There's a curious conjunction between the final episodes of AMC's Better Call Saul, now available on Netflix and HBO's series Barry. In both programs, the shows' directors, writers, and showrunners seem to have become exhausted and, perhaps, even contemptuous of their material and characters in these long-running shows. I have often commented that the format for shows on Cable TV encourages narrative inefficiency and, even, overt padding. (There are many instances of this dating back to Fassbindser's 16 or so episodes of Berlin Alexanderplatz made for German TV in ; there are hour-long shows in that series in which literally nothing takes place -- people drink and quarrel to no end in supernal darkness on claustrophobic sets and that;'s about it; you can barely see what's going on but there's nothing to see because nothing is going on anyhow.) Both Barry and Better Call Saul in their final iterations have a weird posthumous quality -- the shows seem to outlive themselves and continue in only a faint semblance to those qualities that made them popular and famous. Because these shows were written and produced by world-class talents, these curious "zombie"-endings are not without interest. Indeed,these shows remain brilliant and innovative but in a peculiarly desultory way -- in their concluding episodes both Better Call Saul and Barry veer into despondent surrealism. It's a kind of insult to the audience. an action melodrama (or neo Noir) with bigger than life characters and plot lines that suddenly reneges on all the promises earlier made to the viewers and drifts into narrative limbo; it's as if Samuel Beckett were engaged to bring these popular and highly acclaimed shows to their conclusions, which are less conclusion than a sort of radical reject of every thing that came before. I can't tell if this strangely disenchanted effect arises from an artistic impulse to subvert and question the gaudy violence and operatic melodrama of the previous seasons or if this ennui evidences some sort of laziness or, even, disdain for the viewers. Nonetheless, both Better Call Saul and Barry morosely slip off the rails in a fascinating way that is very similar.
Better Call Saul, of course, is a spin-off of the brutal crime drama, a very dark Black Comedy Breaking Bad. Saul Goodman (a slurred 'it's all good, man.') is crooked lawyer. In earlier seasons, he has various adventures, mostly involving two narrative threads -- in half the shows, Saul (previously called Jimmie McGill) connives to thwart the "silk-stocking law firms" in Albuquerque where the show is set; these episodes are satirical, although highly realistic in their details about the legal profession, and they involve Jimmie/Saul inflicting various indignities on his arrogant, snooty betters (so they think) at the Bar. These episodes feature a lot of inside jokes about the legal profession, the implicit point being that all lawyers are crooks of one sort or another and that it's vanity for one set of serpents to regard themselves as better than others. The other narrative strand is a florid and violent account of the shyster lawyer's entanglement with warring Mexican drug cartels -- these shows involve high-stakes, huge amounts of money, all sorts of torture and coercion and dozens of bloody assassinations. The two aspects of Better Call Saul are generally kept apart, although from time to time, the high comedy involving class actions and public defenders (and the harried prosecutor for Bernalillo County) intersect with the blood-and-thunder murders and vendettas in the drug cartel narratives. In most instances, a 42 minute episode (the show had commercials when shown on AMC) will be equal part satire about the machinations of various Albuquerque lawyers (whom Jimmy outsmarts -- he's sort of a trickster figure) and the gruesome fighting between drug gangs competing for the market in southwestern methamphetamine (the link to the meth labs and crime syndicates involved in Breaking Bad)
In the final 13 part season of Better Call Saul, begins with bloody fighting between rival drug cartels. An attempt to assassinate one gang leader, Lalo Salamanca, goes awry and results in a dozen or so killings. Salamanca survives and sneaks across the border seeking revenge on his enemies, the crime organization led by Gustavo Fring, a cultured and soft-spoken gangster who runs a legitimate business on the side, a chicken sandwich franchise called Los Hermanos Pollos. Fring has hired a German engineer and crew of mining contractors to construct a vast underground meth lab, apparently a location featured in Breaking Bad. Meanwhile, Saul and his wife, Kim, have contrived an elaborate scheme to frame another lawyer, the narcissistic and patrician Howard Hamlin (Saul/Jimmie's nemesis throughout the series); Hamlin controls a class-action originated by Saul and must be nudged into settlement since Goodman needs the fee-money. The complicated and implausible frame-up makes Hamlin look like a cocaine-addled drug addict and Kim and Saul are successful; the class-action is settled with Hamlin completely disgraced. By sheer coincidence, (the show is cleverly scripted but relies all-too-often on improbabilities), the two plots converge and there are some more killings. The noble, if arrogant, Hamlin and the corpse of Salamanca end up sharing a shallow common grave in the floor of the subterranean meth factor; Kim and Saul fall out over their successful plot to destroy Howard Hamlin -- although Kim, who is public-spirited and does pro bono work for the poor, has joined somewhat too enthusiastically in the scheme to humiliate Hamlin, she now repents and divorces Saul. At this point, the show is hollowed-out around an absent center -- there is time-lapse of several years, apparently the duration of Saul's involvement with Jesse and Walter White in Breaking Bad in which the crooked lawyer apparently makes millions of dollars before the whole enterprise collapses and he has to go on the lam. (The show simply assumes that its audience will know