I once read Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, extensively explain his aversion to planning in series television; he’d done it for the breakout second season of Breaking Bad, but from then-on, he and his writers made a sport out of writing Walter White into the darkest of corners before having to come up with the most innovative of escapes. This on-the-fly method of writing made for one of the best television series in the history of the medium, or so consensus would tell us. (I tend to agree.) There’s a tendency for observers of art – myself included – to prioritize cleanliness, precision and completion in their evaluations of the product, even if these are somewhat illusory traits. After all, to create is to grind – a first draft or a first take is hardly where the process ends. Breaking Bad particularly presented serial storytelling as an ongoing expression, one that lives and breathes, and whose creative success rests primarily on the ability to create a convincing world with convincing characters – and to allow, as the next step, convincing conflict to arise organically.
Two of the most lauded new drama series of 2015 were Bloodline, Netflix’s family thriller from the creators of Damages, and Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad companion piece brought to life by Gilligan and co-writer Peter Gould. Bloodline was pitched as a tightly constructed six-season saga about the breakdown of a wealthy Florida family; the conception of Better Call Saul began as a joke, evolved into a comical spinoff and was finally picked up as an hour-long prequel. Put differently, Saul was primed to take it one day at a time in the vein of Breaking Bad, while Bloodline’s team of Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler & Daniel Zelman (KZK) had a pretty good idea of where they would take their story from one year to the next. And while both shows emerged as intriguing and visually striking – Bloodline’s Florida Keys and Saul’s Albuquerque are among the most fully-realized spaces in television right now – the difference in approach quickly showed. Bloodline’s first season was a deliberately paced, carefully structured slow-burn, while Saul was changing it up from one episode to the next, trying to settle on an appropriate rhythm for its fictional world’s new set of dynamics.
I preferred Bloodline to Better Call Saul last year, but both were creatively successful. In fact, they were the only freshman drama series to receive multiple major Emmy nominations, a sizable feat considering the oversaturated nature of the contemporary television market. Tellingly, they concluded their debut seasons in markedly different places: Bloodline had told an effective singular story, one so contained it could easily have stood on its own as a miniseries before ending on an arbitrary cliffhanger, while Saul found its voice in its last few episodes, setting up a second season that would take Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill one step closer to the man known as Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad. The circumstances had reversed: I found myself nervous about the show that wound up making my Top 10 of 2015, yet eager to see what Gilligan et al. could pull off after a season that never fully gelled for me.
A funny thing happened to Bloodline. Netflix executives as well as KZK have described its first season as the “starting line” of the series, in which its climax – the death of black sheep Danny Rayburn (Ben Mendelsohn) at the hands of his cop brother John (Kyle Chandler), and covered up by his other siblings Meg (Linda Cardellini) and Kevin (Norbert Leo Butz) – would kick the larger narrative into gear. For any fan of the first season, however, this was curious. Danny had, over the course of thirteen episodes, emerged as the series’ demented heart – its inevitable tragedy, its emotional firepower – and the unfolding of his relationships with various family members heightened the tension and mystery of the series. With Mendelsohn’s astonishing performance backing up one of the more original television characters in recent memory, how Bloodline would press on without Danny remained to be seen. More critically, why the show would press on without him – as not only its chief strength, but also its reservoir, with several seasons’ worth of potential story ready to be tapped – was puzzling. While John’s descent into madness (and, as the show’s tagline alluded to, badness) made for a compelling secondary storyline, the journeys of the rest of the Rayburns – the guilty matriarch Sally (Sissy Spacek), the passive sister Meg, the equally volatile younger brother Kevin – worked insofar as they informed the crux of the drama: Danny’s return home.
Of course, this was all planned out before Chandler, Mendelsohn and the rest of the cast hit the Keys, and before the cameras started rolling. The decline of the Rayburn family may have been more interesting on paper, but in terms of execution it paled in comparison to what Danny’s outcast status revealed about family ties, sibling loyalty and emotional trauma within and beyond Bloodline; as both Andrew and I wrote last year, KZK built a provocative and powerful family chronicle around the very character being booted off. The error in judgment was fairly evident: KZK rendered the announcement of Mendelsohn’s season two return the centerpiece of their panel discussion at the Television Critics Association tour in July, and promoted season two as a faster-paced expansion on what they’d accomplished in the year prior. The intended evocation was that this was their plan all along – that they, for lack of a better phrase, knew what they were doing.
