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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 6 Recap: The Smell Test

    Jimmy and Kim prepare for “D-Day,” Howard tries to make peace, and Lalo has some questions.Season 6, Episode 6: ‘Axe and Grind’We’ve been snookered.At the end of last season, Kim and Jimmy talked about a plot to discredit and shame Howard, and for the last five episodes we’ve been led to believe that framing Howard as a hooker-exploiting drug addict was the point of the plan. It wasn’t. The point was to induce Howard to hire a private investigator who would photograph Jimmy conferring with a guy who looks like the mediator of the class-action suit against Sandpiper Crossing.The particulars of the coming end game are unclear, but we know enough to ask a few skeptical questions. Like: Were all of Kim and Jimmy’s slanderous antics really necessary? If you want to cajole your enemy into hiring a P.I., is the surest approach to plant a bag of drugs in his country club locker room, then steal his car for a joyride with a prostitute, whom you kick out of the vehicle in view of an esteemed colleague?Seems like a lot of effort, and risky, too. It was far from inevitable that Howard would think, “I need to hire a private detective and photograph Jimmy,” once he realized he was the target of a reputation-soiling scheme.The improbability of Kim and Jimmy’s takedown operation is just one problem. The bigger issue is that viewers are not invested in this scheme. (OK, this viewer, at least.) As Your Faithful Recapper has noted before, Howard has his flaws, but he doesn’t deserve whatever the Bonnie and Clyde of the Southwest are cooking up for him. And in this week’s episode, the writers complicate the morality of this entire matter by introducing us to Howard’s wife, offering a close-up of their marital struggles. They are sleeping separately and socializing separately. Howard seems eager to make peace with the missus — he even froths a peace sign into her latte — and she seems utterly detached.In short, Howard is decent to his somewhat aloof wife, which only adds to the sense that he isn’t a worthy target for an underhanded assault. And yet, the last scene of this episode is Kim’s highway U-turn from her drive to Santa Fe, away from a career-making meeting and back to Albuquerque.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.Will Kim save “D-Day,” as she and Jimmy call this moment?It’s hard to care, at least not in a deep, emotional way. “Better Call Saul” has always been two very different planets — the drug world and the lawyering world — with orbits that only occasionally line up. (Think of when Kim meets Mike in Episode 5, or Jimmy’s work for Tuco and Lalo.) Otherwise, they spin on their own, with atmospheres that are dramatically different. Now that the cartel plot is on a boil, the legal plot seems slapstick-y at moments, dull at others and padded at times. Can anyone explain the dramatic reason for the encounter between Kim and Francesca in Jimmy/Saul’s office? If it had been deleted, what exactly would be missing?The episode heaves to life when the drugs-and-money part of the show finally gets some oxygen. Lalo has determined the identity of at least one of Werner Ziegler’s “boys” by reading the underside of the Lucite-encased slide rule that was a gift from the lads, and which Lalo handled during his brief visit to Frau Ziegler’s home. The piece was manufactured by a company called Voelker’s, the sticker said, and somehow Lalo finagled the identity of at least one of the boys from the company.Specifically, he got the name and address of Casper (Stefan Kapicic) who appears to live in the country and chop a lot of wood. When Lalo approaches, Casper flees into a darkened barn. The last thing a sane person would do is enter that barn with a drawn gun, but Lalo can be impetuous, and it isn’t a huge surprise when Casper blindsides him with the axe. This advantage lasts a matter of seconds because Lalo has a razor blade behind the Volker’s sticker (or business card?) that he’s brought along, and almost immediately he is in control and ready to begin an inquisition.This won’t be pretty, and it’s unclear what Caspar knows. He was surely in the dark about nearly everything related to the super lab construction, with a few exceptions. He knows that dynamite was involved, which wouldn’t have been necessary to build the “chiller” that Gus showed to Lalo in that staged, Potemkin-village version of the project at the chicken farm. Casper will remember that little show, and he’ll probably know that it was entirely for the benefit of the guy about to torture information out of him. (The two men were in the same cavernous room that day; hence Lalo’s “I don’t think we’ve officially met” right before he starts chasing Casper.)It’s worth remembering