The shows where everyone knows your name

Picture: Paramount

In the history of television’s greatest shows reaching the end, there’s an accepted list of those that bowed out with the right mixture of pathos, completion and even a little intrigue. Leading this parade is The Sopranos - not only the best series ever to grace the small screen, but one which ended with brilliant, ambiguous flourish: mobster Tony Soprano, long-suffering wife Carmela and their children Meadow and Anthony Jr taking their seats in a New Jersey diner, its front door opens and Tony looks up, slightly pensively...before fading to black, and Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing cuts in to lower the curtain on a modern masterpiece.

Just as The Godfather is regarded as one of the greatest pieces of 20th Century film-making, with Goodfellas its rightful heir, The Sopranos dipped into the same gene pool, coming to be universally thought of as the catalyst of a golden era of cinematic storytelling in television, on a scale never previously achieved. Over six seasons, the epic HBO show coincided with the emergence of non-broadcast platforms and the artistic boldness that new players like Netflix would approach televised drama, giving us programming that was less formulaic gogglebox fodder as compelling novels in video form. 

Concurrent with The Sopranos, we had The West Wing, followed by the expansive arced narratives of The Wire, Breaking Bad and its spinoff Better Call Saul, the latter of which both ended with epic finales of their own. All are indebted to The Sopranos and, in particular, its 2007 finale. While such shows invariably carried a grim subtext (murder, drug dealing, violence, etc), they had a wit about them that television drama had rarely displayed before. Moreover, they could be compared to sitcoms for their depiction of strong, memorable and clearly defined characters. 

The best sitcoms are those with which we enjoy kindred familiarity (or aversion) with the cast, their on-screen personas and the situations they find themselves in. And the best sitcoms, too, concluded with a tear and a knowing look. It’s also why they have been televisual events. 

In 1983 105 million Americans tuned in to watch ‘Goodbye, Farewell And Amen’, the final episode of M*A*S*H, the series that had combined comedy with a moral conscience (having been spun out of Robert Altman’s anti-war film of the same name which, despite being set during the Korean conflict was clearly a statement on the contemporary battle raging in Vietnam). Over 11 seasons, viewers adhered to Hawkeye, BJ, Hotlips, Klinger, Colonel Potter and Charles Winchester with a sense of in-the-trenches camaraderie as they wisecracked their way through the horrors of an attritional war. The finale was as perfect an ending as those 11 years deserved. Obvious comparisons can be drawn with the ending of another war comedy, Blackadder Goes Forth, set amid the senseless slaughter of 1917 France, which signed off with that poignant ‘over-the-top’ order, before dissolving to a field of towering poppies.

Only Fools And Horses embedded itself in British national culture, with its cast, characters and their catchphrases acquiring a familiarity that made them extended members of our own households. Fools will forever be prefixed by the phrase “much loved”. No wonder its final episode, on Christmas Day 2003, attracted more than 24 million viewers - the highest recorded audience in the UK for a comedy, and roughly half the country’s viewing population at the time. The difference between Fools and American sitcoms is that it was written by just one person, John Sullivan. US shows tend to be written by squads of writers, but the effect is much the same, with the characters and their catchphrases becoming our own friends. Which inevitably leads me to Friends, which ended in 2004 with ‘The Last One’, concluding ten years of fun with the six New Yorkers who became, well, friends to all of us. In so many ways Friends was a spiritual successor to Seinfeld which, a few years earlier, had also focused on an equally dysfunctioning group of New York apartment-dwelling chums, their insecurities and mania, in a show that had prided itself on being about nothing at all. Over two episodes - the show’s 179th and 180th, respectively - ‘The Finale’  drew a US audience of 76 million.

Most of us will never be members of a New Jersey crime family, but many can identify with the ordinariness of suburban life at Casa Soprano (yeah, I know we don’t all have a stash of Uzis in the loft, but we have taken teenagers on tours of potential colleges, albeit without a rival being ‘whacked’ along the way). Ultimately, this affinity comes from the discernible gallery of individuals with whom we whom we might associate ourselves either partially or completely. Sitcoms, generally, bae this game easier to play: are you more Chandler than Joey? More Monica than Rachel? Del Boy or Rodney? George or Kramer?

