Pace yourself - this thing's not over yet

Picture: Twitter/BetterCaulSaul/AMC

There have been two stark reminders this week that we're in it for the long run with this pandemic. Firstly, I finally received a letter from my GP warning me to "stay at home at all times and avoid all face-to-face contact for at least 12 weeks" owing to rather foolishly having an underlying health condition. This, I thought, was somewhat curious as we are now in Week 4 of the lockdown, and I'd received a text message from the NHS three weeks ago today warning me, then, to stay at home for “at least” 12 weeks. So, am I now confined to barracks for 12 or is it 15 weeks? And then, if I heard Chris Whitty, the government's chief medical adviser, correctly this week, I might be here for even longer, like The Count of Monte Cristo or Rapunzel, after he alarmingly stated that no one's getting out until they find a cure, or a vaccine, or the economy collapses and it's the Zombie Apocalypse for real. Something like that.

A staple of the media over the last few weeks has been reporting on how people are (or not) coping with the lockdown. I'm not going to be flippant, and pretend that there aren't families in appalling conditions, children sharing bedrooms in cramped flats, and a serge in domestic violence; I'm also not going to believe that everyone in the UK can simply ride this thing out over the summer by setting up permanent station in their gardens, as it's a myth to believe that we all have one in this green and pleasant land. We do, however, all have access to television, which has become a universal panacea. It's no surprise, then, that box sets and streaming services are being chewed through at a rate of knots. Even I have started watching Masterchef and Bake Off, the kind of thing I'd ordinarily swerve, for want of something feelgood. Travel shows, too, have provided the escapism we've been denied by the lockdown (Sir Tony Robinson taking a train from Seattle to Alaska the other night was strangely liberating, despite being largely about the actor sitting inside a metal tube for hundreds of miles at a time). And there was Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness, the batshit-mad story of the batshit-mad Joe Exotic, his big cat zoo in Oklahoma and his allegedly murderous obsession with conservationist Carole Baskin. What could have been easily condensed into a single hour (as Louis Theroux had done previously) was brilliantly strung out into seven, somewhat individually themed episodes. These could also have been rationed but, in most people's cases, were binge-viewed in three, two or even single sittings. Given the bizarre story that played out, with equally bizarre players, it was hardly family lockdown material, but there we were - all of us - craving another episode after each dose, even when it was clearly getting late.

Since it’s premiere on 20th March Tiger King has been watched by more than 64 million households (Netflix’s metric) and has become a classic example of word of mouth cultural encroachment. We watched it because “everyone” was talking about it. We weren’t disappointed. Every day there's another recommendation on Facebook, be it Stranger Things, Ozark or Love Is Blind, or from these shores, the BBC’s Killing Eve (an episode of which was filmed not 100 yards from the kitchen table at which I write this). No wonder Netflix has added almost 16 million new accounts in the first three months of the year (almost double the number of new sign-ups for the final months of 2019). Even with new productions on hiatus, Netflix promises that it won't be running out of content any time yet.

One of its jewels, and one it was smart to bet on from the outset, is Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad prequel which, it is frequently debated, has been even better than the show from which it spawned. This week its ten-episode fifth season drew to a stunning conclusion, brilliantly setting itself up for a sixth and final run, though no one quite knows when that will appear. Showrunners Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould were aiming for a season a year, but the lockdown in California has meant that production is on hiatus, although it has provided time to work on the new scripts. If you’ve not watched the final episode of Season 5, I won’t spoil it here, but like the previous seasons, 5 has been a delicious arc, continuing the metamorphosis of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman, the shyster lawyer of Breaking Bad (“It’s all good, man”), laying a few seeds that flower in the original series and even dropping a few plot lines that have left devotees of both shows wondering where and when the link will be made.

