have turned episodic television into an art form that can be considered the equal of the novel. More often than not, the best stuff on TV is significantly superior to big budget films in theaters in terms of interesting stories and compelling characters. I'm looking forward to see where the lives of Don Draper and the rest of the people on Mad Men will end up, and I hope Matthew Weiner can find at least one more good season in him.

A concise review of the Season 3 finale of Breaking Bad

Damn.

The Prisoner (2009)

A few years back, AMC announced they would be filming a remake of The Prisoner, the single season cult classic 1960s British import starring Patrick McGoohan as a spy who resigns and is taken against his will to a mysterious but charming resort called The Village where everyone seems to be content but him. He wants his freedom. They want his information. Every show ends in stalemate.

The announcement said the new version would be a six episode mini-series. The hero Number Six would be played by Jim Caviezel and his nemesis Number Two would be portrayed by Sir Ian McKellen.

Well, I thought, that's half a piece of good news, which has to be better than none.

It turned out to be no good news at all.

The modern version of The Prisoner is a re-imagining, not a remake. Like the most recent versions of Battlestar Galactica, Alice in Wonderland and Star Trek, the latest version of The Prisoner bears little resemblance to the original. If you actually liked the original, you have a natural resentment to the new version built in from the beginning.

The original TV series was a remarkable breath of fresh air. James Bond had single-handedly created a new genre of spy movies and TV shows, much in the same way The Maltese Falcon had created the hard-boiled detective genre some twenty years earlier. There were rip-offs of Bond, there were spoofs of Bond, and it even opened the door for John LeCarré and others to create spy entertainment that wasn't just hot chicks, beautiful locales and suave villains. The Prisoner turned the genre on its head, portraying a man in an oddly cheerful dystopia, questioning what it means to be free and why a free society needs to keep secrets.

The modern version of The Prisoner has no such claim to originality. In the late sixties, paranoia as popular entertainment felt new. Now, it feels very close to being played out. Besides ripping off small details from the original show, The Prisoner also feels like a re-hash of Lost, Dollhouse, Fringe, The X Files and a lot of other TV shows and movies that are frankly better written.

As always, the writing is where it starts, and this show felt stale very early on. It started slow, but by the third episode I had hopes it would get better. The fourth episode dashed those hopes but I plowed ahead anyway. The end of the show was somewhat clever, but how it got there was remarkably unsatisfying.

Then there's The Village. In the original show, The Village was like an extra character, an interesting place that the viewer might well like to visit. It may not have been quite as remarkable to British viewers, since it was in Wales, but to Americans it was definitely exotic and charming. The new version of The Village looks like a tract home hell hole stuck in the middle of the desert. You very soon get the idea that Number Six is not the only discontent in this place and there is no charm in this dystopia.

Speaking of no charm brings us naturally to Jim Caviezel. I have never connected with a character played by Jim Caviezel. He has all the dumb earnestness of Kevin Costner without any of the likability or ease with an occasional smart ass quip. In The Prisoner, he's supposed to be the Smartest Guy In The Room. If he's that, it's a pretty dumb room.

And at last, we come to Sir Ian McKellan, not the worst part of the show but easily the biggest disappointment. He's usually as good or better than the material, but in this role, being Sir Ian McKellan got in the way. His version of Number Two has a family, a wife in a coma that he is prolonging with drugs he feeds her and a very pretty young son who turns out to be gay. As the audience, we fully expect that nothing is what it seems in The Village, so it is a distinct possibility that neither the wife or son are actually related to him. Given that the character of the son is gay and the actor Sir Ian is openly gay, anyone paying attention has to consider the possibility that Number Two is keeping the young man around for other reasons. That story line does NOT come to pass, and as creepy as it is, there are other story lines nearly as creepy that do come true. If the actor playing Number Two was not openly gay, like Patrick Stewart or Kenneth Brannagh, that unneeded distraction wouldn't be there.

The final scene of the new version of The Prisoner leaves open the possibility of continuing the story, and I hope that no one succumbs to the temptation. Six episodes was quite enough, thanks, and the writers and actors are just not up to the task.

