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King Hong Kong posted:I don't mind the slow pace of the story at all but Mike sitting in a car for ten minutes is really excessive, especially when the payoff to one of those scenes is seeing a "Los Pollos Hermanos" sign. That means nothing unless you've watched Breaming Bad so in its own right it is pointless unless you believe the aesthetic experience of seeing tediousness translated to screen justified it. The way all the promos have been pushing Gus so hard totally sapped all the suspense from it too. There wasn't any question what the sign would be, so treating it like a big reveal was kind of weird. Mike takes up way too much time in this show in general, and giving him plodding scenes to tell us what we already know makes it worse.
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Apr 20, 2017 01:58
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Barreft posted:I will say as much as I love Mike they've concentrated on him a little too much. I think the way they slammed on the brakes between the first and second seasons really shifted the balance. Later seasons were probably going to open up the supporting cast a bit no matter what, because that's what happens with most shows, but once Jimmy was basically stuck treading water for a lot of last season, the momentum for the show increasingly came from Mike and Friends in their own Breaking Bad prequel. Obviously the overwhelmingly positive reaction for the Mike episode in the first season had a lot to do with it too, but keeping Jimmy from progressing to a point where he'd need a fixer like Mike on a more regular basis is a big part of what kept them apart.
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Apr 20, 2017 04:49
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sticklefifer posted:Any word on how long this show is planned to go? They have to work towards an ending eventually. Jonathan Banks is 70, and nobody else is getting any younger either, so I hope they don't try to stretch it out too long. We're a few years away from the show turning into a parody like Wet Hot American Summer. drat, I just noticed that the worst rating before this season was 1.93, and this season has been 1.81 and 1.48 so far. Guess that Gus Fring ad campaign didn't do as much for people as they'd hoped. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Apr 20, 2017 |
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Apr 20, 2017 14:56
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FogHelmut posted:I am totally fine with never seeing Jesse Pinkman or Walter White in this series. Same. Despite its problems, this is a good show and shouldn't need to rely on fan service from a better show every five seconds.
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Apr 20, 2017 18:43
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What if Ted becomes one of Kim's clients after Kim strikes up a friendship with Skyler? Junior can be heard asking about breakfast in the background. Edit: Maybe the case Kim could help Ted with would be a slip and fall? Nice foreshadowing! Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Apr 20, 2017 |
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Apr 20, 2017 18:48
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Alienwarehouse posted:They should have never marketed Gus' return. Imagine watching this latest episode with ZERO knowledge that they were bringing him back for this. They even recorded fake Los Pollos commercials with him FFS. The ratings have dropped massively too, so the Breaking Bad fans they thought they were going to reach with that marketing clearly didn't care. I'm sure it'll still do fine on Netflix, but I kind of wish it was just airing there in the first place since I think the show's deliberate pace would feel less like punishment if you didn't have to wait a week for the next episode. I'd just wait and do that, but there's no way I'd manage to avoid spoilers for a whole year. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Apr 21, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 03:04
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NO LISTEN TO ME posted:Everybody's been saying ratings are "way down" but I haven't heard any numbers, or anything official? Where are people getting their doomsaying from. The premiere had fewer viewers than any episode from a previous season, and the most recent episode had only 76% the viewers of any episode before the premiere. 
Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Apr 21, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 13:58
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NO LISTEN TO ME posted:If I'm right in assuming the y-axis is millions of viewers then these numbers aren't too far off Breaking Bad's, explosive growth in season 5B aside. Even season 5A never cracked above 3 million, and in season 4 no episode aside from the premiere hit above 2 million. It's not that they're terrible ratings, just that they're heading in the wrong direction, and that the decline was pretty steep so far this season. If they were thinking about turning this into a 6 or 7 year show, I hope this can persuade them to reconsider.
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Apr 21, 2017 14:38
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some guy on the bus posted:Is Mike fiddling with a tracker and watching people walk around with binoculars gangster stuff? This is why Mike worked better as a side character than co-lead, imo. Turns out the idea of a super methodical badass is probably more interesting than watching one do all the work.