Arguably the greatest example of sitcom ensemble casting reached its own finale 30 years ago today, when time was called on Cheers. I hold a particular affection for this show as, over its 11 series, it became the anchor of my Friday night viewing here in the UK, thanks to Channel 4. Even when I wouldn’t have been old enough to buy a pint in a British pub, let alone an American bar, Cheers was - and remains - the perfect half hour of gags and characters you couldn’t help love.

TV & Satellite Week, 18 May 1993

When it ended in 1993 I wrote a piece for TV & Satellite Week magazine in which I drew on Cheers’ status as the wittiest, most intelligent, most sophisticated television comedy of its time. And, possibly, since. This reverence, I argued, had much to do with the way it challenged the established order of sitcoms, being comprised of a group of somewhat disparate people linked by locale, not family. 

Cheers redefined the sitcom, abandoning the safe predictability of wholesome domesticity (i.e. The Cosby Show, Family Ties, et al), by abandoning the home to set itself in a downtown bar (the original concept was for the show to be set in a hotel as a US version of Fawlty Towers). 

In this setting, where punters went to escape their home life, Cheers presented a gallery of distinct personalities, generating laughs by exploiting these personas, either to prick the lasciviousness of Ted Danson’s Sam Malone, the pretentiousness of Shelly Long’s Diane Chambers, the slovenliness of George Wendt’s Norm Peterson, the dullness of John Ratzenberger’s Cliff Clavin, the naivety of Woody Harrelson’s Woody, the causticity of Rhea Perlmann’s Carla, the pomposity of Kelsey Grammer’s Dr. Frasier Crane, and latterly, the unfulfilled ambition of Kirstie Alley’s Rebecca Howe. But more than just being a platform for jokes about or from these characters, humour came from pitching their interactions - Sam’s pursuit of Diane, Norm’s bafflingly interdependent bromance with Cliff, Carla’s inverse bullying of everyone, Woody’s apprenticeship of adulthood with all of them, and so on.

Sexual and even social tension became a constant theme on Cheers, again in sharp contrast to the confected safety of American network television’s usual conservatism. The show also made much of the fact that it was set in a place of both work and recreation. Although many episodes featured scenes set away from the titular Boston bar, most were concentrated in the one set, giving the show a theatre-like environment. 

Not for nothing, Cheers won 28 Emmy Awards (and was nominated for a colossal 111). In its final episode, Sam would fix his final date; Carla would dish out her last barb; Cliff would regurgitate his one unused irrelevant fact; Woody would draw on his only remaining recollection of life “back in Hanover”; and Norm would down his last beer, though there is no record of him finally settling his bar tab (over 273 episodes he managed to avoid paying for a single drop of beer). 

That it got to that point after 11 years, growing to regularly commanding audiences of 83 million a week in the US, is testament to the perseverance by the US network NBC that ran it. Its first season, in 1982, suffered from poor ratings, but winning five Emmys, coupled with critical acclaim kept it going.

Picture: Netflix

What finished the show was Danson’s desire to concentrate on his film career, but also the intention to quit while Cheers was still at its peak (he was also earning a then-record $450,000 an episode). Most of the principle cast would go on to enjoy significant success elsewhere, though arguably it was ‘new boy’ Harrelson who would have the most critically successful career. Following Danson’s decision, the remaining cast members contemplated making a 12th series without him but they, too, concluded that Cheers would never be better.

Grammer, of course, would take his character Frasier Crane into his own eponymous sitcom which, for UK viewers, would also find a home in Channel 4’s Friday night fixture. It too - in its original run - enjoyed an 11-year run of ratings success, adopting both the traditional domestic formula with Cheers’ workplace setting. Frasier gave a somewhat lesser Cheers character a life of his own - in Seattle - creating with brother Niles, father Martin and his carer Daphne, radio producer Roz and standout star Eddie the dog another beloved ensemble (with Niles’ social-climbing but never seen wife Maris repeating the gag established by Norm’s Vera in Cheers).

