Jimmy McGill’s part in “Smoke” begins and ends with normalcy. In his first appearance in the episode, he gets up, feeds his fish, and makes coffee — the regular, mundane tasks of his new life. And in his last scene, he does the same things: joking about his fish’s appetite, tossing out coffee grounds, and seeming like a man very much returned to his routine.
Caution: this article contains major spoilers for the S-Town podcast.
Our lives are not just our lives. Even at our most isolated, or our most misanthropic, or our most closed off, the trudge of seconds and minutes and years which pass through us make a path through other lives as well. In order to know someone, to understand who they are and to feel the weight of their life and death, you have to know the individuals they connected themselves to, willingly or otherwise. And you have to know the place they emerged from, the culture and community that shaped them.
If you want to know someone, really know them inside and out, then you have to examine each gear and lever and pulley, the intricate, interconnected machinery of their lifetime, that moved them, regardless of whether they embraced it, fought it, or even knew about it.
As I discussed on The Serial Fanaticist, that’s what the S-Town podcast, created by This American Life stalwart Brian Reed, tries to do for John B. McLemore, an eccentric, tortured resident of the small Alabama town that is his hometown, eternal punching bag, and long-lamented final resting place all at once.
Breaking Bad posited that who a person is, what kind of choices they make, is situational. Walter White always had Heisenberg within him: the arrogance, anger, and self-satisfaction. But that side of him, and the evil he would inflict, couldn’t emerge until his circumstances changed. When fenced in by a middle-class life with domestic responsibilities, Walt was a meek science teacher who wouldn’t, and maybe couldn’t, hurt a fly. It took a cancer diagnosis and a series of increasingly wild events to turn him into the vicious kingpin he eventually became and yet somehow always was. Breaking Bad suggested that this type of change in circumstances could reveal the real you and that your true nature is just one big bang away.
And yet Better Call Saul, through its own protagonist, presents a very different idea of who a person is and who they might become and what can restrain or expose that. There is a sense that Jimmy McGill’s true nature is irrepressible no matter his circumstances. Jimmy was born to con and manipulate and use his silver tongue to open doors, regardless of whether he’s a humble (if colorful) elder law attorney or the local TV huckster who becomes Walt’s conscience-free fixer in Breaking Bad. That part of him was always going to be there, rich or poor, success or failure, good or bad.
The Joker had left an indelible mark on pop culture long before Heath Ledger assumed the role. He’s one of the few super villains to be consistently featured on merchandise going as far back as the 1960s. His classic semi-origin story in 1998’s Batman: The Killing Joke spurred a dramatic shift in the medium that left fans demanding more of its darkness in their comics. The Joker’s place in the cultural firmament was enough to lure the likes of Jack Nicholson to portray the character on the silver screen. For decades, despite his myriad misdeeds and sizable body count, The Joker nevertheless garnered a consistent crowd of acolytes who saw him as a sort of harlequin antihero.
There’s a cottage industry devoted to trying to explain how and why The Simpsons fell from greatness. Every year or so, there’s a new YouTube video, or multi-part essay, or investigative deep dive that claims to have the answer for what made the show plummet from its perch as a pure television achievement to a series that became nigh-unrecognizable, both to casual audiences and the show’s biggest fans.
But as I discussed on The Simpsons Show Podcast, the truth is that there isn’t one answer to that question, let alone an easy answer. Everything from an exodus of talent, to a shift in the approach used to make the show, to the inevitable cracks that emerge in long-running series, contribute to the “why” part of it. And elements as varied as differences in the storytelling, technological changes in the animation, shifts in the characters’ personalities, and changing trends and norms in T.V. humor contribute to the “how” of it.
Season 1 of Westworld had an easier task than Season 2 did. The first season of the show, as Clementine might put it, didn’t have much of a rind on it. All of its mysteries, all of its characters, all of its ideas, were completely new. The audience was starting from square one, and the show was able to spoon feed details and reveal important facts bit-by-bit until the shocking twists burst out. The first season also had a clearer trajectory for its season-length mega arc, with early hints that there was something amiss with the hosts, building to a full blown revolt at the end.
But as I discussed on the Serial Fanaticist Podcast, Season 2 had no such luxuries. Despite the introduction of a handful of new characters, when the second season rolled around, Westworld’s major figures had become known quantities. How the park worked, the contours of this artificial world, was no longer as burning a question after ten episodes’ worth of worldbuilding. And the path from business as usual in Westworld to all hell breaking loose proved a much clearer and more direct path than Season 2’s disparate collections of characters who each want different things, and are all marauding around the park in a far less unified fashion.
I’m old enough to be able to remember when The Simpsons first started using Comic Book Guy — the portly, surly, and above all opinionated proprietor of Springfield’s local comic shop — as a stand-in so the show could poke fun at its die hard fans. The reaction was as swift and negative as you’d expect, with series’s biggest devotees (often its biggest critics) taking great offense, not only at being cast as schlubby lowlifes, but at having their concerns dismissed as pointless, nerdy nitpickery.
So it felt like deja vu when ReBoot: The Guardian Code — the 2018 revival of the groundbreaking 1994 computer-animated television show, ReBoot — depicted the hardcore fans of the original series in nearly the exact same way and received the same sort of response.
I don’t come to a Deadpool movie for the plot. The first film that featured the “Merc with a Mouth” was a hilarious, take-no-prisoners romp when it was poking fun at conventional superhero flicks, and a duller indulgence when it was aping them. The second film dutifully follows in those same, blood-stained footsteps. Deadpool 2 is a blast when its title character is making mischief or joking around and more tedious when it’s trying to wring some pathos out of his otherwise irreverent tale.
I’m not the first person to suggest that The Walking Dead has exhausted itself creatively. Eight years in, almost any show is going to have trouble feeling vibrant and fresh. But what’s conspicuous about “The Lost and the Plunderers” is how clearly it evinces the sense of a late era version of this show — a show that’s always tried to aim a bit higher than its grindhouse roots — that’s running out of meaningful things to say.
Solo has the scruffy confidence to be its own film. Of the ten Star Wars movies released so far, it’s the only one that doesn’t directly tie into the events of the main saga. That alone makes it interesting and laudable as the first real silver screen step of Star Wars ceasing to be a series and starting to be a “cinematic universe.”