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Apr 21, 2017 22:33
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CaveGrinch posted:Jesus loving Christ this thread just took a massive nosedive. Is it gonna be like this between every goddamn episode now? You're right, maybe we should speculate about who that guy at Los Pollos Hermanos was instead. He seemed suspicious!
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Apr 22, 2017 02:44
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I have a lot less to say when I like something, but I figured I'd chime in again to say this episode was way better than the first two since I was kind of making GBS threads on them in this thread before. Nobody's ever going to accuse this show of having a blistering pace, but when the episodes are good that's okay. Turning Kim into a saint of compassion and forgiveness is going to make it really painful when Jimmy fucks up enough to actually lose her.
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Apr 26, 2017 02:33
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I think that was the best episode of the series so far, and probably my favorite episode of television overall since at least the last episode of Game of Thrones. Letting the show focus on the main character, and allowing his plot to actually develop, turns out to be a good thing.
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May 10, 2017 03:45
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Grand Fromage posted:They thought it was Huell Howser and he was going to spend an hour telling a really boring story about beans or something. How dare you. That man was a treasure.
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May 10, 2017 05:25
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BiggerBoat posted:How are the ratings for this season DOWN? this is one of the best shows on TV. What the gently caress do people watch? Dancing with the Stars and poo poo still? The second season and first part of this season were pretty slow, and while the middle and end of this season were excellent, I can see why some people might have checked out before then. The show still has a bit of an identity crisis and a bit of a Daenerys problem in the way that there are still two different worlds that only very rarely converge through Mike too, and the more pre-Breaking Bad elements they add to Mike's part of the plot, the less this show makes sense to people who haven't watched that show. This show can be a bit unrelentingly grim at times too, and while Breaking Bad worked on fixing that by adding Bob Odenkirk as a comic relief character, this show ended up being far less comedic than the original pitch, or even than the first season was. Everyone involved thought we'd be watching a show about Saul Goodman by now, which would be a show in which he worked directly with Mike on criminal matters far more frequently, but the soft reset between the first and second seasons changed that plan a lot. I think there were benefits to slowing things down, but I think there were also clearly costs too, and they probably overdid it a bit.
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Jun 24, 2017 04:33
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Riptor posted:Disagree. The show is perfect Cool, I'm glad you're having fun. I'm fully back on board after wavering a bit earlier in the season (though I still think they need to wrap it up in another couple seasons or the actors' ages will go from being a stretch to being laughable), I'm just saying I can see why they lost some viewers along the way.
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Jun 24, 2017 05:06
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Spellman posted:Did a clickbait article roll out saying that BCS is tanking, I don't know where people are getting this Every episode of this season had lower ratings than the worst episode from last year, and all but one episode from season 2 had worse ratings than the worst episode from the first season. Losing over a million viewers between your first and second seasons and losing half a million between the second and third isn't the trajectory they could have been hoping for, especially since Breaking Bad massively gained viewers over time (and they explicitly tried to lure them back with the marketing around the return of Gus). I don't think the show will be canceled, but I don't think anyone at AMC is going to be begging them to do six or seven seasons either.
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Jun 24, 2017 17:36
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Spellman posted:I don't think Vince and Peter would beg for this either If lovely ratings help everyone do the right thing, I'm glad. Back to the show itself, I wonder if/when Jimmy's going to realize it wasn't what he did in court out of desperation that sent Chuck over the edge, but his spiteful behavior with the insurance company that wasn't necessary in any way. If he hadn't done that, Chuck's recovery would have likely continued. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Jun 24, 2017 |
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Jun 24, 2017 17:53
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some guy on the bus posted:His actions in the final episode even go against how the Season 1 finale ended. About how he'll never let doing the right thing get in his way again. That season finale was part of a very different show from the one we ended up getting. It was going to be about Saul Goodman instead of spending years answering the question nobody demanded the answer to about how Jimmy became Saul. I'm being unkind, and honestly the courtroom showdown between Jimmy and Chuck was by far the best episode of the series for me, so I'm not saying there wasn't any value in doing it this way. It's just obviously very different from the original concept the creators had, and the one many fans were hoping to actually see, which might have had Bob Odenkirk and Jonathan Banks actually interacting on the same show instead of having an occasional guest spot on each other's shows.