‘Event’ finales like those of Friends, M*A*S*H and Cheers are unlikely to ever occur again. TV consumption has changed out of all recognition. 30 years ago, Cheers’ final episode became the 1983 season’s most watched show with over 93 million Americans watching it - some 40% of the entire US population. This had been partly engineered by clever marketing by NBC, which had promoted the episode as “the television event of a lifetime“ and television’s “greatest night”. Others got in on the act: Massachusetts governor William Weld (in the manner of The Simpsons’ publicity opportunity-seeking Mayor Quimby) declared 20 May 1993 the state’s ‘Cheers Day’. In the show’s fictional home, giant video screens were set up on Boston Common so crowds could watch the finale. Jay Leno even broadcast a live episode of his Tonight Show from the city’s Bull & Finch pub, the Cheers bar’s supposed location (the show was, of course, shot in Los Angeles). NBC devoted most of its programming that evening to Cheers, leading right up to the ‘One For The Road’ episode.

Just as the Friends finale would do a decade later, Cheers concluded with character closure. Woody entered public life as a Boston city councillor, getting Norm an accountancy job at City Hall in the process. Cliff got a promotion at the post office. Rebecca finally achieved her ambition of marrying a rich man. And TV’s greatest will-they, won’t-they romance, between Sam and Diane was revived…briefly, before calling last orders on one of the best sitcoms of all time by remaining, like that Sopranos ending, delightfully, ambiguously unresolved.

Goodman in a storm: an epic television journey

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

So that was Better Call Saul. Six captivating seasons of television charting the back story of shady lawyer Jimmy McGill and his metamorphosis into even shadier lawyer Saul Goodman (and, then, apparently unassuming Omaha, Nebraska, Cinnabon branch manager, Gene Takovic). Goodman (“It’s all good, man!”) was only meant to be a sub-character in Breaking Bad, introduced in its second season for a four-episode run, only to be developed into a more pivotal character in the universe and then, over the last seven years, the focus of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s brilliantly written, intelligently directed, utterly compelling series. 

Much of the show’s strength has been drawn from Bob Odenkirk’s performances as the serial scammer McGill/Goodman/Takovic, an enlarged version of the exaggerated lawyers you see advertising on American local TV (“Been in a car crash? Then I’m the guy for you! Let ME fight your corner!”), making him protagonist of a wider landscape of Mexican drug gangs in and around Albuquerque, the thread running through both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. 

To some extent, Saul has been about plugging gaps in the Breaking Bad universe, filling in the back story of how McGill became Goodman, and thus became mixed up in the cartel that turned high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) into the drug kingpin Heisenberg. Saul, however, has never been about tying up loose ends, instead presenting something of a Bonnie & Clyde love story between McGill and fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), as they engage in an ever-increasing spiral of capers which eventually end in tragedies and tragic separation.

Vince Gilligan (middle) with Bob Odenirk (right) and Michael McKean as Chuck McGill (left)
Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Common to both Breaking Bad and Saul are moments of subtle comedy mixed with arch violence, at perverse odds with the murky nature of plotlines, such as Jonathan Banks’ Mike Ehrmantraut - the cynical ex-cop-turned enforcer for fried chicken supremo/meth magnate Gus Fring - challenging Odenkirk for the wriest lines, and for a good half of Saul’s sixth season Tony Dalton as the Dick Dastardly-esque moustache-twirling smiling psycho Lalo Salamanca, easily one of the finest small screen villains I’ve seen in years. 

“When we first started concocting the idea of doing a spinoff, we literally thought it’d be a half-hour show,” Gilligan recently told Rolling Stone. “It’d be something akin to Dr Katz [animated Comedy Central sitcom from the late ’90s] where it’s basically Saul Goodman in his crazy office with the styrofoam columns and he’s visited every week by a different stand-up comic. It was basically, I guess, legal problems. We talked about that for a day or two. And then Peter Gould and I realised, we don’t know anything about the half-hour idiom. And then we thought, okay, well, so it’s an hour … but it’s going to be a really funny hour. I said, ‘Breaking Bad is about 25-percent humour, 75-percent drama and maybe this will be the reverse of that.’ Well this thing [Saul], especially in Season Four, is every bit as dramatic as Breaking Bad ever was. I just didn’t see any of that coming. I didn’t know how good it would all be. I really didn’t.

