Breaking bad

Say what you will about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, but there are few showrunners who are better at starting a series off with a bang. Who could forget the spectacle, from the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, of Bryan Cranston’s pants-less, intense-looking Walter White, addressing his family – and by extension, the audience – by saying “My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104. To all law-enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt?" Or Bob Odenkirk’s half-hapless, half-sly Jimmy McGill, aka Saul Goodman, leading a black-and-white half-life in Omaha, Nebraska, as we slowly, inexorably observe the circumstances that have led to his downfall?

If viewers of Breaking Bad had taken bets during the show’s original run on which of the cast was likely to become a breakout action-film star a decade after the series finished airing, Bob Odenkirk would likely have been near the bottom of that list. The young actor Aaron Paul was perhaps the most obvious prediction, but Jesse Plemons, Dean Norris – even a grizzled and pumped Bryan Cranston – were all more predictable choices to do an alpha-male Liam Neeson-meets-Keanu Reeves act than the foppish comic relief Jimmy McGill, aka criminal lawyer (in both senses) Saul Goodman.

Jason Dessen, the hero (and, as you’ll discover shortly, anti-hero) of Apple TV’s latest sci-fi caper Dark Matter, is a physics professor at a second-rate university in Chicago. You can tell he’s not that good at his job because he introduces the concept of Schrödinger’s cat (surely the only interesting bit in the entirety of physics) five minutes before the end of a lecture. ‘Oh and the cat dies,’ he says to the uninterested students as they file hurriedly out of class. With no time constraint, sci-fi series on streaming channels can keep spinning you along for all eternity Still, at least he’s happy. His teenage son might have been genetically engineered to fit the phrase ‘but he’s a great kid’ and his hot wife Daniela is beyond perfect.

This week's finale of AMC's Better Call Saul represented a quiet end to the Golden Age of Television. It's a fitting end for Prestige TV — marked by lavish sets, sex, violence and episodes as expensive as feature films — to end with a small black-and-white ode to a spin-off. Bob Odenkirk's performance as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, a pivotal bit character in Breaking Bad a decade ago, was marked by over-the-top colorful courtroom flair, but it ends with somber black-and-white drama and a quiet prison cell, serving almost as a muted on-screen act of penance for all that came before.

Next week will see the final tranche of episodes of the sixth series of Better Call Saul swaggering onto Netflix. They follow a tense mid-season cliffhanger that saw the sudden death of one major character and the unexpected return of a former nemesis. Expectations for the last installment are appropriately high, not least because of the much-heralded return of the two characters who defined the Breaking Bad universe from which the series was spun off: Aaron Paul’s hapless Jesse Pinkman and, most excitingly of all, Bryan Cranston’s Walter White. Better Call Saul’s creators, Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan, are intelligent men. Gilligan was responsible for Breaking Bad, on which Gould was a writer, producer and director.

Having been fired from World Championship Wrestling, Steve Austin entered the World Wrestling Federation with the godawful gimmick of 'the Ringmaster’. He looked no more memorable than a Big Mac. Austin knew that something had to change. He wanted to adopt an edgier, more cold-blooded character. The WWF’s creative team, displaying the genius that had inspired 'Mantaur’, a wrestler who dressed up as a Minotaur, and 'the Gobbledy Gooker’, proposed such names as 'Otto Von Ruthless’ and 'Chilly McFreeze’. According to wrestling legend, Austin was at home when his wife told him to drink his tea before it turned 'stone cold’. Stone Cold Steve Austin was born. He quickly flourished.

I’m really not enjoying Your Honor, the latest vehicle for Bryan Cranston to play a good man driven to the dark side by extraordinary and compelling circumstances designed to make the viewer go: ‘There but for the grace of God go I…’ The problem with the compelling circumstances in this case is that they feel so desperately contrived. Cranston plays a priggishly upright New Orleans judge who radiates implausible goodness and rectitude. We first glimpse this during the case of a trial of a black woman accused by police of concealing drugs in an intimate part of her anatomy. A white cop, sweating integrity, swears on the witness stand that he has witnessed her doing it. Open and shut case, right?

I bet you didn’t see Showtime’s one-hour special with comedian Lavell Crawford. Which is weird because the media is delirious with racial parity these days and they scarcely mentioned it. Crawford is a unique voice in American comedy and routinely sells out black audiences across the country. So where’s his New Yorker profile or New York Times essay? Why didn’t anyone hear about Crawford calling Trump our ‘first nigger president’ — back in 2017, no less? I discovered Crawford through an NSFW Breitbart comments thread, reading, as I like to, across the divide. The video, ‘Lavell Crawford — Trump Obama’, is an excerpt from Crawford’s Home for the Holidays tour, which Showtime premiered in late 2017.