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Jun 24, 2017 18:21
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some guy on the bus posted:Can anyone defend what they did with Mike this year? I thought the storyline about how he got to work with Gus was going to be more dramatic than that. The show just basically said "It happened, yawn." Uh maybe you missed the part where GUS FRING showed up, or freaking LYDIA. Plus Mike flirted with a widow for half a second or something! What more could someone want?
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Jun 24, 2017 18:36
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Blazing Ownager posted:Also Saul has never been a monster. There's a difference between screwing over some people, and screwing over others. I can even picture Breaking Bad Saul feeling bad for utterly wrecking the life of a sweet old lady and her two cats. I don't think anyone's under the impression he had the part of his brain that's capable of empathy surgically removed when he becomes Saul, but the character we know from Breaking Bad certainly wouldn't risk his livelihood or throw away a million dollars he could use right now because he felt bad about hurting someone. He wasn't just an accessory to many of the crimes in the show, he also openly suggested killing Hank to try to save his own skin.
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Jun 24, 2017 19:02
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Blazing Ownager posted:Sony co-owns the show, so there's that. Better Call Saul is already available on Netflix though, and all evidence suggests that anyone who's bingeing it there isn't joining on as it airs live now. Breaking Bad and Mad Men had the fortune of good timing and of being better shows.
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Jun 24, 2017 19:06
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The Ninth Layer posted:Sure. This season shows the shift from Half-Measure Mike to Full-Measure Mike. The whole point of Mike's arc in Breaking Bad was that he was full of poo poo and did take half measures though. I guess finding a mentor who generally didn't in Gus was what he needed to keep him in line, though the one thing Gus did half way turned out to be his downfall too.
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Jun 25, 2017 04:55
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Ein cooler Typ posted:all the people Saul suggested to kill, it was the logical thing to do Is this a joke post? Having reasons for murdering people doesn't make it not murder.
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Jun 25, 2017 15:27
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SeXReX posted:You guys realize this is a show about the bad guys, right? Wtf are you even talking about? Nobody's bothered by him being a bad guy, there was just a bit of contention about whether or not he was a monster, with some people trying to excuse his behavior and others saying nah he was willing to do pretty much anything out of self-interest by the end of Breaking Bad.
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Jun 25, 2017 17:48
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:Pretty sure if you put a gun to Jimmy's head at the end of Season 3 of BCS there isn't much he wouldn't go along with if he thought he could escape external consequences. Put a gun to anyone's head and they'd probably do just about anything. Saul suggested murdering an innocent man to try to escape prison or the exile he ended up going into though, not to save his life. Jimmy's not a good guy, but I don't think he'd openly suggest murdering someone for that reason at this point in his evolution. The Saul from his early appearances in Breaking Bad probably wouldn't have either, to be fair. Walt made him a worse person than he was.
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Jun 25, 2017 21:45
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Javid posted:Given that we never actually saw ANY of Saul's personal life in BB, I'm open to the possibility that this show isn't necessarily about the transformation into Saul so much as telling us what kind of a person Jimmy really was while he was playing Saul for his clients. Maybe he isn't the guy we think he was, he just acted like that. I think it's really more that he played a part so long and so well that he forgot who he really was, and he's only remembering now that he has time and distance as Gene. Even the writers keep talking about what's keeping him connected to his humanity and keeping him from being Saul, and how those pillars are crumbling, so I think we're meant to assume he's going to be left with nothing but that persona by the end of this.
