Better Call Saul thread

Wow that is my favorite episode of the entire show. Just to see chucks face when he looks over and sees the council members staring straight at him is fantastic. He thought the case was rock solid and was so smug about it. Now Jimmy/Saul has the upper hand and his face when he figured it out is glorious

 

its truly awesome to see the lengths he goes to with his character. Chuck's contempt for Jimmy for decades because Jimmy was the parents "favorite" has been astounding in the way he covers it all up and says "the law is the law". Yes he is an excellent lawyer and he truly cares deeply about the law and treasures it, but its also a crutch for him in his personal life




fascinating interview with michael about this episode and what chuck is all about:

• ‘Better Call Saul’s’ Michael McKean on Chuck’s Devastating Downfall
  

The actor behind the frustrating Chuck McGill, this episode pits the two McGill brothers publicly against each other

Spoiler

The veteran screen and stage actor takes us inside his character’s revelatory Better Call Saul episode. Warning: Spoilers ahead.

Early Monday morning, The Daily Beast caught up with Michael McKean by phone on what was supposed to be his day off.

The actor, currently appearing in eight shows a week alongside Laura Linney and Cynthia Nixon in The Little Foxes, had just started a busy day that would include presenting an award to fellow Broadway actor Kelli O’Hara and performing at a gala in honor of playwright Suzan-Lori Parks before an 11 p.m. Skype session “with a lot of strangers back in L.A.” after Better Call Saul airs the fifth episode of its third season Monday night.

This week’s episode, titled “Chicanery,” contains a few major revelations about McKean’s character Chuck McGill, most notably—spoiler alert!—that his “allergy” to electricity is far more psychological and a lot less physical than we might have imagined.

Much of the episode’s action takes place in the courtroom where a panel of judges will determine whether or not Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill should be disbarred. At the end of Season 2, we found out Chuck had secretly taped Jimmy confessing to breaking into his house and transposing the numbers for an address on a series of legal documents, embarrassing his brother professionally and delivering a major client to his partner and love interest Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn).

The case hinges on whether Jimmy can convince the judges that he only admitted to what his brother was accusing him of so that Chuck wouldn’t think he had lost his mind. In order to do that, he sets out to prove to them that Chuck is far less sane than he appears to be. And that the supposedly rare medical condition that causes him physical pain whenever he is close to electromagnetic waves is all in his head.

At the climax of his dramatic cross-examination of his brother, Jimmy asks Chuck to look in his breast pocket. There he finds a fully charged cellphone battery, surreptitiously placed in his jacket earlier in the episode by Lavell Crawford’s Huell, reprising his role from Breaking Bad. It’s been sitting next to his chest for nearly two hours, but, as Jimmy points out, he “felt nothing.”


In that instant, Chuck begins to question everything about his reality and we can see it all happening on McKean’s face. “I am not crazy!” he shouts. But Jimmy has already succeeded in making the court believe otherwise. The sickest part is that we, the viewers, know that Jimmy is essentially gaslighting Chuck, making his own brother doubt himself when in reality Jimmy did do everything he admitted on that tape.

The episode, and those that have led up to it, presented an acting challenge that perhaps only someone with McKean’s extensive experience on screen and stage could pull off this convincingly. He may be best known for his mostly improvised comedic roles in films like This Is Spinal Tap and Best in Show (and early days on Laverne & Shirley), but in Better Call Saul he is proving week by week how great he can be when given the right dramatic material.

And while he was not willing or able to say anything about the lawsuit he and his fellow Spinal Tap stars have filed against the media firm Vivendi, McKean did say that he “hopes” to work with Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer again sometime soon.

Below is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

This was a huge episode for Chuck. What did you think when you first read the script?

I thought this is a lot of stuff to memorize. But, you know, the writing is so good on the show that my actions are very, very clear. All of ours are. I’ve had very few questions about any particular area in the scripts for all 30 of these episodes that I’ve done. Dan Sackheim, the director, called me and said, “How do you want to do this? We can shoot in all one direction and get all your stuff out of the way. Or we can shoot everybody else and then come back to you.” And I said, look, you’re the eyes, I’m just the subject here. So, leave it to me, I’ll know my stuff and we’ll go for it. And so that’s kind of what we did. I knew I had a lot to do and a lot of changes take place. The best laid-plans of even the most brilliant lawyer in New Mexico oft go awry.