Only, the second season of Bloodline is a remarkably pointless mess. The show loses track of the twisted sense of humanity that Danny (and Mendelsohn) introduced to the aesthetic, and its allure of inevitability – season one opened with the reveal that Danny would die, and meticulously built to that moment up until the finale – is replaced by a purposeless slog. At a shortened ten episodes, year two spends four episodes on John trying to pin the crime down on a local crimelord, only for the man to be killed and any plot movement prior to be erased; he then runs for sheriff, against any and all logic, thereby re-exposing himself and his family when the investigation of Danny’s death would otherwise be closed. New villains are introduced in the form of Danny’s old crime buddy Ozzy (John Leguizamo) and his estranged girlfriend Eve (Andrea Riseborough), but they never inform the direction of the narrative and, instead, hang around ambiguously, promising to wreak havoc without ever doing so. The writing becomes so hampered by the threat of John getting caught that it consumes the show: John, Meg and Kevin navigate their way around red herring after red herring, descending deeper into the amoral abyss with the only end in sight being confession. Furthermore, John’s moral arc is redundant. He’d already done the “bad thing,” and so while season one tracked his shift, this season finds him in survival mode, repeatedly crossing the line to stay afloat.
The purpose of this sloppy approach is, surely, the ending set-up for season three – John running out of town, Kevin killing the detective who has figured it all out, Meg (presumably) confessing to her mother. Now, the cliffhanger would indicate, is when things start happening; just stick around another year, for it’s all part of the plan. Yet even in that best case scenario – and when this approach to momentum and plot development is how you’ve already structured an entire season, it’s a difficult habit to break out of – it doesn’t excuse an entire season based on false starts and go-nowhere adversaries. Bloodline killed its heart at the end of its first season – apparently without realizing it.
But the gravest sin here is not the slack in plotting or shaky construction. The first season of Bloodline featured an authentic and often devastating set of family dynamics that textured its noir mood. The series had always been relatively bleak and humorless, but the show successfully drew the Rayburn family and its many thorny relationships in season one, buttressing the dark narrative with real emotional resonance. Even putting Danny’s death aside, the absence of this element – aside from a handful of strong scenes between the characters – is jarring in season two. The full-steam-ahead focus on getting to the middling endpoint leaves anything tangible – anything worth grasping onto – in the dust. The only thematically significant storyline of the season involves Sally, as she compensates for her guilt over how she treated Danny throughout his life by connecting with his previously-unknown son, Nolan (Owen Teague), and eventually his mother Eve. Flashbacks to how Danny tried and failed Nolan as a father bring Mendelsohn back into the fold, but they also remind of the depth and complexity that Bloodline trafficked in throughout season one, and abandoned in season two. Observing Sally’s continued repression while being drawn into her attempts at self-reconciliation makes for a quietly moving stretch of episodes, but it starts too late and is never properly connected to the main action. In that sense, the season’s few bright spots are as much of an irritant as they are welcome; they persistently indicate that the creatives behind Bloodline aren’t aware of what made (and sporadically makes) the show so uniquely captivating.
This is in many ways representative of the pitfalls of “planning.” I plowed through Bloodline’s choppy, overwrought and staggeringly thin second season, in frustration yet in awe of its technical brilliance: the cicadas echoing and the ceiling fans whirring in the swampy Florida background; the cinematography relentlessly but also gorgeously invoking beachside horror; the actors putting on a clinic, from Chandler and Cardellini down to Spacek and newcomer Teague; the spare but haunting score, humming in at just the right moments. The production hints at a great series; it backed one up just a year ago. But you can’t look at the success of Bloodline’s first season without acknowledging how it fed into the disappointment of its second. The show had a clear idea of what it wanted to do in season one, and where it wanted to take the story from there. But television is not a novel. What’s on the page may not translate into what’s put on camera. Thinking ahead is important, but so too is being in the moment.