Picture: AMC television

But, unlike the much-binged Tiger King, Saul has been drip-fed to us, week-by-week, an old-fashioned approach, perhaps, but equally as effective as cliffhangers from old when the following week’s episode couldn’t come soon enough. This weekly progression has helped build not just a story curve but the season’s character curve, too. There have been standout performances from Bob Odenkirk as McGill/Goodman, as he finds himself deeper and deeper into the murky world of Albuquerque’s criminal underworld. Goodman was only ever meant to be a minor character in Breaking Bad, but with each new season of Saul, Gilligan and Gould have mined an even richer seam of ambition - and paranoia - providing obvious and not so obvious links and bridges to what we know of his future; Rhea Seehorn as his romantic partner and career-minded lawyer who, herself, starts to display a more nefarious side towards the end of the season, just as Walter White’s wife Skyler became more embroiled in the affairs of his alter-ego, ‘Heisenberg’; and the enigmatic Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut, the gnarled ex-cop (and, possibly, ex-special forces operative) doing the dirty work for nefarious drug emperor Gus Fring; and the season’s standout character, Lalo Salamanca, played with glorious, moustache-twirling, vintage villainy by Tony Dalton.

“Just IMAGINE when Better Call Saul was announced...the notion of suggesting it’d be half as remarkable as Breaking Bad was. You’d have been immediately ripped on & discredited. It’s all I see now - that it equals it, if not surpasses it. Astronomical odds of that happening.” So wrote the very excellent Canadian radio presenter Greg Brady in a tweet on Tuesday. I mention this as A) I follow Greg (and occasionally you can hear him on BBC 5 Live’s always entertaining Fighting Talk) and he follows me, and B) I couldn’t have summed up Better Call Saul better myself. That’s almost all there is to be said. With each new season, the bar has crept ever higher. Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have rightfully joined the ranks of the great entries in the so-called 'golden age of television', that period over the last couple of decades when The Sopranos, The Wire, Band Of Brothers, 24 and Homeland managed to transcend formulaic series television and become what became known as “appointment TV”, epic, cinematic television. America hasn’t had the monopoly on this, of course, as the likes of Line Of Duty, Killing Eve and, most recently, The Nest have demonstrated. But many of these examples are of shows which conform to a conventional linearity.

Picture: AMC

Better Call Saul - even more than Breaking Bad - has frequently demonstrated none of it. Moreover, Gilligan, in particular, has presided over two series with an identical love of quirky cinematography. If you thought some of the camera angles in the original Batman TV series in the 1960s were askew, some of the shot framing and scene-teeing in Saul, in particular, has been exquisite. The precedent was set in Breaking Bad, of course, with the opening episode commencing with Walt White, wearing white underpants and a gas mask, speeding off-road in the New Mexico desert in his cookshop 'RV'. All this before we had any clue as to who he was, what he was or why he was out there. Speed forward (or back), to the premiere episode of Better Call Saul, and the opening sequence begins with a individual who looks a lot like Saul living in stark anonymity in Nebraska, running a shopping mall Cinnabon kiosk, and spending his evenings replaying video cassettes of Saul Goodman TV commercials. All in black and white with hardly a word uttered. Here's Gilligan’s trademark: quirksome and often irony-laden, using idiosyncratic tracking shots or even something as simple as the reflection of an SUV in a puddle to build menace, curiosity and fear in equal measure, rather than simply resort to ‘establishing shots’ of landscapes which, while pretty, give little for the narrative to follow.

The Sopranos did similar things, with music frequently applied to underline Tony Soprano’s baby boomer, middle-aged dadness, an important reminder that he wasn’t just a ruthless capo. Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul have traded off the fact that New Mexico is not like anywhere else in the American south, and that Albuquerque is not like any other southern desert city. Even if the criminality theme fits into any reflection of modern America, and urban America in particular, the fact that Gilligan’s shows are not set in the usual locations, like Los Angeles or New York, merely adds to the fact that we’re simply watching something else entirely. It’ll be truly interesting to see where Saul - now he has more or less become Vader to Jimmy McGill’s Annakin - takes us in the final season. Whenever that materialises...