what the stakes are here. Lalo wants information on Fring’s construction project, which he will eventually discover is a super lab that will produce vast amounts of high-quality meth. Fring has no plans to share profits from the lab with the cartel, and we know from Jesse in “Breaking Bad” that it will eventually produce $96 million worth of the stuff every three months. It is the money-making machine of Gus’s dreams.Were Lalo to learn about this operation, Gus would either be murdered for his perfidy or forced to share the bounty. Given Don Eladio’s sensitivity to slights, the former seems more likely.Odds and EndsFor those who’ve wondered about the roots of Kim’s con artistry, or her attraction to Jimmy, the opening of this episode helps. We’re in Nebraska, where a very young Kim is helping her mother run a shoplifting scam on a store owner. Perhaps this experience, and others like it, have left Kim with the impression that love and fraud go together.Zafiro Añejo gets yet another cameo in this episode. It’s the pricey tequila brand that Gus will later use to poison and kill Don Eladio in “Breaking Bad” and that Kim and Jimmy order while hustling a mark at an Albuquerque bar in Season 2. Here, Jimmy buys a bottle at a liquor store and gets a warning about the sharpness of the crown-shaped top.That top is prominently featured in the season-opening montage of Saul’s emptied house. Either that thing will play a key role in this story or the writers are providing an elaborate feint.The little black book belonging to the veterinarian-cum-underworld fixer is also in the opening season montage, and now we know why it’s impossible to read without a decoder. Clearly, Saul somehow acquires it before the vet leaves town.A quick salute to Tina Parker, the actress who plays Francesca. She is flawless at conveying both exasperation (at Saul) and graciousness (toward Kim). Every gesture, every facial expression is impeccably authentic.Question of the week: What medicine does Jimmy take from the vet, and what role will it play in the plan to undermine Howard and win the Sandpiper case? We know only that the drug, if that’s what it is, will not show up in a blood test and that it will make Jimmy feel as if he had consumed two Red Bulls on an empty stomach. And we know that when Jimmy stares into the mirror, his pupils are wildly dilated.Huh? More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 5 Recap: Psych 101

    Kim loses sleep. Howard and Jimmy mix it up. Lalo resurfaces abroad.Season 6, Episode 5: ‘Black and Blue’Lalo Salamanca is playing the long game. In previous seasons of “Better Call Saul,” he seemed impetuous (i.e. murdering that TravelWire clerk) and a big fan of improvisation (i.e. the impulsive volte-face near the Mexican border to look for Jimmy’s car). That Lalo is gone, or maybe he has learned to fight smarter after appreciating the guile of his enemy.The new Lalo isn’t looking for “proof” in Mexico, as Your Faithful Recapper incorrectly surmised, nor is the proof he seeks related to the attempt on his life. He wants to know about what Gus Fring is surreptitiously building — a topic that riveted him starting in Season 3 — and his search has taken him to Germany.Specifically, to a bar where Margarethe Ziegler (Andrea Sooch), the widow of superlab engineer Werner Ziegler, is acing trivia questions and drinking alone. Repackaged as a debonair international business traveler named Ben, Lalo drops the name of the town where Werner had beckoned his wife to join him during his prohibited, and ultimately fatal, attempt at a brief conjugal reunion in Season 4. Soon, Lalo is frisking Margarethe for the few facts she knew about her husband’s work in New Mexico.Which isn’t much. Nor, it seems, is there a hefty archive in the Ziegler home; Gus Fring’s minions hauled away anything relevant to the superlab, and maybe a lot more. Lalo’s brief haus invasion apparently produces little of immediate value, other than a good look at the carefully encased slide rule given to Werner, a gift “with love” from “his boys.”What Lalo knows is that none of those boys showed up at the funeral and their identities are unknown to Margarethe. Surely there was a no-go order given to the crew when it came to Werner’s final send off, a safety precaution imposed by Gus, who halted superlab construction because of Lalo’s snooping.