Better Call Saul was originally set to fast-track the transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman, sensing fans’ appetite for a closer relationship to Breaking Bad. Appropriately, the ingenuity of the second season is Gould and Gilligan’s reconsideration of that initial plan. Season one featured many effective if disparate elements, the best of which featured Jimmy as a slick lawyer teetering between opportunistic and immoral, and as an ethically ambiguous but good-natured brother, colleague and potential lover. Rightly, the ten-episode sophomore season zeroes in on these tensions as its focal point. Not only does this make for good standalone drama, but it more effectively complements Breaking Bad, as a morality play operating on a see-saw.
Saul plays with far lower stakes than its predecessor, but has them so finely tuned that its depth of feeling and suspense remains comparable. In season two, Jimmy is left to decide whether to make it work as a milquetoast lawyer at a top regional lawfirm, or to do things his way by going out on his own – and by no doubt making less money. He rekindles with his old flame Kim (Rhea Seehorn) and is pitted directly against his resentful (but also physically impaired) brother Chuck (Michael McKean); his choices, and in turn his fate, are all intertwined with those he’s growing closer to, whether in a romantic or adversarial context. Everything he does – every direction in which he goes – leaves an aftershock. This construct builds to an ending run of episodes that is near-unbelievably satisfying, given the show’s mild nature. Jimmy’s attempts to satisfy his brother and his girlfriend, while also striving to stay true to his nature, establishes dramatic contours that subtly fill each of these three characters out in great detail. And given our knowledge of where Jimmy ends up – as Saul Goodman, a sleazy lawyer working for the worst of the worst – this set-up slides the show into genuine tragedy.
Gilligan and Gould’s command of the basics – character, conflict, relationships, history – allows their narrative a more methodical development. The flashbacks of this season inform the divide between Jimmy and Chuck – in how they saw their father, in how they were treated by their mother – as a way of imbuing their ongoing feud with gravitas and substantive emotion. As Jimmy’s actions force Kim into a corner, where her future at her law firm – co-run by Chuck – is put into question, the series morphs into a Kim-centric drama for several episodes, centered on her decision to change the direction of her life, take a gamble and bet on herself. (Again, the set-up is beautifully tragic, given that we know she and Jimmy do not end up together.) The performances from Odenkirk and Seehorn are so measured and affectionate – and McKean, so vehemently skeptical of our hero – that, regardless of the pitch at which Saul is operating, the character work is consistently strong.
Better Call Saul chose to integrate another Breaking Bad character, in Mike Ehrmantraut: we meet him in the first season of Saul as a gruff parking attendant, but know him as the handler for an Albuquerque methamphetamine syndicate in Breaking Bad. Mike was a side-player in the prequel’s debut run – aside from the engrossing “Five-O” episode – and he takes on a larger, almost parallel role in this second season, coming into contact with a handful of Breaking Bad bit players as he immerses himself deeper in the drug trade and enforcement game. His stuff is entirely separate from Saul’s in season two, which can sometimes lead to a mental disconnect, but it’s still entirely compelling. Intellectually, it works too. We know where both Saul and Mike will end up, and we know that their paths will eventually intersect – thus the lack of overlap in their storylines befits the grander scheme. They’re headed in the same direction, however differently.
The back-half of Better Call Saul’s second season is as potent as anything Breaking Bad accomplished in its first two seasons; while I still question whether this show can reach the original’s dramatic scope, it has proven to be a worthy and fascinating production in its own right. The climactic confrontation between Chuck and Jimmy manages a specific kind of rawness – in the way it presents the cracking of their bond, relying on information previously parceled out regarding their history – and it bleeds, gradually, into a cliffhanger rife with possibilities. But Gould and Gilligan are still open-minded about where their story will go next, aside from the promise of crime boss Gus Fring’s eventual return. They’re letting their world, and their characters, dictate where this story goes. And it’s working. As Peter Gould succinctly put it, when asked if he has yet to pin down the Better Call Saul timeline, “It’s still a process of discovery for us.” May that always be the case.