Veronica Mars

I'm always on the lookout for new stuff to put on my Netflix list and several people including sfmike of the Civic Center blog recommended Veronica Mars, a show that played on UPN and the CW networks. I rarely watched anything on those channels, so this didn't catch my attention when it first aired.

The premise of the show is the town of Neptune, California has no middle class. There are the rich people and the people who clean the rich people's homes. Veronica Mars has a pass into the rich people's world because her dad is the country sheriff and she is dating a rich kid and is best friends with the rich kid's sister. But the sister, played by Amanda Seyfried in flashback scenes, is murdered, and Sheriff Mars steps on toes investigating the crime and is replaced. He becomes a private investigator and she becomes an outcast.

Kristen Bell plays Veronica, and as we can see in the picture, Ms. Bell is actually cuter than a button. You might think that this is the reason a dirty old man like myself watches the show, but News Flash! TV and movies are filled to capacity with attractive women. The story has to work or I lose interest.

Veronica is a superhero without powers. She is an A student, she is at the Sherlock Holmes level of sleuthing abilities and she always puts together cute outfits and just the right lip gloss on a very modest budget. The show is filled with nods to earlier TV feminist icons. Two actresses from Buffy play recurring roles, Charisma Carpenter and Allison Hannigan. The creator of Buffy, Joss Whedon, showed up for one episode as an annoying car rental employee. In an episode where the FBI is brought in to investigate a kidnapping, the lead FBI agent is played by Lucy Lawless. There was no Veronica vs. Xena climactic battle. Veronica lives on her wits, not on beating people up. Also, Lucy is about six feet tall and Kristen is barely over five feet. I think if she really annoyed Ms. Lawless, she would be found stuck in a locker somewhere.


For me, the weak link on the show is the young male cast. The show is about class war, so there isn't supposed to be much mixing of the different classes. Even inside the different classes, there is strict ethnic separation. The most interesting young male character is Weevil, the leader of a Hispanic gang for whom Veronica has done favors and vice versa. (Everyone is always doing favors for Veronica, usually without pay, and she is almost always taking people's cases, also often without pay.) Weevil is played by Francis Capra, a former child star. He's a good looking young man, but his height is listed at 5'5", which limits his options as a leading man. In any case, I like his work on the show.


One of my favorite aspects of Veronica Mars is her relationship with her dad Keith, played by Enrico Colantoni, who was the lead alien in Galaxy Quest and had a featured role on the sitcom Just Shoot Me. There has been a long and storied tradition of TV dads being clueless idiots, but Keith Mars is shown as being competent at his work and a loving father. At the end of the first season, Veronica is in a damsel in distress situation, not a common theme on the show, and it's her dad who saves the day. I like the actor, I like the role, I'm glad to see Mr. Colantoni continuing to get work.

As for Ms. Bell, she is continuing to get work, but like the post-Buffy career of Sarah Michelle Gellar, I haven't found anything she has done since quite as interesting, though some of the work has been popular, like a brief stint on Heroes, the successful but truly awful comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall and the narrator on Gossip Girl.

I recommend skipping those and watching Veronica Mars instead. The CW website has seasons 2 and 3 online, so you need to rent the DVDs to catch up on the show from the beginning.

Mid season 3 of Breaking Bad:The Passion of Hank Schrader

What follows is a discussion of the most current three episodes of season 3 of Breaking Bad. Spoilers and plot points will be discussed below the lolz of Hank Schrader, the DEA agent and brother-in-law of the main character of the show, Walter White.


