“I don’t wanna talk / About things we’ve gone through / Though it’s hurting me / Now it’s history / …. / The winner takes it all / The loser has to fall / It’s simple and it’s plain / Why should I complain?” In the first three seasons of BETTER CALL SAUL, Jimmy McGill…

Melding sci-fi and soap-y domesticity is nothing new to showrunner Russell T Davies, nor is incrementally showing modern Britain descending into fascism. Yet his 2019 miniseries YEARS AND YEARS still feels delightfully new, not really the sort of “BLACK MIRROR, but six episodes!” the promotion made out, but a rumination on family and temporality (very…

“Don’t bother. What’s the point? You’re just going to keep hurting people….You hurt people, over and over and over, and then there’s this show of remorse….I know you don’t think it’s a show. I don’t doubt your emotions are real, but what’s the point of all the sad faces and the gnashing of teeth? If…

“The moral of the story is I chose a half-measure, when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again. No more half-measures, Walter.” That quote of Mike’s may be from BREAKING BAD, but it defines so much of BETTER CALL SAUL’s second season. Characters consistently pull unsustainable half-measures that the…

“East symbolises the dawn. It’s why pretty much every grave everywhere faces east; so the spirit of the dead person faces the rising sun. Dead things, burial things.” As a prequel spinoff to BREAKING BAD, in some ways BETTER CALL SAUL would seem a “dead thing”. What happens to the titular character (and deuteragonist Mike)…

“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.” In the style of prestige miniseries like HBO’s own TRUE DETECTIVE, CHERNOBYL was entirely written by the one man, and entirely directed by the one – a separate, but still singular – man. The writer was known for…