TV Reviews
Several months ago, I decided that I was watching too little TV, so I paid for a Netflix subscription. TV is important. I regret this lapse.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I never watched many of the TV shows that have become part of the national bloodstream. Trying belatedly to make up for lost TV time, I paid for and binge-watched Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. I wasn’t disappointed.
While I was watching Breaking Bad I had a few criticisms but I’ve forgotten them so they must have been inconsequential.
Bryan Cranston, an actor with whom I was previously unfamiliar, has entered my consciousness as a quintessential “man of a certain sort.”1 A man of a certain sort is a man who represents his type of guy perfectly. His “certain sort”? Middle-aged, white, competent, besieged by dimwits and frauds on all sides. Cranston is a great actor.
I was aware that the series had a huge claque of obsessed fans, mostly male, but I wasn’t aware that Skyler White had attracted a boatload of misogynist criticism.
Though I’m late to the party, I understood the phenomenon because after a certain age, you develop the ability to comprehend situations after the fact. Having no boundaries, males who have never matured beyond the “I hate girls” stage get butthurt easily. According to them Skyler was all sorts of nasty shrew.
I disagree. I thought Sky was a noble character. Look at all she put up with, uncomplainingly:
She lived in a downscale home with a morose husband who never realized his potential for reasons that had nothing to do with her, she had a physically challenged son whom she loved dearly, she carried an accidental late-in-life pregnancy (which entails risk of having another physically challenged baby) to term, she sticks by her sick husband while suspecting he’s a drug dealer, her awful sister is a thief, comes up with some wily ideas to get him out of trouble and finally goes to bat for him. She never really dumps him. Perhaps she should have, for the baby’s sake, but she doesn’t.
Oh, about that name: Heisenberg. To me the meaning is obvious. Walter Heisenberg worked for the Nazis, lying to himself that he was just doing science. That’s what Walter White did: just doing science and providing for his family.
Upshot: 10 out of 10. Any criticisms are inconsequential nitpicking.
Better Call Saul is both better and worse than its predecessor.
Better:
Better Call Saul’s writing is even sharper and bleaker than in Breaking Bad.
Kim Wexler is the greatest female character I’ve ever seen on any TV show, hands down. The secret? They didn’t write a Strong Female Character, they wrote a human being who goes through life in a woman’s body.
Saul, that mean, cold bastard, truly loves Kim. But even that is based on criminality, albeit petty compared to the things Saul does otherwise. Kim should have known better. He’s her weakness. She has no one else. I noted that the only friend in the world she had was Saul. She didn’t have a Best Female Friend that she’d dish with. All her eggs (literally) were in this corrupt bastard-basket, and she paid for it.
The relationship between the two brothers is shatteringly honest and tragic.
Worse (and it’s a big flaw):
Gritty reality is the heart of Better Call Saul, in the writing and the casting and the cinematography. The weak spot is the featured role casting.
All of the principal and supporting actors are flawless and brilliantly cast. It’s true that some of the ones that were in Breaking Bad look older (especially Mike) but Gilligan had no control over the fact that the prequel was filmed after the sequel.
It was in the featured parts that verisimilitude gave way to politics.
The featured parts were overwhelmingly played by black actors. At a certain point I said to myself, “OK, is this judge going to be a black woman?” At which point you are not immersed in a story, you realize you’re being manipulated and you resent it.
Woke casting preceded Revolution Summer of 2020 by at least 15 years. It started in the theater (both British and American) with “color-blind casting,” which ostensibly meant that actors would be cast without regard to race, but that was a lie: it always goes in one direction. It means that black actors get white parts, never the other way around, and once a part goes to a black actor, it’s black in perpetuity.
In 2012, Mandy Patinkin, one of the last of the true Broadway stars, was forced to resign from a part (that he was going to play temporarily!) because… he was white.
Tony-winning actor Mandy Patinkin dropped out of the Broadway show “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” on Friday after an announcement that he would be replacing African American actor Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan in the role of Pierre was met with anger online.