I remain of the opinion that Breaking Bad continues to improve as time goes on. While the actions of Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and partner in crime Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) continue to be the engine that moves the plot forward, other characters have their time in the spotlight as well, and for the past three episodes, the story of Hank Schrader, brilliantly portrayed by Dean Norris, has been the main character. Offered a great chance at career advancement by sharing time between the El Paso office and the show's home base of Albuquerque, Hank passes up the promotion to chase the trail of the new producer of crystal meth, the criminal known by the code name Heisenberg. He has no idea that Heisenberg is his brother-in-law Walter White, but he does have Jesse Pinkman in his sights, and he continues the investigation without a partner when the rest of the Albuquerque office thinks the trail has gone cold. In episode 6, he looks to have Jesse cornered in the Winnebago meth lab. Walt is meeting with Jesse inside, unbeknownst to Hank, but the criminals give him the slip by getting someone to call and tell him his wife is in critical condition in the hospital. By the time he figures out it was a ruse, the Winnebago has been destroyed.

At the beginning of Episode 7, Hank beats Jesse senseless, enraged that the criminal used his wife to get to him. The Cousins, two assassins from Mexico intent on killing Walt, are given the okay to kill Hank instead, since he is the one who actually killed their cousin Tuco in a shootout. Whereas the episode begins with Hank beating a defenseless Jesse, it ends with Hank, without his gun while the investigation into his misconduct is held, being set upon by the Cousins, and barely escaping with his life.

In Episode 8, Hank is always there, though Dean Norris is not to be seen on screen. The family holds a vigil in the hospital where Hank has been brought after the shootout. One of the Cousins is dead and the other is also in the hospital trying to recover from the wounds Hank inflicted on him. Ever since The Sopranos, the hospital vigil scene has been done so often that it's very nearly a cliche, but the quality of this episode convinces me that Vince Gilligan and his writers continue to produce the best weekly drama series on TV that doesn't air on HBO.

When the show started several years ago, Hank felt like a plot device, the gregarious jock of the family sent to torture the introspective nerd. But Hank's character has grown so much in the past few years, and we see him as a man with virtues and flaws and goals of his own. The writing has a lot to do with that, and so does the note perfect performance of Dean Norris as Hank. There are echoes of Javert and Jean Valjean in Hank's relentless pursuit of Heisenberg, but two and a half seasons in, we know that Hank really is the good guy and Walter White, for all his good intentions, is not a misunderstood hero but sinking instead into villainy with every bad decision.

Vince Gilligan isn't certain how long the show will last. He has talked about a four to five season arc to tell all of Walt's story. That might change over time, but I do want to see where the trail will end.

The new supporting cast on Breaking Bad

The story line on the show Breaking Bad has progressed and important new characters have been added. In the first season, Walter White and his partner Jesse Pinkman produce a better grade of crystal meth than the competition, but they are still just street level dealers. As they move up the food chain and survive some tough situations due mainly to luck, they gain access to the next level of money and power in the drug trade, and two new characters become part of the regular supporting cast.

On Breaking Bad, series creator Vince Gilligan never throws a fastball. There always has to be a twist. Sometimes it's a curve, sometimes a screwball, sometimes a hard slider. Bob Odenkirk's portrayal of the criminal lawyer Saul Goodman is definitely a screwball. Odenkirk has been a comedy writer and actor since the early 1990s, starting on Saturday Night Live and working on shows like Mr. Show with David Cross, as well as doing a lot of guest spots on sitcoms. The character of Saul Goodman is a lawyer advising criminals on how to commit crimes more efficiently. We've seen this before, most notably with the character Tom Hagen in The Godfather and also on shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, but Saul Goodman is also one of those ridiculous ambulance chasers that advertises on late night TV. In a show that tends very much to the dark side, Saul is played for laughs by Odenkirk, and he delivers on a regular basis.


It is Saul that gives Walt his introduction to the big time drug kingpin Gus Frings, played by Giancarlo Esposito. I first noticed Esposito in Spike Lee films made back in the late 1980s, but he had been working on TV for about ten years before that and has had steady work ever since.

Unlike Saul, Gus is no joke. He is very quiet and serious, and like the old E.F. Hutton ads said, when he talks, people listen. Besides being a major drug kingpin, Gus runs a chain of fast food chicken restaurants called Los Pollos Hermanos throughout the Southwestern United States, which is also his territory for his other, more lucrative product. He got where he is by being smart and being cautious. He doesn't seem to have any temper at all so far, but we have seen that when violence needs to be done, he does not hesitate to give the order.