Throw in, then, large dollops of irony, the consistently oblique opening sequences to each episode [such as the brilliant Point & Shoot, which begins with the Pacific dreamily washing over a beach, a lone black shoe bobbing in the brine, and followed by a tracking shot that leads to an abandoned car - a future flashback to Ehrmantraut’s deception of how the murdered Hamlin’s body was never found). Add to that exquisite cinematography and smartly unpredictable direction, and Saul will make an immediate entry into the great pantheon of formidable TV series that have enthralled us over the last decade or two. 

Saul’s final season, spread out over 13 episodes (with a mid-season break caused by Odenkirk’s absence from filming due to an on-set heart attack), took arcing narrative to a new level of sophistication and creative licence. Just as Breaking Bad charted White’s transition to Heisenberg, Saul charted McGill’s less linear path from Chicago con artist to his reinvention as Goodman, and then - cleverly shot in black and white - eventual denouement as Takovic (presumably living a new life in Nebraska away from the murderous events in Albuquerque but finding the temptation to scam too much to let go, leading - in last night’s finale - to his past catching up with him). 

It is not altogether, a feelgood end. There is a hint of mild redemption, as McGill settles in for an 86-year stretch at an extreme federal prison in Montrose, Colorado, where fellow hardcore inmates respect him for his ‘Better Call Saul!’ TV ad persona. There is even something of a reconciliation between Jimmy and the now estranged Kim, long after their scamming and its intersection with Lalo Salamanca led to the violent death of smarmy lawyer Howard Hamlin and indeed Salamanca himself.

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The received wisdom is that we have been - and still are - in a golden age of television. Better Call Saul, and Breaking Bad are both entries in a library of shows that have, with each iteration, challenged the conventions and formulas that, in particular, American-made network television shows took during my childhood. The arrival of, first, the cable channels and then, more recently, the streamers threw off the shackles of network regulation. An hour of television suddenly became an hour of cinematic television. The Sopranos (still for me the greatest television show of all time) in 1999 can lay claim to being the catalyst, leading to shows like The Wire, Mad Men, Homeland, Game Of Thrones and almost every other ‘appointment’ drama you’ve ever been recommended. Even network shows, like House or Grey’s Anatomy benefitted from the narrative-driven approach that the cable and streaming series generated.

I know all of these examples are American, and there have been plenty of similarly intelligently-written series elsewhere (from acclaimed Scandi-dramas to Line Of Duty), but the US has cornered the market for event programming to schedule your life around, rather than simply have on. You could say, I know, that few of these shows were based on new concepts: there was The Godfather before The Sopranos, political dramas before The West Wing and Hill Street Blues before The Wire, but none were allowed the space and creative licence to explore the plots and themes that they pursued, challenging ‘cookie cutter’ depictions of nuclear families, urban living, social behaviour or the criminal underworld.

Arguably, though, the biggest strength of all of them - and Better Call Saul has been the prime example - is pace. Like its ‘sequel’ Breaking Bad, Saul was deliberately slow to get cooking. Gilligan and Gould were in no rush to establish Jimmy McGill as the vengeful rogue, slowly building his ascent to become Saul Goodman by creating a long-form rivalry with slick lawyer Howard Hamlin (whose own arc crossed streams with Lalo’s in tragic circumstances in this final season), leaving victims in his wake, such as his own brother Chuck and eventual wife Kim. Saul doesn’t ask for our view on the morality of it all, much as The Sopranos didn’t ask for our opinion on the casual violence and the almost organised infidelity of the principle characters. And so, McGill cons and fleeces his way through scam after scam, becoming Goodman and latterly Takovic. None of this happened overnight. And it was better for it.