To compound the cultural masochism, the black actor was playing a Russian fictional character, Pierre Bezukhov, the protagonist of War and Peace.2
When Kenneth Branagh cast Sophie Okenedo as Margaret of Anjou in 2016, opposition to this racial gaslighting (“why do you care it’s just acting no these are our parts and if you notice don’t notice you’re a racist”) had been beaten down to right-wing tweets. (And obscure Substacks.)
Both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul famously took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. You might say that Albuquerque is actually an uncredited character in both.
Both series featured Hispanic actors playing evil drug lords, which perfectly reflects the reality: Hispanics do dominate the drug trade in the border states.
Many scenes took place in Mexico. There were notable scenes with illegals coming over the border. The show depicted how this is entwined with the drug trade.
Further: These Hispanic characters aren’t just evil, they are surpassingly evil, cruel, sadistic, and disgusting in a specifically Hispanic way. Their “Hispanidad” was linked with their cruelty and evil.
I think this is fine. I’m not saying Gilligan should have changed this for politically correct reasons. It reflects reality.
But then don’t suddenly turn from gritty verisimilitude to woke casting and expect me to believe it.
In a half-Hispanic town, most of the service/support personnel in every walk of life would be Hispanic. The letter carriers, the bus drivers, the front desk clerk in the criminal court, most of the court personnel from the lower downs to the DAs to the judges, the detectives—these vital cogs of human society in Albuquerque would surely be Hispanic. They are the substrate of Albuquerque life, with whites in the middle and on the top. In a series, these would be called “feature parts.”
Virtually every feature part was played by a black actor. In a town that’s 3% black!
There was even a scene in which Saul is interrogated by two detectives about Saul’s client, who owns a valuable baseball card collection. Both detectives were black. I could see one detective being black to throw a sop to diversity, but two? C’mon.3
It gets worse. This isn’t in the clip, it comes a bit before this action starts, but one of the black detectives is a Ty Cobb fan and owns a valuable Ty Cobb card. The idea that a black baseball card collector would treasure a Ty Cobb card is about as ridiculous as it gets.
Ty Cobb was famously racist.4 The chances of a black Ty Cobb-loving detective in Albuquerque working with another black detective are, well, nil.
Taking away parts from Hispanic actors playing the service jobs Hispanics do in real life slants the portrayal against Hispanics as a race. In the entire show there was one Hispanic character who had a conscience, Nacho Varga, whose father ran a legit business. Other than that, Hispanics were sadists who ran the drug business, illegals, or servers in fast food restaurants.
Woke casting created a seriously distorted picture of Albuquerque. If a show’s calling card is verisimilitude and you distort something blatantly for political reasons, I’m going to dock you for it.
Upshot: 6 out of 10. Better Call Saul is a feminist triumph and a racial cave-in.
I initially gave it a 5, but on reflection I bumped it up to 6 because I think it’s worth watching for the good parts. Maybe a 7.
Rough Diamonds tells the story of the Wolfsons, a Hasidic family of diamond traders in modern day Antwerp. They get involved with the Albanian mafia, the cops learn about that, and over all that they struggle with the modern world undercutting their livelihood.
It’s from the same production crew as Fauda, which I hated. That’s another story for another time.
I thought Rough Diamonds was literally half excellent and half crap. It’s one of those series that’s two-in-one: a frank depiction of a way of life that’s in opposition to the modern world set on top of a twisty crime story.
I thought they did a bang up job depicting the Hasidic world. I hate that word “respectful” — great art doesn’t respect anything, it tells the truth — but this is a commercial product and perhaps the same rules don’t apply. It was respectful without being obsequious. Some reviewers objected to the fact that the Hasidim were played by non-Jewish actors. I’m not going to bother objecting to that, it’s so stupid. The actors were outstanding, in fact, I thought the actors who played the Hasidim were better than the ones who played the non-Jewish Belgians, especially the actress who played Adina, the one sane member of the Wolfson family.
The lead actor, a Belgian named Kevin Janssens, was a true leading man. He held the whole mishmash together.