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Jun 26, 2017 03:50
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Konstantin posted:My guess is that in the next season Jimmy will propose to Kim, she will say no and break up with him, and that will drive him into being Saul Goodman. It's pretty clear that Kim sees it as a "friends with benefits" arrangement, while Jimmy is a lot more serious about the relationship. Kim didn't throw away her moral principles to unquestioningly defend Jimmy, against his protests, because she wanted to be his friend. The show does a very bad job of showing their romance, to the point where it was kind of shocking that they kissed, but they're obviously living together and in a committed relationship at this point. It's just mostly off screen for some reason. Actually I remember someone being asked about it in an interview, and the response was that they thought they were portraying a couple that's comfortable enough around each other not to act lovey all the time. I think they pretty clearly missed the mark though, because they come across as pretty cold to each other the majority of the time. I don't think we're meant to wonder why she's still doing this when she barely even seems to like him. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 15:56 on Jun 27, 2017 |
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Jun 27, 2017 15:53
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maskenfreiheit posted:is it even canon that they're banging It's canon that you're not.
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Jun 27, 2017 16:43
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Cojawfee posted:This is what I was saying earlier in the thread. Use season 4 to transform fully to Saul. Maybe don't connect to breaking bad, but end with the same Saul that's in breaking bad. Then get Gene to reconnect with Kim somehow in Omaha. Or they'd just find a way to shove a bunch of old Breaking Bad characters into the narrative. Ever wonder what happened to Jesse? He's working at a Hot Topic in the next store over, and Gene has to hide behind a trash can so he doesn't blow his cover. Marie also steals a cell phone from a kiosk.
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Jun 27, 2017 21:09
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Solice Kirsk posted:I think a criminal of the week type show would have been better. At least then I'd get to see a lawyer be a lawyer. The opening trial and the Chuck trial were my favorite parts of the show so far. Hard agree. This is an interesting show with some great moments, but I'd rather be watching that show. I mean maybe not quite criminal of the week, but something closer to the original concept where it would have been about Saul Goodman as an attorney with more comedic elements.
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Jun 28, 2017 14:40
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notthegoatseguy posted:I actually think this show does a really good job of showing lawyers being lawyers. A lot of lawyers, particularly those outside of criminal prosecution and criminal defense, rarely step inside a court room. It is a lot of meeting with clients, paper work, administrative hearings. Those were all choices the writers made though. Jimmy started the show as a public defender, and we know he'll end up as a criminal defense lawyer in the future, so it would have been entirely possible to have him stay on that path without the many diversions. I enjoy the show we got, but something that stuck closer to the core premise probably would have been more enjoyable and would have let them have Jimmy and Mike interact more, so I really don't understand why they got so deep in the woods on some of this stuff. It's almost like they wanted to find a way to do the unexpected in a prequel and forgot to tell a coherent story in the process. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Jun 28, 2017 |
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Jun 28, 2017 16:50
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How bad must it suck to literally be a manager of a Cinnabon and to see it used to represent a living hell.
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Jun 28, 2017 17:24
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I'm trying to imagine what Breaking Bad would have been like with this show's pacing. Obviously Walt had fits and starts too, but he was already cooking meth and killing people in the first episode. Imagine if he was still puttering around at the car wash in the third season and wrestling with the morality of selling meth. Obviously I don't think that's really a fair comparison, but it amused me anyway. I do think the breakneck pace of the pilot has a lot to do with why Breaking Bad is so great though. The opening flash forward makes you think it's the end of the season or maybe even series, but nope, it gets there in one episode and lets you know immediately that the show's going to be something special.
Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Jul 3, 2017 |
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Jul 3, 2017 14:30
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BiggerBoat posted:I know you're exaggerating but BB had plenty of slow burns and gradually developed story lines. Sure, the pace overall was faster, but I'm not sure that's why BB was "better". I didn't find BCS all that slow actually but I'm engaged by good writing, compelling characters and exceptional acting and I don't think it ever faltered in that regard so I was never bored. The difference is that Breaking Bad tells a story that's clearly about something, which is Walter White's criminal career, and it jumps right into it. There were aspects of that story that weren't super fast paced, but Walter White went from normal guy to killer in the pilot, and if killing when his life was in immediate danger didn't drive it home enough, he killed someone in cold blood in the third episode. Better Call Saul started off as a show that was going to be largely about Saul Goodman as a criminal attorney, featuring the return of a beloved side character from Breaking Bad, but has turned into the prolonged descent of Jimmy, featuring beloved side characters from Breaking Bad. Jimmy's plot in season 2 basically consisted of him saying "not today, devil," then being bored for a year, and the reason was because the people making the show decided not to move him to the place we know he's headed. The third season was stronger in general than the second, and the story of the Brothers McGill offered up one of the best episodes of television in years, but even now it remains in two steps forward, one step back mode.