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.Perhaps Lalo’s next move is to find the occasionally rowdy and very industrious young crew that Werner brought with him from Germany to blast the superlab into existence. How exactly he is going to determine their names is not clear. The handwritten cards he finds in Werner’s house are condolences from friends. And even if he finds those men, what will they know? Presumably, they were never told what they were creating, nor did they know where, geographically, they were working.Lalo already had a hunch that Gus was building something more ambitious than “the chiller” he told Lalo was under construction in Season 4. Beyond that, Lalo is in the dark but apparently heading toward illumination. At least, that is the hunch of Gus, who appears in this episode to be suffering from symptoms of pre-traumatic stress disorder, if there is such a thing. He is panicked enough about an imminent Lalo assault that he is scrubbing bathtub grout with a toothbrush. He takes Mike and his men to the superlab, reflecting a premonition that Lalo is going to show up there, rather than his house.“I can put more guys on the place,” Mike tells him, shining a flashlight around the empty space, “if that’s what you’re thinking.”Privately, Gus secrets a handgun in a superlab nook. The “Better Call Saul” writers are either throwing a feint or signaling that a showdown between Gus and Lalo will happen in the structure that will eventually become the largest and most profitable meth lab in the world. Leaving a weapon there seems to provide Gus with some modest measure of peace.Howard Hamlin, the other human quarry in this two-pronged tale, has called out his pursuer and summoned him to a boxing ring, in the apparent hope that a few rounds with gloves on will put an end to their feud. As Jimmy later nurses his wounds with Kim, he is baffled as to why he took the bait. Your Faithful Recapper is confounded by the fisticuffs themselves. A boxing match? It seems a goofy contrivance even in the context of Jimmy and Kim’s credulity-strangling plot to frame Howard as a drug addict.Thankfully, Howard has more in mind than resolving his differences with Jimmy using the Marquess of Queensberry rules. He’s hired a private detective to follow Jimmy. This is good news for anyone who wanted this strand of the show to acquire more intrigue.That said, Jimmy and Kim seem so utterly nonplused that Howard has discovered their plot that we have to assume it was part of their plan. (Howard suggests as much when he says Jimmy failed to hide his tracks and wanted to get caught.) Perhaps tipping off Howard, compelling him to hire a pro to tail Jimmy, was in the blueprint. Certainly, Kim and Jimmy never speak about tweaking their scheme. On the contrary, Kim implies that everything is on track.“Because you know,” she says, when Jimmy wonders aloud about why he indulged Howard and strapped on those gloves. “You know what’s coming next.”Very mysterious.Odds and EndsThere is a parallel worth noting between Gus and Kim. Neither can sleep and for the same reason. They think Lalo is about to appear. So Gus has hired bodyguards and a surveillance team. Kim has wedged a chair against her apartment door.The Most Entertaining Appearance of the Week award goes to Francesca Liddy (Tina Parker), who turns up at Saul Goodman’s grim, unfurnished office and can hardly process what she’s seeing. Jimmy is using a new name and has pivoted away from elder law to serve unseemly clients who have lined up outside the door like it’s Wal-Mart on Black Friday. She agrees to join this new enterprise — a decision she will rue by the end of “Breaking Bad” — under two conditions. A raise, plus “I get a say in the decorating.”Francesca, if you’re responsible for the U.S. Constitution theme of Saul’s office and those Roman columns, we need to talk.Mrs. Ryman is a Toto fan!It’s not just existential dread that is driving Gus a little nuts. Even before Lalo showed up, construction of the superlab was behind schedule. The delays are expensive, of course, and risky as well, given that Gus’s secret German partner and equipment supplier, Peter Schuler, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown when we last saw him. The delays also add plausibility to a key plot point of “Breaking Bad.” Walter White exploited Gus’s fear of falling behind on the lab’s meth production schedule to save his own life. We have a better sense than ever of why that ploy worked.And our question of the week for the comments section: What do Jimmy and Kim have in store for the man who is going to mediate the Sandpiper Crossing lawsuit? Kim has wheedled the name of the gent from an unsuspecting, somewhat fawning former associate at Schweikart & Cokely. Jimmy and Kim then get a look at the man in a copy of a bar journal and take note of his handlebar mustache.“That’s a lot less face to worry about,” Jimmy says.Looming plot twist alert! This is arguably the most baffling line of the season so far and clearly an important one.What does it mean? More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 4 Recap: The Wicked Flee