what happened in Breaking Bad -- I didn't watch the show and don't have a clue and, therefore, encountered all sorts of fragmented, dream-like imagery probably referencing events in the other series but incomprehensible to me. Shows of this extended form represent a new genre on TV and this sort of novelistic and expansive narrative hasn't yet been fully debugged -- the creators of these shows rely upon viewers recalling minor details that transpires many hours earlier in the programs and this doesn't always work; although I could follow the general narrative arc, I wasn't clear on many details, probably because I don't know Breaking Bad but, further, because I couldn't remember clearly things dramatized earlier in the preceding five seasons of Better Call Saul. I presume that as these kinds of cable shows become more prevalent, narrative problems of this sort will be solved somehow.) With the end of the dueling lawyers' scenario and the climactic bloodbath in the gang war involving millions of dollars at stake, Better Call Saul, then, moves into some peculiar unexplored territory. Some indeterminate amount of time has passed and Saul is hiding in a snowy Omaha managing a Cinnabon franchise. Kim Wechsler has moved to Florida where she works as a clerk in a sprinkler company; she's either remarried or living with another man. Saul is so inveterately dishonest and so addicted to thrill-seeking that he can't be satisfied slipping into oblivion in an honest trade. Instead, Saul devises an elaborate plot to steal from an upscale department store in the mall where his Cinnabon business is located. After five seasons of gangsters murdering each other over millions of dollars, Better Call Saul devotes an entire episode to what is, in effect, an intricate scheme to shoplift some suits and handbags. It's profoundly weird and dispiriting; the show has become intentionally trivial. (The Omaha scenes are shot in black and white, but they are, also, a species of delirium -- for some reason, Omaha is always covered in snow and flakes are always falling, but the trees seem to be in full summer leaf; in other words, everything about the Omaha sequences is eerie, disconnected to the rest of the show and visually baffling.) After nearly getting busted for the shoplifting scheme, Saul cons an old woman, played wonderfully by a distraught, if intelligent and quarrelsome, Carol Burnett. The show seems to want to depict Saul in complete decomposition -- he's still a crook and fraudster but his criminal schemes are now completely sordid, low-stakes, and, even, a bit uninteresting. With a couple of dishonest Nebraskans, Saul begins to roll drunks and steal their credit cards -- this also goes predictably wrong and Saul is arrested. This sets up the final episode which is also extremely disorienting. Saul is extradited to New Mexico. He lures Kim Wechsler to a court room where there are some baffling proceedings. In the final show, the theme is regret. Does Saul have any regrets or is he beyond any kind of redemption? The thought-experiment in which the show indulges is that of a time machine -- if you could back in time what changes, if any, would you make to your conduct? Would you try to repair the harm you have inflicted? This is all bleak, wintry stuff, deliberately undramatic, a climax to the show that is intended to be anti-climactic. (This has been done before, for instance, in the controversial last episode of The Sopranos, but never at such length and with such conviction as in Better Call Saul). There are many nice touches in this material (the only color in the last episode is the tip of a glowing cigarette) but the narrative strategies are intentionally off-putting. In fact, the title sequences for the last four or so shows in Better Call Saul involve a distorted parody of previous titles used on the program with stuttering stop-and-start video and a soundtrack that seems to be recorded on a dictaphone or something, ending with a subliminal flash of imagery from the upcoming episode, but all shadowy and almost impossible to see. I think it's bold, uncompromising and innovative but I'm still trying to understand exactly what was intended here.
Barry is a variant on the premise of The Sopranos -- that is, a violent gangster seeks psychological therapy for his depression. In Barry, a violent CIA-handled assassin finds solace in attending acting classes led by the flamboyant and self-satisfied Henry Winkler, once upon a time, the Fonz in Happy Days. The assassin played by SNL alumnus Bill Hader and Henry Winkler's narcissistic method-acting coach are both excellently performed but the show's combination of ultra-violence and acting exercises with improv always seemed a little precious to me, a bit implausible although the high-concept is intriguing. In the final series, Barry has been arrested for the murder of the acting coach's girlfriend, a cop, and, with his former CIA handler, finds himself in a menacing and nasty hoosegow. A subplot involving Chechen gangsters reaches a violent climax with a score of murders that leaves no one left standing to populate that story. In prison, Hader and his handler both get tortured and beat up and spend most of the show pretty badly disfigured. (The show features odd mise-en-scene -- direct frontal shots intercut with landscapes in very long shots; we see tiny figures in vast bleak deserts.) There's a big slaughter during an attempt to murder Barry in jail (the assassins are led by Fred Armisen, a recipe for disaster) and, after some more killings the hero escapes. And, at this point, the show replicates the curious anti-climactic strategies at the end of Better Call Saul. Suddenly, the show shifts, without any explanation, to a vast surreal desert, an empty space barren to the horizon. Barry is living here in an utterly isolated trailer house with his girlfriend, who is now his wife. Barry and the woman are now clearly middle-aged and they seem to have a ten-year old son. What has happened? Is this supposed to be a real place or