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The flashback with Chuck’s ex-wife is so interesting, because we see the lengths he went to conceal his condition from her. He seems, for the first time, almost embarrassed by it. That might be our first hint in this episode that it’s not a purely medical condition. I wonder if he would be so embarrassed if he truly believed it was a medical condition.

That was one of the few questions that I had for the writers. What is the big deal? Why wouldn’t it be a sympathetic thing to say that, look, I have this problem and it’s gotten worse and worse and I still want to continue conversations with you, my ex-wife. Why isn’t that his way? And the fact is, a lot of people don’t want sympathy. A lot of people think that accepting sympathy would be a sign of weakness. That’s why I really had to approach it. I think the real story there in that flashback is how dedicated Jimmy is to helping Chuck. It’s kind of the part of the story that we haven’t told yet. We’ve seen Jimmy kind of attempt to be sweet, but this is something else. This is Jimmy, hands-on, really trying to help his brother. And no good deed goes unpunished.

The most vivid part of this whole experience for me has been living with this guy and understanding with him and sympathizing with him. I can’t play a character I could not sympathize with. I’m playing a guy right now in The Little Foxes who’s fairly despicable. But I also understand him in his world, in his attempt to control his world. I understand that just academically, so I can follow it emotionally. And that’s what you have to do. I worked with Helen Mirren years ago, and she played an awful character and she said something that was interesting. She said, whenever I have to play someone who’s truly terrible, I have to imagine or learn from the writer or the director, what was done to that person to make them like this. And you can take that to the bank. If you sympathetically examine what your character is about, you can find a reason to be as unsympathetic as they want you to be in the story.

So what is that thing for Chuck?

It is fairly complicated, but if you really want to boil it down, it’s that I was the good boy, but my parents seemed to like Jimmy more. They loved me, too, but I was the one who went off to school and graduated from college and passed the bar on the first try and did all those good-boy things. And then I became like a third parent when it came to the problem child. I never quite understood that. If you keep boiling it down, you get to this: I made Mom proud, Jimmy made Mom laugh, you know? Not to give away too many secrets, but that’s kind of it in a nutshell. How this total screw-up got so much of the sympathy vote. Lloyd Richards, who was my [acting] teacher at NYU, had this theory that every scene you do is about love, on some level. At the time, when I was 18, I thought, well this guy’s full of crap. But you can really almost play anything that way. You can love money, you can love a woman, you can love America. There are all those things that if you take love as the center—you can be a loveless person, but it will make sense.


Do you feel like Chuck loves Jimmy despite it all?

I think that he would be capable of loving Jimmy, yes. I think that what happens in the early part of this episode in the flashback with Rebecca is evidence of something potentially very close about these brothers, something we have not seen really. They have only been antagonists. But I really think that there’s hope there. I think that there’s hope for everybody, I’m that kind of optimist.

Whether Chuck’s condition is psychological or medical presents an interesting acting challenge for you. Does the nature of the condition affect the way you play it?

I have always had to play it as if it were 100 percent real. And physically and genuinely feeling it. I have to be that way because it says in the script, even when there are no other actors on the set, Chuck is suffering. It’s not in his head, as far as he knows. But even if something is in your head, it can still hurt. I’ve always had to take that as the real thing. And the revelations of this episode make no difference. It’s still something that is felt. The more it changes, as far as the viewers are concerned, the more it stays the same, as far as what the actor is doing, in my opinion.

It’s almost as if Jimmy is gaslighting Chuck, making him believe he’s crazy, even though we know Chuck is right and Jimmy is the one who’s lying. Where do you think that leaves Chuck emotionally at the end of the episode?

Well, as you see, it is a man finally looking for help, looking outside himself. Like I said before, the guy who has a law degree in his early twenties and is really good to go, the self-doubt is not even an issue for him. When it suddenly becomes an issue, a very stubborn man will never look for help and will die on that hill. But a man who has been pushed into getting help is a man with some hope. I try to keep it simple, because humans, despite all their complexity, are very simple. They want to feel better and to do better and to find love. And to succeed, I suppose. It’s everybody else who makes things complicated.

You recently told fans not to “get too attached” to Chuck. What did you mean by that?

You know, I’m not really sure what I meant. If I recall, we were talking about Chuck as a role model and I think it got kind of taken out of context. I think I was really talking about, be careful, even if a guy makes some headway in becoming a better human being that doesn’t mean you really have to change your allegiance.