    Gus sweats life in red-alert mode while Jimmy goes on a joyride.Season 6, Episode 4: ‘Hit and Run’Gus Fring is getting nervous.We get a de facto tour of his psyche in this week’s episode, by way of the elaborate surveillance system designed to spot Lalo Salamanca, the man Gus tried to kill, before Lalo can kill him. It’s a no-expense-spared operation. Seven cameras are pointed at Gus’s house; someone keeps an eye on nearby cars when he drives; a hired gun is working the fryolator at the Los Pollos Hermanos where Gus has an office; and two guys are trailing Kim, in case Lalo goes looking for her first.Also, he’s wearing a bullet proof vest and has a firearm strapped to his ankle. This guy is expecting the worst.“Two weeks and we haven’t had a tickle,” says Mike, toward the episode’s end.Nonsense, says Gus, in so many words. He’s in a game where your instincts get to fail you only once, and he will not be swayed from his conviction that Lalo is alive. As viewers, we know that he’s right, but we’re in the dark about everything else Lalo-related. He hasn’t been seen for the last two episodes, and spotting Tony Dalton’s name in the opening credits doesn’t count. The effect is to put the audience in the same mind space as Gus. We, too, know that Lao is on his way. Exactly when is a total mystery.If he arrives. When last seen, the suavest member of the Salamanca clan — not a competitive category, true — was on the hunt for proof that Gus was behind the failed, very bloody home invasion of Casa Lalo. He isn’t going to show that proof to Gus, of course. He’s going to show it to the cartel. Which may mean Gus will face a whole organization with many reasonably capable assailants in its employ.Thing is, we know that Gus is going to live, and that frames a conundrum for “Better Call Saul” writers this season. Given that Gus is a lead character in “Breaking Bad” and Lalo is not — OK, he’s mentioned once by Saul in that series, which does leave some narrative wiggle room — Gus’s survival, at least through the end of this series, is assured. Which is to say that the degree of difficulty faced by Vince Gilligan, Peter Gould and every other writer on this show is very high. They are betting that when a tale is told well enough, it is suspenseful even if the ultimate outcome appears to be known.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.The success of this season thus resides not so much in what is going to happen, but how. And already there is plenty of intrigue. Your Faithful Recapper is riveted by Mr. and Mrs. Ryman, as they are identified in the credits, Gus’s bicycle-happy, hand-signal proficient next-door neighbors, played by real-life couple Kirk and Joni Bovill. There is a hidden tunnel between their homes, and the Ryman’s kitchen and living rooms are occupied by Gus’s underlings, some armed, others manning a video-screen installation. The Rymans appear to live in their basement, where they do jigsaw puzzles when not getting out for a ride.Who are these people? Until now, the number of noncombatants aware of Gus’s double life is, let’s see … uh, zero? At least at this point in the story. So, we have to assume the Rymans are on the payroll. But one of Gus’s video watchers refers to Mrs. Ryman as “ma’am” when he asks for some iced tea, suggesting he doesn’t know her well. And the Rymans seem intimately familiar with the local homeowners association, implying that they are longtime and authentic members of the community.What’s certain is that when Gus moved into 1213 Jefferson St., he purchased the house beside him, presumably a just-in-case measure that is now coming in handy.While Gus frets, Jimmy and Kim continue Operation Cockamamie, which in this episode involves briefly absconding with Howard’s Jaguar while he’s seeing his shrink. (The man has marital problems, we learn.) The plan involves a pantomime with the ever-amenable Wendy S. (Julia Minesci), whom “Breaking Bad” fans will remember as the meth head and prostitute who helped Jesse with a nutty scheme of his own. (She was supposed to deliver poisoned burgers to some especially wicked street-level dealers Jesse wanted dead in Season 3.)This time, Wendy pretends to get bounced out of Howard’s car, making it appear to a slack-jawed Clifford Main, who is the sole audience for this spectacle, that Howard is consorting with, and mistreating, a hooker.Like previous parts of this campaign to frame Howard, this one works without flaw, thus clearly foreshadowing that the entire plan will ultimately fail. There’s a jarring tonal shift in these scenes, as though “Better Call Saul” decided it can’t all be tense violins and deadly tangos and must switch occasionally to tubas and the cancan. This is certainly lighter fare than the anxieties of a man who fears imminent demise. But when Jimmy gets a spray tan, whitened teeth and a wig to pull off his Howard impersonation, the show seems a little goofy.In the courthouse, Jimmy is a pariah because of his success in