“You know, my philosophy is hire the best, and then let let them do what they do so well. The auteur theory is always a very flattering one. People say, “It’s an auteur show!” And I love it! (laughs) On some egotistical, vain level, I love hearing it. But having said that, I’m going to be honest. This has always been very much a group effort. And as much as it personally serves me, and as much as I love hearing the auteur theory bandied about, I’ve never really bought into it. I’ve always thought that no one talks about the auteur theory of the Brooklyn Bridge, for instance. It’s like one guy designed it — except that he had a team of people helping him with the math, and then hundreds or thousands of people who built it.”
Stay On Air Forever, Breaking Bad
I came to Breaking Bad after getting bored with Mad Men - I found Don Draper’s journey to be frustratingly static, every week a movement from A to A, where something was on the verge of happening but not quite (About Season 2 or 3). Breaking Bad, comparatively, was all about the joys of plot: every week, something happened of consequence, and the line that the show was built on, a “good” man going evil, expanded and twisted in ways that were deep and fascinating.
Nowadays, I’m back in Mad Men’s pocket. (I loved the last season.) But I still love Breaking Bad the most, and find it kind of irresistible to call it “better than Mad Men.” It’s funny because really, the two shouldn’t be compared. They’re on the same station, they’re doing the same good work. Retroactively, in five years’ time, it’s not going to matter one iota - mostly it’ll just be a record of two very good TV shows on the air at the same time, one winning the Best Drama Emmy because of the nuance and class, the other winning the Best Actor Emmy. I don’t see Jon Hamm - who, admit it, is desperate like a WB starlet in an iconic role to prove that he can be comic and not Don Draper and it’s funny because it’s awkward - ever winning an Emmy when Bryan Cranston has to go from A to K to R to F to Z to B, all in the course of one episode. (This is a bastardization of Dorothy Parker’s famous Katharine Hepburn diss, “She ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.”) The point of Mad Men is that Don Draper is superficially going from A to B, with tiny little cracks in the fissure.
They’re two consistently fascinating shows, since they’re asking what makes a (modern) man? and the answer is something like to survive and succeed, you have to be a sociopathic nihilist. Those shows, Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos, seem to be the main arguments for why TV is the driving force of creative freedom in the culture these days, although I’m fairly sure you could combine the audiences for those shows and get half of the amount of people who’ve seen something on CBS, and this argument about “the golden age of TV” sure does discount any sort of female perspective on the shows or as a showrunner.
What I love about Vince Gilligan is that he never, ever assumes that the audience is dumb. (Unlike a Showtime series, which is all about setting up a wacky, skewed view of the world, having some fancy guest star come in and shake it up, and then having that person die and then the game is back at zero. I am talking about Dexter here.) Gilligan lets the audience figure out the games that the characters are playing, how their motivations are roiling underneath their placid faces. It’s hard not to totally love him for that fact. He has a tendency to quote a Billy Wilder adage about “letting the audience add up two and two to four and they’ll love you forever,” which is true.
I’m constantly surprised by Breaking Bad and I’m a little heartbroken that the “last” season is starting next week, which means there are only sixteen hours left of Walter White’s story. I have no idea where it will go, I assume it will be with his death - but maybe not - and whether it’s something epic and Greek or pathetic and driven by the return of his cancer, I don’t know. It’s not enough time for the world to quite catch up with Gilligan’s genius, for people to write about Breaking Bad in some of the ways that people write about Mad Men (which is an easier show to write about in a lot of ways, partially because it’s aspirational?). For me, I want to figure out why I have a tendency to relate a bit more to Walter White’s nihilism than the big beating heart of Jesse Pinkman. Perhaps it’s due to being the daughter of teachers.
What I do know for sure is this: at the end of the series, Walter White will be alone.
The Men Behind the Curtain: A GQ TV Roundtable →
Another awesome piece from this month’s killer, D'Angelo-featuring GQ: a great, essential interview that really delineates the personalities of David Milch, Matthew Weiner, and Vince Gilligan. I loved how every time Weiner talked about how “you have to get credit for what you do,” Gilligan was diplomatic and was like, “well, we do it slightly differently” or “yes, that’s such a great point.” For a sick, sick visionary, Gilligan sounded genuinely nice and kind. Milch comes off like a wonderful college professor talking in abstracts.