There are almost two separate shows happening at once on Better Call Saul right now. Do you watch the Mike and now Gus story as a viewer?

Not just as a viewer but as a Breaking Bad fan. And as a Giancarlo Esposito fan and a Jonathan Banks fan. When I’m reading those scripts, I’m aware of what has nothing to do with me, so I kind of skim over that part. A lot of it is wordless anyway, a lot of Jonathan Banks stuff is like Rififi. There’s no dialogue, it’s just, what’s happening? What is this picture telling us? And it’s just so beautifully shot and so well-directed. And it’s like I’m watching another movie and then, oh my God, look, I’m in it! And the introduction of Giancarlo’s character, of Gus, it was just so gradual and kind of leaked out so beautifully, it was just really, really good filmmaking. I think this [Vince] Gilligan guy is going to have a future.

Do you have hopes to work with those guys, Jonathan and Giancarlo, in some scenes at some point?

Oh my God. Well, you know, only God and Vince Gilligan know. I guess Peter [Gould] knows, too.

This show, as you said, is so well-written and well-constructed, but have the improv skills you built working with Christopher Guest and others over the years come in handy at all on this show?

Not really. The scripts make sense, it’s very clear. The writers know who we are. There’s really no room for improvisation. Mr. Odenkirk and I, if we were left to our own devices, we’d probably have more jokes, but it wouldn’t serve the show much.

Any plans to work with those guys again in the near future, Chris and Harry Shearer?

I hope so. I certainly hope so. Every time Chris cooks up something, he gives me a shout and sometimes I can join him, sometimes not. It depends on what I’m up to. Same with Harry. Harry’s in New Orleans a lot and he’s in London a lot. Getting us all in the same city is a chore. I’m here in New York, I don’t even know where in the hell Harry is and Chris is in L.A. But when the confluence is there, we always have fun and we usually wind up with something that’s worth seeing.

 

Better Call Saul's Best Supporting Actors on Competing for Emmys

The acting on Better Call Saul's third season is so good that there are four actors who could conceivably earn a nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series: Jonathan Banks, who plays Mike Ehrmantraut; Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Gus Fring; Michael McKean, who plays Chuck McGill; and Michael Mando, who plays Nacho Varga.

Of these four, only Banks has previously been nominated for his work on Better Call Saul. He's been nominated twice (as well as once for Breaking Badand once in 1989 for Wiseguy), and he should have won in 2015 for his incredible performance in "Five-O." Unsurprisingly, he's a competitor again this year.

Jonathan Banks, Giancarlo Esposito, Michael McKean and Michael Mando, Better Call Saul


But Mando says that the guy to beat this year is McKean, and after his extraordinary showing in Monday's episode "Chicanery," it's hard not to agree.

"Don't get too attached" to Chuck McGill, warns Better Call Saul's Michael McKean


So will they campaign against each other?

"I don't campaign, and I don't compete," says McKean.

But Banks?

"I will trash these two," he says of Esposito and Mando. "I'm throwing them under the bus." Don't let them near your small pets or "woodland creatures."

Emmy nominations are announced July 13. May the worst man win.

 

series

 

How Better Call Saul fixed Breaking Bad's Skyler Problem



/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
May 15, 2017











Better Call Saul is firing on all cylinders right now. But in lieu of discussing all the details of last week's exceptionally tense episode, which marked the climax of two and a half beautiful, slow-burning seasons, I want to note a small but significant artifact of this artful prequel to Breaking Bad: Namely, that virtually every fan forum discussing this show is overflowing with love for Rhea Seehorn's Kim Wexler.

If you're familiar with how Breaking Bad fandom tended to approach the show's female characters, this fact is so remarkable it demands attention.

Fans of Breaking Bad who read things on the internet will likely recall the show's Skyler problem. It was, put simply, that people hated her — and they weren't supposed to.

For the uninitiated: Skyler was the long-suffering wife of Breaking Bad's antihero-in-residence, Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher whose artful evolution into a drug kingpin is a mainstay of the Difficult Man genre. Skyler was supposed to offer an everyman's perspective on his transformation, a kind of sympathetic anchor the viewer could use to gauge the extent to which her husband was slowly turning monstrous. This is unexceptional: Shows love to use women to measure the extent to which men have morally strayed.