Tony Dalton as Lalo Salamanca
Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

The quality is courage: The Sopranos wasn’t afraid to bump off Soprano crew stalwart Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero in just the second series and there have been similar ‘Well that just happened…!’ moments in all of the shows it sired, from Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell in The Wire to Bryan Cranston’s Walter White in Breaking Bad itself). Even in Better Call Saul, Lalo met his end midway through this final series, despite appearing to be set up as chief antagonist for its entire length. That is the brilliance of this sort of television. Predictability just won’t cut it.

Seinfeld proved, too, that you could fill a half hour with nothing at all, as long as it was witty. Gilligan and Gould have done something similar with their two series set, more or less, in the fairly uninspiring New Mexico city of Albuquerque. Who else could make five minutes of McGill/Goodman bouncing a tennis ball off his office wall while he contemplates his own divorce, riotously entertaining? In an industry - especially the American television industry - where every second of airtime has to count, less can definitely mean more.

Of course, some of the credit for this must go to the non-linear channels like HBO, Netflix, AppleTV, Disney Plus, AMC and others that now dominate our viewing choices. They’ve enabled the proliferation of television length, cinema-scale creativity, some of which is attracting some of the most talented directors in the industry. Disney’s acquisition of the Star Wars universe, with spinoffs like The Mandalorian and Obi-Wan Kenobi, may not have won over all of the fanboys, but they’ve literally chopped up a cinema product and made it bingeworthy telly. 

Better Call Saul’s ending will probably end the Breaking Bad universe. Gilligan says they’ve had other ideas, but his focus now will be on something completely new. “It’s a lot of pressure. It’s very scary. A lot of sweaty palms. A lot of sleepless nights,”, Gilligans’s creative partner, Peter Gould said of Saul’s ending during a Television Critics Association presentation. “I think, ‘Who are we going to please?’ I think we know. I think those of us on the show are very happy with where it ended. I hope everybody else agrees.”. 

Over the course of 62 episodes of Breaking Bad, 63 episodes of Saul, and the post-Breaking Bad film El Camino, Gilligan (who previously worked on The X Files) and Gould have sealed themselves firmly in the great library of epic television shows. While they haven’t reinvented the medium, they’ve injected something of wit and intelligence to the hour-long format. One day, I’ve promised myself to rewatch The Sopranos in its entirety. I can see these entertaining tales of morally reprehensible behaviour in Albuquerque getting another airing as well. I’d just need to find ten uninterrupted days to binge my way through all of it.

Picture: Greg Lewis/AMC/Sony Pictures Television

Still listening?

Picture: Paramount/Gale Adler

The history of cherished TV shows being revived long after they’ve disappeared in their prime has not always been a happy one. For every success - a Doctor Who, say - you could cite the disappointing Open All Hours, relaunched without the deceased Ronnie Barker, or the recent attempt at reviving Will & Grace. Half the problem is that TV companies, much like their first cousins the film studios, have an interest in retreading something old and familiar rather than commission something new. 

Inevitably, this risks messing with the very magic that made a property much loved to begin with (the 2016 Dad’s Army film did just that - an awkward homage that failed to justify its rationale of updating a TV series that has arguably never been bettered). Some expired properties live on as spinoffs: you could easily argue that Better Call Saul is actually better than Breaking Bad, of which it serves as a prequel. 

Some, though, don’t live up to expectation. Matt Le Blanc’s Friends offshoot Joey was never the snappy ensemble piece of its parent. Even that highly anticipated one-off Friends reunion - planned for last May but shelved by the pandemic - hasn't exactly had people holding their breath in anticipation. Don't get me wrong, Friends was wonderful, 30 years ago in its pomp, and still holds its own in endless syndication, but are we really that desperate to see Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe and Ross in middle age? The whole premise of Friends was a group of twentysomethings living in New York. When it ended, with parenthood and suburban living, it felt like it had run its natural course.

So it’s with some apprehension that we read that Frasier is coming back, 17 years after it came to a timely end in one of the greatest sitcom finales ever. Paramount announced this week that Kelsey Grammer will reprise his role as Dr. Frasier Crane for a brand new run as an anchor of its new digital streaming service Paramount+. 

