Weekly Watch: Better Call Saul

April 7, 2015April 7, 2015 / JD Byrne / 3 Comments

Confession time – I have never seen minute one of Breaking Bad. Not out of any critical motive, mind you. It just slipped past me until it was one of those “catch up with it on Netflix” someday things. On the other hand, when the prequel/spinoff featuring Walter White’s trusted attorney, Saul Goodman, premiered, I was on top of it. Aside from the glowing early reviews it’s a lawyer show, which I have a hard time ignoring. Thankfully, the early reviews proved accurate.

“Better Call Saul,” as I understand it, was the tagline in the TV ads Saul Goodman used to drum up business in Breaking Bad. But as this series starts, there is no Saul Goodman (except in a brief flash forward), only Jimmy McGill, struggling lawyer. Jimmy has a con artist past (when he was known as Slippin’ Jimmy) and brother, Chuck, who’s a partner in a big law firm. However, Chuck is now confined to his home by a psychosomatic illness involving an aversion to electrical devices. Nonetheless, Chuck is who Jimmy aspires to be, although without the mental issues.

Thus the first season is basically the tale of Jimmy trying to find his legal niche. He as some connection to Chuck’s law firm, but it’s unclear what that was until several episodes in. On his own, Jimmy resorts to some old trick to drum up business (a staged rescue in which he’s the hero). It works, somewhat, and he stumbles into the field of elder law and even appears to genuinely care about his elderly clients.

But things go wrong when a big case falls into his lap. He enlists Chuck who, quite rightly, argues to bring in his old firm because they have the resources to handle it. Jimmy agrees, assuming that this is his ticket into the firm legitimately – as a rainmaker. Only he learns that not only will he not be welcomed into the firm it’s because his brother has been blocking him at every turn.

This leads to the key scene of the season and the one most interesting to me as a lawyer. Chuck, basically stands up for the standards of the profession. Jimmy, who got his degree from an off shore diploma mill and has a criminal past, doesn’t make the cut. Law is a sacred trust, Chuck argues, ones that doesn’t have any place in it for people like Jimmy. Lawyers bear a particular responsibility, not just to their clients, but to society at large. Being a lawyer, as Chuck tells it, is just as we real world lawyers want it to be.

But the joke’s on us, because for the rest of the population, we look an awfully lot more like Jimmy. It’s perhaps no surprise that when Jimmy becomes Saul he manages to drop in social standing, from not-quite-reformed con man to criminal defense attorney. After all, what kind of person defends murdering drug dealers for a living? At least that’s what people think (and sometimes tell you!).

By the end of the season, Jimmy’s had one more chance at being “respectable” and turns it down. Does it mean that he’s completely turned the corner into the criminal shyster he becomes in Breaking Bad (so I’m told)? Who knows. Maybe he just decided that his idea of respectable and Chuck’s are far apart and the legal profession has room for the both.

If You’re Worried About Rosebud, You’re Missing the Point

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015 / JD Byrne / 1 Comment

It’s his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I just saved you two long boobless hours.

– Peter Griffin, spoiling Citizen Kane

Saw Gone Girl last weekend. It’s really good, particularly if you like the kind of movie that takes place in an air of dread that’s perfectly summoned by David Fincher (with able assists from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). I say that even knowing the big twist of the film going into it. Not because I had read the book on which it’s based, but because my wife blurted it out during a TV commercial. She didn’t know I wanted to see it.

Point is, she didn’t really “spoil” the movie for me, in the true sense of the word. That’s because the flick is good enough that it doesn’t rise or fall on the big “twist” (which, for what it’s worth, happens about halfway through – this isn’t The Sixth Sense we’re talking about). In my opinion, any movie/book/TV show that rises and falls on that twist isn’t really worth watching.

What’s more, people seem to enjoy things more once they know how it turns out. At least that’s what some research says.

Back in 2011, as The Atlantic reports, a study was published that sounds pretty neat:

Scientists asked 900 college students from the University of California, San Diego, to read mysteries and other short stories by writers like John Updike, Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Carver. Each student got three stories, some with “spoiler paragraphs” revealing the twist, and some without any spoilers. Finally, the students rated their stories on a 10-point scale.

The results? Readers preferred the spoiled stories. But why would we want to know how it ends ahead of time?

One theory is that our anticipation of surprises actually takes away from our appreciation for the 99 percent of the movie that isn’t a monster twist. ‘The second viewing is always more satisfying than the first,’ Sternbergh said, ‘because you notice all the things you missed while you were busy waiting for the twist.’ Psychologists have observed that when we consume movies and songs for a second (or third, or hundredth time), the stories become easier to process, and we associate this ease of processing with aesthetic pleasure.