These additions to the cast have added to the drama and excitement of the show, and these are only a few of the ways the story has expanded. While the plots are surprising, so far characters have stayed in character and the things they do in remarkable and stressful situations make sense. I find myself looking forward to each new episode with the hope of seeing more good work from a master storyteller. I consider Vince Gilligan to be one of the best writers working on TV today, at the same level as David Milch, Joss Whedon, J. Michael Straczynzski, Matthew Weiner and many others at their best.

The small but pivotal role.

I can't say enough good things about the TV show Breaking Bad, but I'm certainly going to try. I don't have my TV connected up to anything but a DVD player, so all the new TV I watch is through Hulu or other web sources. The only show I am paying money to watch is Breaking Bad, which I subscribe to on iTunes. Every week, I get the new episode and a short extra clip of Vince Gilligan and his actors and crew talking about what's happening in the episode.

The show is now in its third season and it gets better every year. The first season was almost all about the chemistry teacher turned crystal meth manufacturer Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his ne'er-do-well former student and partner in crime Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul). The story has opened up considerably, and I wanted to comment in this post about how good the cast is from top to bottom, including some actors you might remember from other TV shows or movies who play small but pivotal roles very well.

One of the first actors in the supporting cast I recognized was Tess Harper as Jesse Pinkman's mom. She was in Tender Mercies with Robert Duvall several decades ago and she played Tommy Lee Jones' wife in No Country For Old Men.

Meeting her and her husband, we see that Jesse is the wastrel son of an upper middle class family, not the product of the mean streets where he now lives. Together, she and her husband give Jesse tough love, most of the toughness coming from the husband and most of the love coming from her.


Jonathan Banks has been a character actor for over thirty years now, and most of his career has been spent playing villains. Two of his most memorable roles were in two Eddie Murphy vehicles, 48 Hrs. and Beverly Hills Cop.

In the topsy-turvy world of Breaking Bad, Banks plays a mysterious character named Mike who acts as an underworld guardian angel for Walter White. We first meet him as an employee of the lawyer Saul Goodman (more about Saul tomorrow), but we find out later that his loyalties are divided.

Banks is 63 years old, and he's playing a guy you aren't supposed to fuck with, if you'll pardon the expression. He does it very well.

Don't fuck with Mike.




John De Lancie's best known role was as Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He plays the father of Jesse Pinkman's love interest and, as we see here, he is also an air traffic controller.

His role in Breaking Bad definitely qualifies as small but pivotal. He has a great scene with Walt in a bar where they meet by coincidence. There are several major plot twists involving his character in the second and third seasons, and writing much more than this would require a spoiler warning.

Mark Margolis, like Jonathan Banks, has played a lot of villains in his long career as a character actor. If you watched Law & Order from way back in the day, you might recognize him as the gun dealer who shot Paul Sorvino's character.

In Breaking Bad, he plays Tio, the mute uncle of Tuco, a major bad guy from seasons one and two. Margolis doesn't look particularly Hispanic, and all he gets to do is sit in a wheelchair and ring a bell, but you always understand the danger he represents whenever he's on screen. Acting isn't just lines, and veterans like Margolis understand this very well.


I thought it was a very good chance that no actor from the cast of The Wire would ever get a better role than the one they had on that ground-breaking show, but David Costabile's role on Breaking Bad may be the first major exception. On The Wire, he was the weaselly Managing Editor of The Baltimore Sun, one of the people above Gus Haynes on the org chart who, unlike Gus, had a very hard time doing the right thing. His character on Breaking Bad was introduced just last week, Walt's new assistant in the drug manufacturing business, Gale Boetticher. In just one show, he's already had a couple of terrific scenes, and his character has a lot of potential for growth and conflict.

Those who pay attention to labels on blogs will have noticed I made a new label specifically for this show. I may have just barely 100 regular readers of this blog, but I intend to stand on my little soapbox regularly and sing the praises of Breaking Bad. I absolutely do NOT recommend trying to watch the next episode tonight if you've never seen it before. Rent it from the beginning, because the arc of the story is important. I won't say it's the best drama on TV ever, but in my opinion, the only shows that compare with it are the best on HBO, which puts it in very good company indeed.