Spoiler

But, as often happens with sympathetic portrayals of antiheroes like Don Draper and Walter White, people fell for the protagonist's hype — hype that was supposed to be ironized. Walter White's growly "I am the one who knocks" speech (delivered to Skyler at a moment when he's actually quailing with fear) has become exactly the kind of fist-pumping You-Go-Guy motto-on-a-mug it was intended to mock. This is, as many critics have observed, the unanticipated challenge of antihero fandom: Draper and White struck many viewers not as deluded and damaged but rather as sincerely powerful macho men. And hey, if they had morally murky dimensions, that's masculinity for ya. Boys will be boys! Etc.

The antihero story was supposed to be a complicated narrative experiment, one that coyly tempted viewers into sympathizing with the dark side. In Breaking Bad, the creators trusted that the viewer's ethical compass would echo and reinforce Skyler's objections. (Sample Skyler position: My dude, no one asked you to cook drugs for the fam. Plus doesn't the cartel kill the families of those who cross them and aren't you supporting their biggest rival?). The theory was that viewers would enter into a provocative state of tension, suspended between their innate sense of right and wrong (which would align with Skyler's) and the seductive power and momentum of Walt's bad decisions. Whom would they side with? The man killing his rivals in the meth trade or his baffled and concerned wife?

It should have been a killer philosophical conundrum. In practice, it turned out to be a lot less vexed. Viewers had less trouble scuttling their better angels than anyone anticipated. They cheered the devil on, worshipped "Heisenberg," and flocked to forums like "I Hate Skyler White."

The hate that flowed to Skyler for the crime of standing in the antihero's way was (to put it mildly) excessive. Facebook pages dedicated to loathing her had thousands of likes. Whole forums were established to revile this fictional wife, dissect her failings, and anticipate her death. The frenzy boiled over to the point where the actor who played her, Anna Gunn, started getting threats. She ended up penning an op-ed on the phenomenon for The New York Times. How did the character who was supposed to be the show's moral center come to inspire this much vitriol? And why?

In that op-ed, Gunn maintains that Skyler was complex and well-written. She was grateful for an unusually complicated role, and attributed this subset of fan response to a colossal misreading that revealed something real and worrying about ambient misogyny: "[T]he show's writers made Skyler multilayered and, in her own way, morally compromised. But at the end of the day, she hasn't been judged by the same set of standards as Walter," Gunn writes.

Emily Nussbaum called this the problem of the "Bad Fan." There will always be some viewers, she wrote, who are "watching [the show] wrong." Nor is this new; Nussbaum pointed out that "there was always a subset of Sopranos fans that just wanted better and bloodier whackings — and there's a subset of Breaking Bad fans that will always want Walt to wear that hot black hat."

I'll say it again: It wasn't supposed to be this way. Vince Gilligan — who co-created Breaking Bad before Better Call Saul with Peter Gould — spoke with real frustration about the fan response to Skyler (and her sister, Marie):

[W]ith the risk of painting with too broad a brush, I think the people who have these issues with the wives being too bitchy on Breaking Bad are misogynists, plain and simple. I like Skyler a little less now that she's succumbed to Walt's machinations, but in the early days she was the voice of morality on the show. She was the one telling him, "You can't cook crystal meth." She's got a tough job being married to this asshole. And this, by the way, is why I should avoid the internet at all costs. People are griping about Skyler White being too much of a killjoy to her meth-cooking, murdering husband? She's telling him not to be a murderer and a guy who cooks drugs for kids. How could you have a problem with that? [Vulture]

Well, a lot of people had a problem with that. And here's my embarrassing confession: While rewatching Breaking Bad recently, I found myself among them.

When Skyler and Marie start passing a "talking pillow" around during an intervention for Walter, I only semi-jokingly turned to my partner to observe that Skyler was the actual worst.

Now, I've spent a lot of time championing the reviled wives of antiheroes. I do think they're judged unfairly. I'm a Betty Draper defender, for heaven's sake — and there's precious little show canon to work with, since Mad Mencreator Matt Weiner lost interest in her sometime after season two. None of that means I'm immune to internalized misogyny, but still: My recent reaction to Skyler was so powerful that I've grown reluctant to blame the fans for their response.


I deeply respect Gilligan and Gould. I think they're among the best TV writers working today. But I submit that the problem with Skyler in Breaking Bad is not a fan problem. It's a structural problem.