springing Lalo. As reviled as he has become by security guards, clerks and prosecutors is exactly how sought after has become by criminals. So, welcome back Spooge! (David Ury) Looking far healthier and more lucid than he will be as a meth addict and stickup man in episodes of “Breaking Bad,” Spooge is blissfully unaware that in the not-too-distant future his drug-addled partner is going to crush his head with an A.T.M. For now, he has legal problems with an unidentified buddy, and Jimmy has become so popular that he is soon thrown out of his office at the nail salon.This leads to the episode’s last scene, in which Jimmy shows his new work space to Kim. It has a toilet in the middle of the room and not much else. As viewers know, this modest, odorous corner of an unpopular strip mall is about to get a spectacularly garish, patriotically themed renovation.Odds and EndsFor Your Faithful Recapper, the scene between Mike and Kim was the highlight of this episode, which was directed very deftly by Rhea Seehorn, her first time directing an episode. Mike is surely flattering Kim with his “made of sterner stuff” line. More likely, he is speaking to her instead of Jimmy because Kim noticed that she is being tailed and had the nerve to confront her tailers. It’s entirely possible — actually, it seems pretty likely — that Jimmy is being followed, too, and simply hasn’t noticed. Perhaps Mike decided to have a quiet word with Kim so that he could continue to keep two men hovering close by.Vintage Gus Fring perfectionism: He wants the bodyguard assigned to the kitchen at Los Pollos Hermanos fired because he is “not up to Pollos standards.”The opening song, “Best Things in Life” by the Dreamliners, is the perfect background music for that bike ride.And some questions for the hive mind, to be answered in the comments section:What’s with the tomato-red house? It seems unlikely that we linger on that peculiar building for no reason.Jimmy seems positively eager to admit to new clients that he helped Lalo, who in court went by the name Jorge de Guzman, something Jimmy refused to acknowledge to prosecutors. In this episode, when Deputy District Attorney Bill Oakley (Peter Diseth) accuses Jimmy of moral turpitude — “You scammed the judge. And for what? To get a murdering cartel psychopath back out on the street” — Saul says simply, “Prove it.” Well, isn’t proof unnecessary once you confess to half the criminals in Albuquerque?Oh, and one more: Who. Moves. Cones? More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 2: Do the Hustle

    Gus and the cartel chase Nacho, Kim and Jimmy pursue Howard — and everyone is conning someone.This recap is for Episode 2 of the back-to-back season opener; click here for the recap of Episode 1.Season 6, Episode 2: ‘Carrot and Stick’For a guy known for his punctilious approach to both business and personal grooming, Gus Fring sure has made a mess.Much of this superb and stressful episode, “Carrot and Stick,” is a study in damage control, overseen by a man who seems uncharacteristically ruffled and uncertain about what to do. Gus has always been a study in composure, but in one scene he does something that seems almost unimaginable, at least for him. He accidentally breaks a drinking glass.It’s an ideal symbol for the mayhem he has loosed with his ill-considered and disastrously executed plan to murder Lalo Salamanca. In hindsight, he must realize the whole idea was a fiasco — and would have been a failure even if Lalo had been killed. Many of the terrible outcomes that have unspooled in the season’s first two episodes are precisely what would have happened if the assassins sent by Gus had succeeded.Now he has two problems. Lalo is alive, which Gus realizes the moment Don Hector extends a hand in reconciliation during the peace summit organized by Juan Bolsa (Javier Grajeda). Either Hector can’t keep a poker face — if he really wanted Lalo’s continued existence to remain a secret, he would have feigned rage and ignored Gus — or he wants his sworn enemy to know the truth.The second problem is Nacho. He’s the one guy accessible to the cartel who knows about Gus’s plot, and the race is on to find him in his bleak and desiccated Mexican hide-out, the Motel Ocotillo. (Suggested motto: “But … we do offer room service.) Gus has to grab or kill Nacho before the cartel reaches him. The cartel wants Nacho taken alive — well, the Salamancas certainly do — so that he can be tortured into a confession.