The worst thing it shows about the Hasidim is the truth: their tendency to enforce rules by shaming and gossip. Step outside the rules and your name is mud. The customs were simply portrayed as if they were the most natural thing on earth, which they are, to their adherents. This was all terrific.
I frankly did not understand the twisty back story about the crime stuff and after a while I just gave up. That, to me, was a big turn-off, and during the course of the action, something much more interesting occurred to me.
In several of the episodes, the fact that the Hasidim are losing their monopoly to Indian traders is referred to, and one episode is constructed around the competing Jewish and Indian factions involved in the election to the head of the “Bourse.” This led me to read about the subject.
Apparently the Hasidim are in the process of being displaced by Jains from India. Long story short, they did it the way you do it: start small, be crafty, consolidate power, and before you know it, you’re in control….sounds familiar?
No objections to the picture of Hasidim getting in over their heads with the Albanian mafia, I think that focusing on the fact that they’re being displaced is a more interesting plot line than what I saw.
Upshot: 5 out of 10. But see it anyway.
Caliphate is a must-see. I have nothing bad to say about it, OK, a couple of nitpicks. There were some far-fetched things towards the end about timing. Yes, there is a Strong Woman Cop, who gets into the Caliphate in something like three days — that would never have happened in real life, but no series is perfect.
Otherwise, this is a great show about a real problem. They did an incredible job recreating the hell of Raqqa.
The depiction of the young jihadis is spot on. They cook spaghetti and plot jihad. They wear American sports gear, think the US is the most racist country on earth and plot jihad. Israel is an obscenity because of course it is. They discuss makeup and boy bands and plot jihad.
See it, just see it.
Upshot: 10 out of 10.
Have you ever watched a show whose characters you hate but you watch it because the background of the story is so inherently fascinating? That’s how I feel about The Cathedral Of The Sea.
I think it was in the third episode where I said to myself, “I really don’t like these people, any of them.” Maybe it’s the dubbing, but I don’t think so. I can “hear” beyond dubbing. The actors are just stiff and stagey but it’s not their fault: the characters are dull and one-dimensional.
The female characters suck. I think I’ve made it clear that I despise “Strong Woman Character” but the other extreme is as bad.
The gals are either Madonnas or whores. If you’re a whore you get beaten, shut up in a box, whipped, or raped. If you’re a Madonna you die of the plague. This gets tedious.
My chief objection to the “woman as temptress” trope is that I don’t think it’s true to male sexuality. Do men go through life pure as the driven snow, thinking of nothing but sports, astronomy, cars, their dog, and the fate of man until some woman flashes come hither eyes at you? Really? Or do they have overwhelming urges that happen to coincide with the presence of an attractive woman? In this story the main character would go through life hauling rocks, happily celibate, if that evil woman hadn’t skulked around him, dragging him down, making it impossible for him to shtup his (better looking and much sweeter) wife.
I’m not buying it.
The lead actor is, alas, handsome but inert. A good lead actor can cover up for a multitude of sins. I was more interested in this actor’s abundant black hair than his eyes, always a bad sign.
But—the story is interesting. It takes place in 14th century Barcelona, one of the most fascinating places that’s ever existed, and the production values are spectacular.
Upshot: 4 out of 10. See it for the story, but don’t expect much.
LINKS:
Mandy Patinkin’s White Ass Is Booted
Actors occupy an odd space in the mind, something that I keep meaning to write about. In my mind, only James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Keanu Reeves occupy this space. Not even Bogie goes there. Maybe Joaquin Phoenix. It’s not sexual desire: it’s seeing that man as unique yet representative of All Men.
Natasha Rostova was of course played by a black actress, and is now considered part of the black repertoire. Any white actress who plays Natasha Rostova will be considered a racial thief.
Looking at it again, I think the scene sucks. Saul is supposed to be slick, and he’s obviously bullshitting in a way that any competent detective could rip apart in two seconds. Woke casting ruins everything it touches.
Guess what, Cobb’s racism may be a myth. But that’s his image. A black baseball fan would probably think he was.