Here's the thing: Most stories need a villain to work. We secretly like villains because they're so naughty, and the best ones are persuasive too (cf. Satan in Paradise Lost). That's why the antihero recipe works so well: It combines the appeal of being bad with the centrality of protagonism. The inverse truth is that when you've made the wife the antagonist and stripped her of the thrills of villainy — when you've made her not just the boring wife, but also the show's moral center? Well, that there's a recipe for massive annoyance. Which, when you want to be entertained, quickly morphs into hatred.

The great antihero experiment yielded what I like to think of as the Gilligan Theorem: Protagonism, no matter how villainous, will easily trumps ethics. A corollary to that theory is that people love momentum, morals be damned, and turn on characters who try to pump the brakes.

Particularly when they're women.

There's simply no separating the vitriol Skyler received from her femininity, and that's because Walt's journey is wrapped up in questions of masculinity. Walt's secret appeal was that he was climbing to manly-man power as he was breaking bad. Skyler was worse than a nag, then — she was an unworthy adversary. It didn't help that she was pregnant (read: less sexually available). Or that she had an annoying sister — who was married to the greatest threat to Walt: Hank, a DEA agent.

The show structurally invites you to hate weakness, to share Walt's pride as he gets stronger. What could be more antithetical to his progress than his annoying pregnant wife who thinks her support matters? Who supposes — wrongly — that she, with her domestic demands and annoying extended family — could help him?

You know who doesn't have an annoying sister? Or a pregnant belly? Or a baby? Or any vulnerability — or expectations of the antiheroic protagonist? Kim Wexler.

Better Call Saul's Kim is put together. She's sexy. Whereas Skyler was homebound a lot of the time, a lumpen shadow haunting the White abode, Kim barely has a home at all; she showers at the gym. Skyler starts the series glumping around in robes and hideous beauty masks. Kim wakes up looking amazing in a T-shirt.

Skyler insists on helping and even arranges an intervention to force Walt to accept help (cf. the Talking Pillow above). Walt resents her every intervention, and because we spend the most time in his perspective, so do we. But when Jimmy asks Kim to stop helping, she says exactly one word: okay.


Of course, Kim does help: She ably and loyally represents Jimmy during his hearing. Kim is supportive precisely when Jimmy wants support and absent the rest of the time. Her position is that Jimmy owes her nothing, and she won't accept the little he tries to give her. As for family — does she have any? We know so much about Jimmy's back story, his feelings about his brother, his history with his gullible dad. Do we actually know a single thing about Kim Wexler? No! She's marvelous precisely because she's unfettered by back story.

I love Kim, but there's no escaping the fact that she's a Cool Girl. As Anne Helen Petersen explains:

Cool Girls don't have the hang-ups of normal girls: They don't get bogged down by the patriarchy, or worrying about their weight. They're basically dudes masquerading in beautiful women's bodies, reaping the privileges of both. But let's be clear: It's a performance. It might not be a conscious one, but it's the way our society implicitly instructs young women on how to be awesome: Be chill and don't be a downer, act like a dude but look like a supermodel. [BuzzFeed]

Kim is all of that and more. She's gorgeous. Smart. Funny. Responsive. Best of all, she's an enabler for Jimmy's shenanigans. The show likes to pretend that Kim is a straight shooter, a moral compass for Jimmy akin to what Skyler was supposed to be. In practice, Kim plays "Giselle" to Slippin' Jimmy and scams dudes out of $50 tequila shots.

There's a reason everyone loves Kim, and it isn't just that Rhea Seehorn is awesome (though she is). No, it's that in a show that sets some difficult narrative goals for itself, it gives itself a total pass when it comes to the women. If Skyler was structurally impossible to love, Kim Wexler is structurally impossible to hate.

Now, that's one way to solve the Skyler problem — eliminate everything about her that made her vulnerable, annoying, and, well, human. But it strikes me as a disappointing overcorrection.

I've enjoyed Better Call Saul for how intelligently it broke with the masculinity fetish that sometimes plagued Breaking Bad. But I hope that whatever Gilligan and Gould decide to tackle next involves finding a storytelling structure that doesn't depend on you rooting for the antihero against a vulnerable, needy, moralizing, housebound party — whether it's a Skyler or indeed, a Chuck.