Demand may, then, meet supply in helping Paramount+ off the ground with a much-loved property like Frasier. But as Roseanne found, when it returned briefly, a revival is not helped if its principal then goes and does something stupid: Roseanne Barr brought it all abruptly to an end by posting a racist tweet (“repugnant”, in the words of the ABC Network president) that got her fired. 

That, though, didn’t hold back the reinvention of the show as The Conners - arguably the first ever spinoff of a reboot. It's still going, unlike Will & Grace which returned after 11 years away only to last three seasons before getting axed. In truth, it was no longer that funny, seemingly retreading old jokes around the central four characters and not offering much new. 

Frasier was, you’ll recall, a spinoff from the equally loved Cheers, and it’s still a matter of debate as to which was the better, both being blessed with faultless casting and faultless writing. Frasier ported one of Cheers’ supporting characters and turned him into the centrepiece of a new ensemble, built around the concept of the divorced and hoity-toity psychiatrist moving into a swanky Seattle apartment with his decidedly blue collar dad, and his scampish pet dog. The dynamic was brilliantly expanded by the addition of Crane’s younger and even more neurotic brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), and an English physical therapist, Daphne Moon, who looked after the brothers’ father while becoming the secret, and then not so secret love interest to the junior Crane sibling. Even Eddie the dog became a distinctive character in his own right, earning his own front cover on America's showbiz digest Entertainment Weekly. Rightfully, the show won 37 Emmy Awards over the course of 11 seasons, with Grammer and Pierce winning four between them, along with Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild gongs. 

This week's announcement placed Frasier’s revival as the headline act of Paramount+, and was accompanied by a suitably ‘corporate’ quote from Grammer, saying that he would “gleefully anticipate sharing the next chapter in the continuing journey of Dr. Frasier Crane.” However, it is not yet known who would be joining him on that journey: John Mahoney, the Lancashire-born actor who played Crane’s irascible ex-cop dad Martin, died of cancer in 2018; Jane Leeves, the other British cast member (who played Daphne, ironically as a Lancastrian, even though she was born in Essex), said earlier this month that had no intention of giving up her role in the US medical drama series The Resident to do the then-rumoured Frasier reboot. 

The joy of Frasier - much like Cheers - was that it was cleverly multi-dimensional. Frasier may have been the pivot - be it plot lines focused on his Seattle radio station, the relationship with Niles, or their dynamic with Martin - but there was also Martin's dynamic with Daphne, and Daphne’s ‘will-they-won’t-they’ relationship with Niles. For me, at least, it made Frasier ‘appointment TV’ on a Friday night. As for the new series, Paramount promised “more exactly the same than ever”, but wouldn’t be drawn on storylines or casting, including the likelihood of Pierce returning. Grammer himself had previously said that he wouldn’t revive the show without his on-screen brother, surely one of the most serendipitous casting decisions in television history (a happy accident - originally there wasn’t going to be a brother until a casting manager saw a 10x8 of Pierce and saw what appeared to be a strong family resemblance). 

In Cheers, the educated, pompous and ever-so slightly snooty Frasier Crane was the fish out of water amongst the bar flies he drank with in Boston. Frasier flipped personas in moving to Seattle, with his ex-cop dad and the Mancunian Daphne becoming the grounded points of reference, leaving the brothers to fuss over fine wines, Debussy and the cut of their well appointed suits.

Quite what the Frasier reboot will be like, then, remains wide open. When a potential return first surfaced in 2018, Grammer told The Guardian that there would be risks: “It would be quite a breathtaking failure to try to do it and not do it better than the previous show - and I think that’s almost impossible. To pick up that responsibility would be a very brave thing to do.” A year later the subject came up again, but this time Grammer put a little more substance behind ideas that were clearly under consideration, including setting the show in a city other than Crane's home town. “We’ll see how people respond to it because it’s not going to be the same place, it’s not going to be Seattle,” Grammer said in 2019. “It’s not going to be the same Frasier, it’s going to be the man in his next iteration.”  