Think about this for a second. Most of us have some piece of culture that we go back to again and again. I know that the big escape at the end of Brazil takes place all inside Sam’s head, but I still watch it. I know that Arthur and Ford wind up on a primitive Earth populated by a bunch of idiots expelled from a better planet, but I’ll still consume Hitchhiker’s Guide . . . again (in its many forms). And I know Tommy goes back to being blind, deaf, and dumb at the end, but that doesn’t make “Pinball Wizard” kick any less ass.

Of course, there might be other reasons why spoilers really aren’t, including the uncomfortable recognition that we really like predictability more than we let on. But, in this area at least, I’d like to not be completely cynical and think that, deep down, we realize that works built on the big twist only are, as someone else put it in the Atlantic piece:

like artistic flash paper: It excites for a moment but offers little lasting wonder.

After all, we want to be better than Peter Griffin. Right?

Note: This piece was originally posted on my old blog on October 20, 2014.

Weekly Everything: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 / JD Byrne / Leave a comment

Last week marked the anniversary – the 37th, to be exact – of the debut of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in the form of a BBC Radio play. In the decades since it’s conquered just about every form of media – books, TV, film, video games, the Internet. It’s been one of my favorite things in the world since my brother introduced me to it lo those many years ago.

But I do have a bit of a confession. As a writer, my favorite version of Hitchhiker‘s should be the books, right? Not only do they cover a lot more ground than the other versions, they’re books! Alas, ’tis not the case, for my favorite version, the one I return to again and again is the TV version. Yes, the cheap and exceptionally dated BBC production is what I think of when I think Hitchhikers.*

Part of that is almost certainly because that’s the version I experienced first. I think (it’s been a while, after all). But I also think that the TV show comes the closest to getting it “right,” if there can be a “right” for Hitchhikers, given that Douglas Adams was involved in all the various permutations. I think that comes down to two things.

First, the TV show does the best job of integrating the Guide itself into proceedings in a way that really works. The animation, combined with the voice of Peter Jones, allowed the Guide to really exist apart from the main story. Here’s one of my favorite examples:

Wouldn’t life be better if Wikipedia worked that way?

The other thing that I think works in the TV show’s favor is, perhaps counter intuitively, it’s tiny budget. I’m not talking cheap – to paraphrase Frank Zappa, cheap has nothing to do with budget, although it helps – but it’s clear there were certain limitations that the BBC crew were working under when producing the series. It looks low budget because it was, but it’s not cheap.

But the low-buck approach yields an interesting benefit in that it comes across almost more like a theater production, where the audience has to buy into a willing suspension of disbelief to enjoy things. Yes, we know Zaphod’s second head and third arm are clearly fake props, but so what? It might even work better that way.

Science fiction is at its best when, in spite of its setting or embrace of gee-whiz tech, it’s holding up a mirror to humanity as we know it now. It’s true for comedic work like Hitchhiker‘s as well as more serious stuff. That’s sometimes harder to do in the modern CGI world. Take, as one example, the Vogons, Adams’s ultimate bureaucratic nightmares and purveyors of bad poetry.

Here’s the Vogons of the TV show:

Here’s the Vogons of the 2005 movie:

The movie version looks “better” in just about every conceivable way, including the fact that they are terribly alien. But does that serve the story more effectively? The TV Vogons look like people in rubber suits and, as such, are still somewhat recognizable as people. Which is appropriate, since the Vogons aren’t really something that sprang fully formed from Adams’s brain from nothing. They’re formed from our own real world experience – they are the ultimate cold blooded government functionaries. They may be an exaggerated form of one of humanity’s worst traits, but they’re nonetheless rooted in humanity.

The movie Vogons, but contrast, are really alien. They’re different enough that the connection to our own world is lost. It doesn’t make the story worse, but the jokes don’t land quite as hard when they aren’t as grounded in reality.

None of this is to say that anyone else is wrong for having another version of Hitchhiker‘s as their favorite. That’s one of the coolest things about it – it’s reached out so many ways that it doesn’t matter if you’re a reader, a watcher, or a listener. Regardless, you’ve got a great place to jump in.

Just remember – bring a towel.

* Actually, that’s not completely true. The first thing that usually pops into my head is the line about how Vogon ships hang silently in the air in “the way that bricks don’t.” Utter brilliance.