Season Three of Mad Men: The quibbles (SPOILER ALERT!)

As I said in yesterday's post, I liked the third season of Mad Men a lot. I thought it was a big improvement over the second season. Even so, there were some story lines I didn't like and some that I thought didn't make sense. These complaints are small compared to the positives, but I bring them up anyway.

(Important plot points of season three now discussed. Avert your eyes if you haven't watched yet and want to be surprised.)

Mother of mercy, is this the end of Salvatore Romano? The answer to that question looks like a "yes", and that's too bad.

Sal was a great character. Played by openly gay actor Bryan Batt, it's as plain as day to modern audiences that Sal is gay, but nobody at Sterling Cooper can make the connection. Sometimes it was played for laughs in a quiet way. There's a scene where beautiful young Betty Draper is shocked that a movie entitled The Best of Everything would think that Joan Crawford is any competition for beautiful young Suzy Parker. Don casually mentions that Sal loves Joan Crawford. Sal also has a scene where he savages what Loretta Young wore on her show the night before. Nobody bats an eye.

The reason they gave that Sal had to be fired makes perfect sense. The guy from Lucky Strike is mad at him and that account is worth a lot more than an art director, even a good one.

Even so, I wanted to see where they were going to go with his story. And after the ridiculously handsome Jon Hamm, Bryan Batt was the best looking guy in a very good looking cast. This is a show that knows that eye candy is important.

Somebody loses a foot, somebody gots to GO! Okay, the John Deere scene. It was great. Just like the scene where Fred Rumsen was found having peed himself, it feels like a true anecdote dressed up to be made part of the story.

Also, let's consider the real world. John Deere decided to sign off on this plot twist. That took some guts on their part to have their product portrayed in a bad light.

The only thing is, if it happened, someone would have to take the fall for it, and the best bet would be the incompetent Lois who was driving the damn thing. Ken Cosgrove, who first drove the tractor into the office before the party where everybody was drunk, might have to take the brunt as well, but Lois and Ken are still on the staff at the end of the season, and that's just not right.

Did Roger Sterling get a mulligan on his heart attack? Roger had the heart attack a while back and there were a few episodes that showed him as frail. He was supposed to stop smoking and cut back on drinking. In the third season, he seems to smoke or drink or both in nearly every scene.

For a show that prides itself on actions having consequences, the non-aftermath of the John Deere episode and Roger's no cost return to bad habits don't feel right in terms of the writing.

Peggy and Duck? Yuck. Having Peggy and Duck hook up isn't illogical, given the assumption that Peggy is always falling for the wrong guy. I just didn't buy it. I saw the second half of season three first, so now that I've seen it from beginning to end, I expected things to make more sense, but this is the relationship that I still can't fathom.

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Again, let me say it. Quibbles. Mad Men is still an interesting show and now that I have a Mac and iTunes TV shows work just fine, I'll probably go ahead and subscribe to the show when season four becomes available, just so I can hold my own at the water cooler with a co-worker at Mills who also loves the show. I am often not a loyal TV viewer, but I like the change in direction promised in the next year, even though it means some interesting characters are going to have to go by the wayside.

Season Three of Mad Men: A few of my favorite things (SPOILER ALERT!)

I've just finished watching Season 3 of Mad Men on DVD, and overall, I liked it very much, much more than I liked Season 2. Today, I'm going to review several of the things I liked most about the season and tomorrow, I'm going to put all my quibbles and gripes into a separate post. The positives far out-number the negatives.

As I said in the title, I will be discussing important plot points of the show, so if you haven't seen it yet and you think you might like to, the rest of this post will ruin some surprises for you.


The return of Don Draper, world's greatest cad: Don Draper is obviously the center of the show, and if his year isn't good, the whole show suffers. In season 2, he spent a lot of time cheating on his wife with Bobbie Barrett, a woman who wasn't even close to being in his league. That whole relationship didn't make much sense, because Don likes the chase and it was Bobbie who threw herself at him.