That man has, in truth, gone through two reinventions, with his own show and a guest appearance by Grammer as the character in a crossover episode of the sitcom Wings. But what garnered all those Emmys during its run between 1993 and 2004, building to an audience of 37 million in the US alone for its final episode, was the combination of saturated creativity - a vast team of show runners, producers and writers - and a core ensemble cast who lived in our hearts for thirty minutes every week. Only Fools And Horses comes to mind as an equivalent (although that had just one writer behind it). 

Here lies the key to whether the reboot will work. “Great television is about creating characters that resonate with audiences and creating universes that viewers want to spend time within," Tim Glanfield, editorial director of the Radio Times said this week. And from that, he said, some shows create a genuine emotional need. “The characters are missed, the world it occupied is mourned for, a little gap is left in people's lives, and audiences often ask, 'why couldn't they have made more?’”.

Picture: NBC

The compulsion will be for Frasier’s producers to do their damnedest to bring back as many of the original cast as possible, simply as that was where the magic lived. Cryptically, when appearing on James Corden’s US chat show in 2019, he hinted that any reboot would be a “third act” rather than a continuation. “The same group of characters, but in a different setting,” he said. “Something has changed in their lives.” Quite what, we don’t know, but it's wise to suspect that it will not be the sort of franchised reinvention that Blackadder went through. All of the principle cast - if they commit - will have aged (even the lad who played Frasier and Lillith Crane’s son, Frederick, is now 32), which, like the Friends reunion, might either inspire the creative premise, or be its failure. Hopefully we will find out, if Paramount confirms details of when - and where - the reboot will appear.

The bigger challenge, arguably, is how Frasier will connect with its audiences. Unlike Friends, the show was never a feature of younger viewing habits. Since it came off air, anyone under the age of thirty will have become hooked on the myriad reality series that keep the streaming services afloat. But, like the Friends reunion, I’m sure there will be a quorum of viewers eager to recreate their Friday evenings in the '90s, settling down at 9pm in eager anticipation of that jazzy xylophone riff and an animated squiggle of Seattle’s Space Needle, welcoming us into Crane’s KACL radio studio. All followed by Grammer’s mellifluous baritone saying the words: “I’m listening”.

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...

It’s all good, man

There is a debate amongst television critics over which show can be declared the greatest ever. It’s a similar discourse to that perennial, what is cinema's greatest film (The Godfather, obviously). Except that the television debate is probably even tighter to call. One thing is certain: we’ve been in a golden era of TV drama since the turn of the Millennium, when The Sopranos was just hitting its stride, The Wire and Band Of Brothers were about to happen, and most right-minded individuals were saying that if it wasn’t for Hill Street Blues and, especially, Homicide: Life On The Street, none of these pieces of epic, cinematic television would have happened at all.

I was prepared to declare all bets off following The Sopranos when Breaking Bad came along. The Newark mob series had everything: Corleone-esque, Shakespearian tragedy; a modern take on suburban family life; male mental vulnerability; dark humour; a creative approach to sex and violence; and a cast so brilliantly assembled - and, so Italian-American - that the Emmy judging committee should probably have just taken the years 2000 to 2007 off with a ‘gone fishing’ sign swinging on the door. The Sopranos’ deliciously open-ended finale was barely six months-cold when the American cable network AMC gave a debut to a slow-burn show about a high school chemistry teacher who, facing up to turning 50 and a terminal cancer diagnosis, succumbs to an unusual form of mid-life crisis and reinvents himself as a methamphetamine kingpin in Albuquerque. Breaking Bad took its first season to get going, and that was clearly writer Vince Gilligan’s intention. Such was its plot and character development that it is, actually, still hard to pinpoint the exact moment that it hit stride. But, like any addiction, once you realise you're in too deep, it's too late. But, by the time Bryan Cranston’s Walter White/Heisenberg succumbed to injury at the end of Season 5, we had been dragged through an intoxicating rollercoaster, not dissimilar to that Tony Soprano took us on, as families were tested, friendships questioned, and plots and sub-plots got thicker and deeper.

