Monday night was the series finale of Better Call Saul, something I covered two years ago (link here). I want to talk about how it all ended a little, but also discuss how we watch television in this day and age. This was an exceptionally rare show I've watched each season, mostly as the episodes come out, and as a result I was much better emotionally invested in the ending. And it delivered.
Binging (that word looks wrong even if I know it's right) has become how so many people watch TV, at least within my generation. With the rise of streaming entire seasons and series are available to us and we tend to get hooked on one or two at a time. This method allows us to consume a whole lot in a short duration, if we so choose, and that choice is often hard to turn down. There are so many shows out there, plenty of good and plenty of bad, and FOMO can be real. I know I want to stay up on a number of the big cultural touchtones, though I like to think I'm usually more interested in finding great stories than only watching what's popular. What I'm attempting to say is that binging can be good and bad. Am I glad that I've seen Breaking Bad, the Wire and Game of Thrones? Absolutely. But I absorbed all three of those in incredibly short periods of time and I think something is lost when you do that. There's value added by spending a week thinking about each episode, a year or more anticipating the next season, and, to some of us, doing game-theory on what's going to happen next. Less at once is more. I'm starting to wonder if another one of my favorite shows, Stranger Things (no I'm not caught up yet), will eventually fade from my memory due to the Netflix release method. I do think it's been hurt by releasing it all at the same time, though they at least did do the most recent season in two parts.
Much more so than Breaking Bad and the Wire, the flaws of a big binge were apparent with Game of Thrones. I saw the series finale with a group of friends during our typically annual excursion to Vegas, at a viewing party at Hofbräuhaus. I know at least one of those guys did not enjoy this but I enjoyed that there was plenty of German beer and a boisterous crowd to laugh with. That terrible finish would've left me more bitter and annoyed had I watched it alone at home. What I realized from that evening was, in the end, I wasn't all that emotionally invested due to how recently I'd started watching it. In that case I was lucky and it worked out. But I knew it wouldn't be that way every time.
Since the GoT finale there have been certain shows I purposefully didn't binge. Peaky Blinders was like that, where every year or so I watched another season, and that's been well worth it. WandaVision was another. All the frustrating, quick endings were as big as anything that happened each episode. That you were left clueless and thinking about it every time made the show. I'm happy weekly releases, like on Disney+ for example, seem to be a returning norm. For some shows a binge is fine. For others it hurts the experience.
Let's bring it back to where we started. I'm very glad I watched Better Call Saul from the beginning and took it slow, each season as they released. Time was key.
----------> Only the mildest spoilers from here.
It was a real slow burn from the outset. Since Better Call Saul's announcement there was anticipation of the eventual collision with Walter White. If you're anything like me you might've gotten frustrated at times with how slowly events developed. Jimmy kept getting closer and closer to the Saul character in Breaking Bad but was never quite there. It was hard to admit it, but to be effective this needed to be a show that worked on its own. And it did, if you gave it the time. During the sixth and final season all the purely BCS storylines got surprisingly quick resolutions and you were thrust, almost entirely, into the B&W future (post BB). Only during the last episodes did we finally get cameos from Walt and Jesse Pinkman, as well as a couple others in the finale. In just a few short, hard-hitting scenes the two complementary shows were firmly connected, now through the lens of Jimmy/Saul.
'So you were always like this.'
Halfway into the finale I thought, and even said out loud to myself, so he's truly rotten to the core. There were few, if any, reasons to think he would even want to redeem himself. Like Walt, his character had only bent one way. But the two characters always had different motivations, and we learned what was truly most important to Jimmy at the very, very end. It was only slightly crushing.
Before I go I need to give props to Vince Gilligan for nailing the utterly satisfying ending. Getting it right seems to be a rarity in prestige drama these days, though maybe I shouldn't project the faults of others onto him. I look forward to what's next.
Comentarios