This year's major conquest is Miss Farrell, the school teacher, played by the lovely Abigail Spencer. (Really, using the adjective "lovely" when talking about the Mad Men cast is like using the adjective "tall" when describing someone in the NBA. It's much more of a surprise when a major cast member isn't lovely, and that goes for the guys as well.) If I may put myself forward as the a typical male viewer of the show, this is what I want. Don Draper is supposed to be a slightly more believable James Bond, but without the firearm. Fabulous babes are supposed to fall into his orbit and he is supposed to bed them. When you look and act like Jon Hamm and they dress you in those impeccably tailored suits, it shouldn't be that hard to do.


Meet Pete Campbell, real human being: In the very first show, Pete Campbell was more like a plot device than a real character. He was there to be hated and that didn't change much in the first two seasons. No matter how morally ambiguous Don Draper's character is, compared to Pete Campbell, he has all virtues. Played by Vincent Kartheiser using the pout and sneer that served him so well on the TV show Angel for several seasons, Pete is the spoiled rich kid stuck in middle management who thinks himself a failure, compared to the successful self-made man that Don presents to the world.

This year, while he still commits some vile acts including cheating on his faithful wife Trudy, played by the lovely Allison Brie, we also start seeing Pete actually being good at his job. Also, after cheating, we see him being contrite and we see Trudy as a real asset for his career. It's probably too late to turn Pete Campbell into a saint, or as close to a saint as anyone on this show can claim to be, but it was nice to see him have some successes and make himself useful instead of always complaining and not seeming to be much help around the firm except for his family connections.


Bye, bye, Birdie. I'll be glad to see you go.: Can I write "played by the lovely" one more time? Oh yes, at least once more.

Betty Draper, played by the lovely January Jones, is easily my least favorite character on the show. She is a complete drip. She finally figured out the big secret Don has been hiding from her for all these years and she is planning to divorce him.

Thank you, writers of Mad Men! Get the hell rid of this millstone. Of course, the character is not going to go away. What I like about the show is that almost all of the things that happen make sense in terms of what the characters should do, given their motivations and the standards of the day. When the show began, a divorced woman was added to the cast and the general reaction was shock and surprise. Now, several characters have gone through divorce and the stigma is slowly going away. That is an important part of the culture of the early sixties.

There's still plenty more twists and turns, but I'd like to see what Don would do if he was free to make fresh mistakes instead of being tied to a woman who doesn't love him.


The return of Joan: Again, the writers of Mad Men develop story lines that make sense for the characters involved. Joan Holloway, played by the stunning Christina Hendricks, was a brilliant office manager, but if she was going to live in the manner in which she wanted to become accustomed, she had no real choice but to marry well. A bright and capable young woman like her should be able to find a good catch, which she does when she marries a surgeon, played by the lovely Sam Page. Because it's a drama and things aren't supposed to go well, her best laid plan gangs agley, as Robbie Burns would write. Still, she's Joan and she doesn't mope. She moves forward and she makes the best of the situation and it opens the door for her to continue to be a part of the show, which is a big win for fans like me, by which I mean heterosexual males.

Though I have no right to speak for them, I think even homosexual males can like her. Joan is a fabulous bitch.

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Other good things about Season 3: The start of the new agency, Conrad Hilton, Peggy smoking marijuana, the way the Kennedy assassination was handled. I'm sure there are other things I liked that I've forgotten for the time being.

Tomorrow: some quibbles with the writing and a sensible story line that still makes me sad.

Science Fun, Vol. 6:Beakman's World and soap

Back in the early 1990s, two science shows aimed at kids began to air. I have a lot of respect for Bill Nye The Science Guy, but I have to admit that I tuned in to Beakman's World on as regular a basis as I could, given that it came on Saturday afternoons and could easily be pre-empted for a ball game or other such non-regularly scheduled stuff.

