show don't tell
I've been trying not to start a new series until -- as I just mentioned this morning -- BSG wraps up and Lost goes into a break. Not only that, but it seems like every time I talk to someone, another show I "ought to watch" comes up in conversation -- Rome, Mad Men, Dollhouse, Big Love, East Bound and Down, maybe Heroes, or older shows like Sopranos (never got past season two) or Six Feet Under (never got past episode two) or The Wire (got about halfway through season one at least)... or even a return to and rewatching of Deadwood or Carnivale. So I kept telling myself I was going to have to be careful in picking which one I committed to next.
And then tonight, oops, I went ahead and watched the pilot to AMC's Breaking Bad.
As the DVDs are freshly out for the first season and season 2 just started (with a bang, from what I hear), it seems to be all the buzz around the internet -- or my preferred window into it, anyway. Bryan Cranston, little-known well-regarded character actor, plays aging chemistry teacher Walter White. Over the course of the first hour of the show we see how shitty his life is, and then we see him get dumped on even worse: on top of working two jobs, having no respect at either, having a son with CP and a pregnant wife whose idea of birthday sex is jerking him off while watching her eBay sales go up -- on top of all that? Now his doctors tell him he's got at best two years to live. And so of course we pick the story up at the right place, when the poor guy finally steps up and starts grabbing life by the horns, starts living. When (not to put too fine a point on it) he becomes a protagonist.
By cooking meth.
I mean, sure, why not?
I'm exactly one episode in, and I'll definitely watch more, but not tonight. Tonight is Writing Only, and not like the last time I said that. My point is I'm in no position to judge a series, having only seen its pilot episode. At best, that's like reviewing a novel after a single chapter, and at worst... I don't know. Like judging a TV show based only on its pilot. It does what a pilot ought to do, which is tell a concise "set up" story while introducing all of the realms and locales, and all of the interrelated characters that are going to make up the bulk of the show's story. You forgive it a little if it's convenient that x character said y thing and happens to have relevant z job, because we're moving fast here. I'm just curious how all those details work out once things start going, and isn't that the point of episode one? Pique my curiosity?
There is a scene roughly halfway through in which the dealer dude asks the chemistry teacher why a straight like him, at "like sixty or whatever," has finally "broken bad" and wants to start making meth. He asks if he's gone crazy or anything, and it's basically an invitation for the kind of scenes I hate. Sure, actors get to chew up some scenery and sure, a writer gets to drop a big moving monologue that might just turn out to be famously good, but I hate those scenes. I literally leaned back, afraid to watch this potentially new show sink tits deep into Sam Mendes/Alan Ball territory: here comes that Kevin Spacey Speech. You know the type, like he delivered in The Ref and Swimming With Sharks and of course American Beauty, and then again in Pay It Forward and sort of in K-Pax... and hey, come to think of it, he gets similar scenes in Seven, Glengarry Glen Ross and The Usual Suspects, too.
...and then Walter White looks at his dealer partner and says, "I am awake," and that is that. No Kevin Spacey Speech. No speech or monologue at all.
Is it possible? Have we moved past the need for a character to come out and monologue for us to understand what he's going through? At least when what he's going through is that Joe vs. the Volcano or American Beauty "life is precious, let's start living it" kind of movieland epiphany we all know backwards and forwards? Are we actually, finally, at long last safely over the hump?
Thank god.
P.S. nothing against Mr. Spacey. Some of the above-named films are terrific and others atrocious, but in each of them I can safely say Kevin Spacey delivers a solid performance and belts out those vitriolic, now-I-get-mine monologues with style. But I still hate those monologues.