So much gold, but this may be my favorite: “Bryan [Cranston] isn’t afraid to be photographed in his underpants time and time again. That’s a pretty good physicalization of his fearlessness.”
The author, Brett Martin, is writing a book on the golden age of cable TV (you wish you thought of it, don’t you? I do!), tentatively titled Difficult Men. I wonder what the next act will be for Weiner and Gilligan, given that Mad Men and Breaking Bad are hurtling towards the end?
I wrote this. It is filled with spoilers. This is the best show on television.
Things not mentioned in this piece, but certainly thought about: Gilmore Girls season 6 (when they break up), A Simple Plan, Coen Bros, The Godfather, and whether there’s a line between Buggin’ Out in Do the Right Thing and Gus Fring. Both are fastidious!
Breaking Bad, "Fly"
I found this week’s episode of Breaking Bad to be frustrating. I do think that it would play well within a DVD set, but self-contained, as the episode for the week, I had to admit that I was kind of left sputtering Comic Book Guy-style.
Even though it wasn’t completely awful, there were some things in there - truly sloppy, metaphor-laden writing for one, the type of self-contained episode that had no real stakes and was just based on irrationality, for another - that just didn’t work and I really hope that they don’t go with that in future episodes. (Kind of like how The Royal Tenenbaums is a decent movie, but you could see Wes Anderson going further into his dollhouse until he actually makes a stop-motion film, you know? Another story entirely, though.)
The fact that the episode was centered around killing a fly in the lab and the slapstick of that, well, that was simply tiring. “4 Days Out” was self-contained as well, but also interesting, because they thought that they were going to die. There were stakes. This was just metaphor spinning in circles.
Walt’s speech about the “perfect time to die” was wonderful. Went with the character. (I buy Cranston’s speeches a little bit more than Aaron Paul’s. Cranston makes them sound more natural. You forget about the writing.) The speech from Walt - doped up on Jesse sneaking Truth Serum Sleeping Pills in his coffee - summarizing most of the series up to that point? It didn’t seem natural. The showy direction by the guy who did Brick and the Brothers Bloom didn’t really add anything significant, and it was terribly paced, even boring.
Whatever plot I got out of the episode, as they were leaving the lab, that was well-done. But this episode was pretty much Breaking Bad doing Mad Men - heavy and slow, laden with metaphor that something may happen but probably won’t - and that’s not where the show’s strengths lie, I think. Let that symbolism serve life and death and plot.
On Breaking Bad
I just finished Season 2 of Breaking Bad. I think the show is wonderful. And one thing I like in particular is its satisfactory plotting. (Because when it comes to Matt Weiner, I don’t get that feeling at all…) Even when it’s an episode about Walt and a water-pump, it ends with a crushing moment. There’s something creepy, real, and awfully unsettling about the show. And the cinematography is so gorgeous. (The episode with the junkies and the little boy is one of the most excruciating hours of TV. Remember, if you haven’t watched Breaking Bad before: don’t do it before bed. You will thank me.)
1) Thank god for Bryan Cranston’s wrinkled, unbotox-ed face. Can you imagine what the show would be like if he couldn’t emote with the worried folds of his skin? Thank goodness he was a journeyman TV actor that got a shot and not a fading movie star. If he was the latter, or the role was for a lady, I’m afraid that the complexities would be lost in the Botox.
1A) Cranston’s awesome, isn’t he? I love that guy.
2) The show sticks with you in awful ways. Last Sunday my SO and I were driving to a waterfall and we got lost. He ends up pulling over in front of this motel with some big bros sitting on the front porch. He’s looking at a map, trying to figure out where we went wrong, and this wiry tattooed dude in no shirt and jeans starts stalking down the front walk towards our car. I tell Stu to go and we speed away. It just didn’t seem like a good scene - and I thought that maybe he could’ve been trying to be a good neighbor, or whatnot, but I feared the worst, and for that, I blame Walter White.