Beakman's World was very silly, and as I had just turned 18 for the second time, it was right up my alley. How can you not love Lester the Rat? Who isn't in the mood for a segment called Those Disgusting Animals, in which the viewer is told about the digestive habits of the lamprey?

Most of the science Beakman discussed I already knew, but I remember to this day the discussion of soap. Some viewer sent a question in permanent marker on a filthy grease covered handkerchief asking what made soap work.

Beakman said "Soap makes water wetter."

The fancy explanation is that oil and water don't mix and oil tends to attract dirt to make grease. Things that mix with water are hydrophilic, things that don't are hydrophobic. Soap is made of long molecules that connect to water at one point and connect to grease nearly everywhere else, which means a soap molecule can be moved around by water and all the gunk that connects to the soap molecule will move around as well.

Though not as precise, I like Beakman's short version of the explanation better.

An All-Star from the minor leagues.

A bigger budget has meant better or at least more lavish production for as long as there has been entertainment. The general rule was that A-list pictures were better than B-list pictures, and anything in the movie houses was better than anything on TV. Now that a bigger budget means more special effects and explosions, quality drama has next to nothing to do with budget, and TV series are putting forward some of the most interesting stories available.

Even if we take the TV industry on its own, you would expect the big networks to make the best shows, but even that "common sense" view isn't backed up by the facts on the ground. HBO makes fewer shows than the big networks, and while not all of them are great, the best of them are better than anything else, in large part because HBO is not repeating the tired genres to death, which is the greatest but not only flaw with network TV right now. Showtime has tried, but the team is making the decisions there is just not as good as their counterparts at HBO.


One should expect the basic cable networks to make the worst of the shows, stuck as they are with even smaller budgets, but AMC bucks that trend by producing only two shows, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and so far making very good decisions. Breaking Bad, the story of a terminally ill chemistry teacher becoming a crystal meth producer, is now in its third season on the air. Since I don't have cable, I'm watching the second season now on Netflix, and I'm now going pony up the dough to watch the third season on iTunes as the new episodes come out.

For my money, the second season of Breaking Bad has been better than the first because the story has opened up. The first season was all about Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, the chemistry teacher and his stoner ex-student who become unlikely partners, played respectively by Brian Cranston (foreground, second from left) and Aaron Paul (far right). While they are still the center of the story, other members of Walt's family have become more proactive and less reactive and their arcs have taken interesting turns. Anna Gunn, playing Walt's pregnant wife Sklyer, has stopped just being the supportive and long-suffering partner and is starting to rebel against the secrets and lies.

The show is a cross between the action show and soap opera dramas, so it's not surprising that the character whose story has come forward the most is Walt's brother-in-law Hank, a DEA agent. In the very first episode, Hank seems more like a plot device than an actual character, the jock in the family sent to torment the family nerd, and also the convenient way Walt learns how much money can be made in the drug trade. But the writers have done much more with the character as time as gone forward, and Dean Norris, the bald guy in the background of the picture who looks like he's constructed out of bowling balls, has really shone in the role now that the writers have given him more to do.

Like with many of the best TV shows right now, it isn't a vanilla product and it might not be to everyone's taste. I was hesitant to watch the show when it started, worried that it would glamorize the drug trade, but there's nothing glamorous about this show in any way. Brian Cranston's work before this has largely been in comedy, but this show is not often going for laughs. The creator Vince Gilligan worked on The X-Files and the spin-off The Lone Gunmen, and this is his first great success on his own, not unlike Matthew Weiner's first great solo success with Mad Men after being on the creative team of The Sopranos.

This is another example of the Hollywood rule of Nobody Knows Anything. A little cable outfit gives the helm of a show to a guy with no successful track record and casts a TV sitcom actor as the lead in a serious drama. You would fully expect this not to work. But then again, if you took an actor who was usually the second bill in gangster B-movies, a first time director and a script from a novel that had already been made into two adaptations that weren't any good, you wouldn't have high hopes for that project either. The not yet star in this case was Humphrey Bogart, the first time director was John Huston and the book nobody knew how to film was Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

In Hollywood, sometimes there are All-Stars that come from the minor leagues.