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Jul 3, 2017 17:58
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Eiba posted:Mike taking the car apart was great. I personally really appreciated all the drawn out "Mike does a thing" scenes. They were fascinating. I agree with all of this, and I also think one reason Nacho is more interesting than the other characters in cartel world is that we don't know exactly what's going to end up happening with him. The more characters from Breaking Bad are in a scene together, the more you more or less know what's going to happen, and while that still means Nacho wasn't going to kill Hector (and there's at least some reason to believe Nacho will survive too), it gives his scenes more tension than something just between Gus and Hector, for example.
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Jul 3, 2017 20:24
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:The first two episodes of season actually did a similar thing, though. Jimmy pretty much immediately gets swept up in the cartel underworld. The first episode ends with him being held hostage. The second has him using his lawyer skills to negotiate a person's life with a crazy criminal. It ends with Nacho giving Jimmy his number, saying to call him when he's ready to be "in the game." I actually forgot about some of that. It really makes the severity of the pullback between seasons 1 and 2 that much more inexplicable to me in retrospect. I've posted before about how slowing everything down, with the resulting effect that Mike and Jimmy wouldn't have much business together for quite some time, really doesn't seem to make sense for the show even in a structural sense. I really can't think of any reason for them to pull back so hard other than wanting to prolong the show, or that they really just fell in love with the idea about turning the show into a character study about Jimmy for some reason (which the second season didn't even do all that well imo). I'm critical of the decision making here pretty often, so I do want to reiterate that I like the show, and think season 3 was much better than season 2. I just feel like it could have been an even better show if they hadn't gotten lost in the weeds for a while.
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Jul 4, 2017 02:10
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SeXReX posted:I don't get this "soft reset" everyone talks about between 1 and 2? It's something Alan Sepinwall has discussed with the creators a number of times, so this isn't something we're making up. The end of the first season definitely teased that he'd be hanging his own shingle and getting involved in more criminal activity rather than joining up with another firm to show us again how he wasn't a good fit for being a straight and narrow type of lawyer. I do think there were some benefits to slowing down, in that Kim was allowed to become a real character (she was the MVP of season 2 for me), but structurally the show became kind of a mess by holding off on bridging the gap between Jimmy and Mike's worlds. Nacho wasn't supposed to sit around doing nothing until the plot had a use for him late in season 3, you know? It's easy to forget he's even met Jimmy at this point.
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Jul 4, 2017 15:02
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My impression is that this season was the only one where there's been any uncertainty about renewal, but I could be wrong.
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Jul 4, 2017 17:17
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Venuz Patrol posted:season 2 of both better call saul and breaking bad are bad. it seems like gilligan just isn't that good at connecting the initial premise with the rising action; in both cases he got bogged down in all these little character beats and motivations to get them set up properly for the legitimately great stuff later on, but it's quite boring trying to get there I agree that season 2 of Breaking Bad isn't the high point of the show, but saying it's actually bad television seems like a pretty big stretch to me. We even got Saul Goodman that season!
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Jul 5, 2017 17:47
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Cimber posted:What do people think Chuck's mental illness was? I asked my wife, who has a masters in psycology and she said he likely had schizophrenia. As someone who's had a panic disorder in the past, I could relate to a lot of it. I don't know if the specificity of his trigger and related symptoms could be fully explained by that, but anxiety can gently caress you up in ways that never would have made sense to me before I experienced it. My suspicion would be that they didn't have a firm diagnosis locked down though, and were leaning pretty heavily on dramatic license. Dr Kool-AIDS fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Jul 7, 2017 |
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Jul 7, 2017 22:37
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