Whether this was Gilligan’s writing process or not, Breaking Bad was an undoubted high point in the art of the story arc, as if he knew precisely how the show would evolve from the opening episode of Season 1 to the finale of Season 5. The same must be the case with Better Call Saul, the prequel-sequel which wittily traces the creation of shyster, knows-where-the-bodies-are-buried lawyer Saul Goodman, the attorney who kept Walter White safe. Because, as we reached the final episode yesterday of Season 4, it is possible that Better Call Saul is eclipsing its predecessor for utter brilliance. Once more, Gilligan has slow-burned it, cleverly building the story of conman Jimmy McGill’s attempts to break into alegal career in the shadow of his eccentric elder brother, Chuck, while sowing seeds of Breaking Bad back stories, including the rise of Gus Fring, the scheming fried chicken entrepreneur-come-ruthless meth cartel player, his enforcer Mike Ehrmantraut and the fiersome Salamancas.

With its fourth season, Gilligan has commenced the transition of McGill into Goodman, not quite Anakin Skywalker becoming Darth Vader, but certainly the creation of a vessel for the dark arts that will, in Breaking Bad, provide Odenkirk with a breakout character as the strip mall lawyer with a line in sharp patter and equally sharp thinking. Running through the season has been Jimmy’s inability to process his brother’s death at the end of Season 3, his slowly decaying relationship with fellow lawyer Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), an ever-increasingly number of hints as to the source of Fring’s fractious - and, ultimately, fatal - relationship with the Salamancas. Meanwhile, Ehrmantraut has been tasked by Fring with overseeing work on creating the super meth lab that will figure in Breaking Bad, another scintilating nod ahead to the mother series (and, to be a bit of a nerd, another unintended Star Wars parallel, like seeing the Death Star under construction in Revenge Of The Sith...).

These are just a few nuggets from Better Call Saul’s fourth season, one which ends - no spoilers here - with Jimmy telling Kim that everything will be fine - "It's all good, man". Genius. Just as Gilligan pulled off so brilliantly with Breaking Bad, time in this universe runs slowly. Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul progress cleverly, at a subtle pace that reveals less than you realise and more than you know at the same time. Some might find this drip-feed of detail frustrating, agonising, even. But it is no less compelling. In the best traditions of soap opera, the need to find out what happens next is infuriating, but deliciously created in the process. Looking back over these last nine episodes of Better Call Saul the reveals have been peeled away like the skin of an onion. It is writing of an exquisite hue, television of an astonishing quality. If you've watched Breaking Bad you know how many of the Better Call Saul characters end up or, at least, how they come about. Even Jimmy's ill-fated brother Chuck and girlfriend Kim are vital ingredients to the slippery fish Saul Goodman seems fully-formed when he comes into contact with Walter and Jesse in original show. Better Call Saul even includes flash-forwards to Jimmy/Saul, post-Albuquerque, trying to maintain life, soul and anonymity in a Nebraska shopping mall where, as 'Gene Takovic' he runs a Cinnabon franchise.

Regardless of the subplots and parallel story strands of each episode, the focus always returns to McGill, and his transformation into Goodman. Such is the genius of Gilligan’s characterisation and Odenkirk’s performance of him, that it will always be difficult to be sympathetic to him. His vulnerabilities, stupidity and, occasionally, good nature are all on show. He is hero and anti-hero, protagonist and antagonist, morally as lacking as most, if not all other principle characters in the show, who are all in some way working to succeed behind the lines of criminality. As we wait eagerly for the next season - there's no clue as to whether a fifth will be the last, even though that would match Breaking Bad's perfect season structure - we know that there is a finite nature to all of Better Call Saul's characters, and yet we crave them. We want more of Ehrmantraut's survivalism, of Fring's utterly cold criminality, even the desert blandness of Albuquerque and the sand-washed normality of the American West that provides such a flattened canvas for the drug crime on which both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad pivot. And, weirdly, we want Jimmy to succeed, just as we did Walter White. There is no morality tale here: White may have had somewhat best intentions to monetising his chemistry expertise, but he had, as soon as he decided to take that path, crossed over to the dark side. McGill was probably already there. Now we wait to see how far he goes there. Season 5 cannot come soon enough. It’s all good, man.