Welcome! It was the week when layoffs hit the world of HBO. It was the week when Jonah Hill drew a boundary. And it was the week when a courtroom battle raged over books, money, and art. Let's get to it.
Opening Argument: What ever happened to chronological order?
I recently was prodded to engage in the fundamentally flawed but sort of entertaining exercise of putting together a list of what I considered the best television shows ever. Considering how many television shows any given person, even a critic, hasn't seen, it has its limitations, but I worked hard to balance impact, production quality, and -- crucially, to me -- consistency over time, which is where a lot of shows I have loved slipped in my rankings. The show that landed at number one surprised me, since I don't tend to be a big crime-drama person generally: It was Breaking Bad.
This week marked the end of the Breaking Bad prequel-sequel Better Call Saul, which traced the story of attorney Jimmy McGill both before and after he worked for Walter White and other criminals in the persona of attorney Saul Goodman. I bring this up only because this seems like the ideal time to register a complaint that I admit sounds like one springing from the mind of a full-on crank: I long for chronological order.
If you followed Breaking Bad itself, you saw mostly a single narrative, with occasional flashbacks. But Better Call Saul eventually was spread across several different time periods. There was a kind of prequel-to-the-prequel time when Jimmy was first becoming a lawyer, meeting Kim and so forth. There was what you might call the central narrative when he was a con man doing slip-and-falls and gradually falling in with Mike (Jonathan Banks) and Lalo (Tony Dalton) and other bad-news bears. There was material set during the events of Breaking Bad when we saw him interacting with Walt and Jesse. There was a period set after the end of Breaking Bad, when he was living a secret life as Gene, the Cinnabon manager. There were also times when the show flashed back within its own run, as in the series finale, which opened with a scene set during the events of Better Call Saul's season 5 episode "Bagman," a season and a half earlier.
You can recognize the narrative impact of a well-placed flashback and still realize that at some point, there may be a limit to how much jumping around your brain can really hold on to before it starts to lose the central thread.
Critics before me have wrestled with the now extremely popular device of opening a show with a climactic, exciting scene and then going directly to the dreaded "SIX WEEKS EARLIER" or "TWO YEARS EARLIER" or "48 HOURS EARLIER" card. Designed to promise the audience that something interesting is going to happen if only they will be patient, it often acts as an artificial support structure for an underdeveloped story or a failure to create stakes.
What's more, there are times when we eventually arrive at that climactic sequence where we began, and it turns out to be less climactic than one might expect. This happened in the final season of Ozark, which opened with a flash-forward to a seemingly devastating incident that, once we finally caught up with it, wasn't all that significant. It also happened in the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, where we began with Beth (Anya Taylor-Joy) struggling to pull herself together after partying too much, but when we eventually got to that morning, it wasn't clear why the story would start there, other than to hook people with the promise of a downward spiral.
This in medias res opening might be the most common reason for scrambled chronology, but it's not the only one. We also are deep into the era of the double (or more) timeline in all kinds of shows for all kinds of reasons: Yellowjackets, The Resort, Under The Banner of Heaven, Pachinko, This Is Us, Westworld ... it's quite a list. Sometimes this is to follow characters in younger versions, sometimes it involves a lot of old-age makeup, sometimes it's done as part of a sweeping epic meant to embrace world history.
Maybe a person goes through a crisis while thinking back on their past -- that's what you get in the Netflix series Keep Breathing, in which a young woman who survives a plane crash reflects on her life while trying not to die in the wilderness. Maybe a real scandal is given a documentary-style framing device, as in The Dropout.
None of this is, in and of itself, bad, and many of these shows are excellent. But it's also worth keeping in mind that a viewer's attention is finite, and now that the "how will we ever arrive at this action sequence?" trick has been used and reused, it doesn't work as well as it once did. I doubt I am the only viewer who watches and exciting opening scene, sees a "SIX MONTHS EARLIER" screen come up, and prepares to be bored for several episodes.
So let me be the simple-minded person who says ... if you possibly can, just tell me the story. If it's not interesting at the beginning, it's probably not going to be interesting for eight or 10 or 13 episodes. Leave the tricky timelines to the people who use them very, very well. Don't make me constantly try to figure out what year it is with people's haircuts and clothes and how old various babies are. Tell me the story. I'm listening.
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We Recommend
Speaking of Better Call Saul, we will have an episode about the finale, but along with that, enjoy Eric Deggans' review for NPR.
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What We Did This Week
We ran an encore of our Indian Matchmaking episode, with Bilal Qureshi and Priya Krishna, as the show launched its second season on Netflix.
I talked to Katie Presley, Soraya McDonald and Kristen Meinzer about A League Of Their Own in two separate episodes -- one about the new Amazon series, and one about the original movie. (Note: Amazon is among NPR's financial supporters and also distributes certain NPR content.)
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