are we in some kind of surreal dream? As in Better Call Saul, the show abandons operatic violence and, even, the melodramatic histrionics of the acting class for completely banal events; Barry's son gets in a fight with a neighbor boy (neighbor? there's no one around for miles). Barry's wife, like Kim Wechsler, has some kind of dull job and seems to be an alcoholic -- she's possibly having an affair with one of the morons with whom she works. Barry seems to have become religious and won't let his son play video or computer games. Back in Hollywood, Henry Winkler's improv and acting coach resurfaces; he's apparently been in hiding after paranoically gunning down a pizza delivery boy. In the case of Barry's enigmatic final episodes, it seems, that ten or more years have passed without a trace from the prison-break and the massacre of the Chechen gangsters.. Imagery is intentionally disorienting and the sound-track takes on an autonomous quality -- in the desert place where Barry is hiding, the wind is always howling through the flimsy walls and screen windows; the radio plays sermons and, even, birdsongs have a tinny, amplified quality. After several episodes poised on the brink of Waiting for Godot, the show reverts to form, ending with the slaughter of, more or less, all of its major characters. The final two episodes show an odd feature arising occasionally in long-form cable or streaming shows -- that is, the spin-off that's not spun-off but remains embedded within the source series. In this case, a feud between the Chechen gangster, older but not wiser, and "Raven" (this is Fuches, Barry's spy-master) sets up a confrontation that really has nothing to do with the main thrust of the narrative. (For some reason that I couldn't make out, Barry's wife and son are kidnapped by the Chechens, but the ostensible basis for the vendetta is that the gangsters seem to have had Fuches (now the heavily tattooed "Raven") tortured continuously in prison -- what doesn't kill Raven makes him stronger and, with a horde of menacing thugs, he attacks the heavily armed Chechens led by Noho Frank (the ineffably weird-looking Anthony Carrigan -- he's completely hairless due to Alopecia Areata, and, so, sufficiently exotic to be type-cast as villains.) In this show, the Chechens are like Apaches in old Westerns (or zombies in the contemporary TV and movies) -- that is, they are cannon-fodder whose main role is to be gunned-down in huge numbers. Noho Frank is homosexual and circumstances forced him to have his much-beloved boyfriend assassinated -- the affable and gentle guy was going to squeal on the mobsters and, so, had to be eliminated. Raven and Noho Frank exchange insults, there's a one-shot tightly choreographed gunfight that lasts about five seconds, and gets rid of both mobs. Raven is unscathed; Barry's wife and son escape without injury, and Noho Frank dies melodramatically, a bit like Mimi in La Boheme, clutching the bronze hand of a sculpture of his dead boyfriend. The mayhem in the last couple shows is motivated by acting coach Gene Cousineau's reappearance in Hollywood where, with his agent, he tries to quash a movie in development about the death of his policewoman girlfriend (she was murdered by Barry in the first series). Cousineau's agent is played by the fantastic Fred Melamed, always type-cast as a very funny, self-aggrandizing and ultra-Semitic Macher. Cousineau is the ultimate "ham actor" and he can be seduced into performing on the subject of his encounters with Barry; his real objection to the proposed movie is not that it exploits the memory of his dead girlfriend but that he can't really control the project. After the massacre at Noho Frank's post-modernist enterprise -- it's all glass and vast ballroom-like floors with transparent staircases (it looks like a set for an upscale Thirties' musical) -- Barry, who is a religious fanatic (remember?), goes to turn himself in for the murder of Cousineau's girlfriend and, thereby, redeem himself in the eyes of his son and wife. But things go disastrously wrong. In the final six or seven minutes of the last episode, there's another fast-forward in time, signaled by another intentionally disorienting shot of amateur performers taking a bow. Barry's wife has just finished directing a Community College production of Our Town (in an incredibly lavish theater); Barry's son, who is now in his mid-teens, goes to a friend's house to watch a movie called The Mask Collector, a fictionalized version of the series that we have just watched in which Barry is portrayed as a hero (not as the rather panicked and fidgety murderer that we have seen throughout the show's five seasons.) On this "Liberty Valence" note, the show ends. None of this is particularly effective notwithstanding various media critics who have hailed the last season of Barry as some kind of masterpiece on the order of Citizen Kane. Rather, the show is chaotic and ultra-stylized in a disconcerting way -- we are supposed to take the brutish plot seriously, but the whole thing is tricked-out with distracting surrealist effects and shot in the manner of a movie (or cable show) by Nicholas Winding Refn -- that is, saturated colors, very long and often inexpressive takes, an inclination toward frontal symmetry (look at how Noho Frank dies, with the monument of his dead lover central to the composition, flanked on each side by crumpled dead gangsters), amplified discordant sound track and vast amounts of gloomy, dire-looking glowering -- people glare at one another to beat the band in this last ten or so episodes. Bill Hader directed all shows in the final series and he imparts a uniquely stark appearance to the final season, but Barry's chief ambition seems to be to transform its affable leading man, perfectly suited to light romantic comedies, into a murderous, beefy and dead-eyed thug. It's as if Tom Hanks were to play Al Capone or Woody Allen act the part of Meyer Lansky -- the thing can be done, but why?
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