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.Season 6 ​​Premiere: The new season began with back-to-back episodes. Read our recaps of “Wine and Roses” and “Carrot and Stick.”A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.As ever, Fring Inc. has a jump on the competition. In the opening scene, we see Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) show up at Nacho’s home and switch a personal safe for an identical one, minus any evidence that Nacho had ever worked for Gus, presumably. Mike ruefully adds a brown envelope to the switched-in safe, and it’s unclear, at least to Your Faithful Recapper, whether he knows that the documents include a bank statement with the phone number to Motel Ocotillo. When Don Bolsa later opens this envelope, Nacho appears to have only a few minutes left to live.In fact, he manages to exit the motel premises with a beating heart, following an escape scene that is expertly staged by show co-creator Vince Gilligan, who directed the episode and demonstrates some serious action-movie chops. The sequence begins when Nacho realizes that a man across the courtyard has been hired by Gus’s underlings to keep an eye on him — time to flee. It ends with a shootout between Nacho and the terrifying Leonel and Marco Salamanca (Daniel and Luis Moncada), a.k.a. the Twins, who arrive in a silver SUV ready to kill whomever they have to in order to take Nacho alive.Now that he is roaming somewhere in Mexico, he might actually have some leverage with Gus, at least. At minimum, he knows that he could wreck Gus’s super lab dreams in under 10 seconds of candid chat with a cartel employee. This doesn’t mean that Gus and his minions will be eager to provide him with safe haven. But he knows that he poses a threat to Gus, and maybe there’s a way to set up a blackmail contraption that would keep a sword over Gus’s head. (For pointers, perhaps Nacho could watch the way Tom Cruise’s character keeps the mafia at bay at the end of 1993 film “The Firm.”)This complicated dynamic is no doubt why, at the end of this episode, in a scene set in an office at the Los Pollos Hermanos chicken farm, Gus appears ready to talk to Nacho when Mike hands him that mobile phone. For as long as Gus can’t kill Nacho, Nacho poses an all but existential threat to Gus.Before that call, Gus wants Nacho’s father brought to him, which he must envision as a kind of check mate that will force Nacho’s surrender. Mike, however, will not countenance that idea and says so, bluntly and firmly, in his first act of overt insubordination. This gets a gun pointed at his head by the ever stylish Tyrus Kitt (Ray Campbell), the only henchman in Gus’s crew you could imagine in line at a Manhattan nightclub.“Whatever happens next, it’s not going to go down the way you think it is,” Mike says.Precisely what that means is a mystery, at least to Your Faithful Recapper. He might be referring to the sniper set up outside of the office, with whom Mike is in radio contact. But that guy appears to be looking for signs that Lalo or his colleagues are readying an attack. It’s at least possible that the same sniper has been instructed by Mike to kill Gus and Tyrus in the event that Mike is killed. Or that Mike has an entirely different plan. Or that he’s bluffing.Speaking of bluffing, on to the Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler frame-up show, where “Operation Ruin Howard Hamlin’s Life” is entering Phase 2. This involves revisiting the series’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde, namely Craig and Betsy Kettleman (Jeremy Shamos and Julie Ann Emery), who in the Season 1 timeline were represented by Howard in an unsuccessful attempt to defend Craig against charges that as a county treasurer he embezzled $1.6 million. Having served his sentence, Craig is a free man in highly diminished circumstances, running a bargain basement, and corrupt, tax prep company out of a roadside mobile home.Jimmy shows up with a proposition: Hire me, and I’ll get you exonerated by arguing that your lawyer was a coke head. This is a bluff. But Jimmy and Kim apparently intuit that the Kettlemans will double cross Jimmy, then head straight to the office of Clifford Main and attempt to enlist him as their attorney. They further know that Main, who saw that planted bag of fake cocaine tumble out of Howard’s locker, will toss the Kettlemans from the office, then wonder whether their story actually has some truth to it.What’s best about the latest iteration of Jimmy and Kim’s improbable little scheme is the opportunity it provides Kim to demonstrate an almost thuggish toughness. She threatens the Kettlemans with jail time, courtesy of an aborted call to an I.R.S. enforcement office, a power play of pure sang-froid. There’s a Robin Hood quality to her maneuverings — the Kettlemans were scamming their financially struggling clients — but one can envision the day when she flexes even harder against less worthy targets. Or when she’s mixing it up with the show’s true baddies.Odds and EndsWell, now we know where Jimmy got that inflatable Lady Liberty that sat atop his office in “Breaking Bad.”Why would Mike risk his life for Nacho, a man he has kept at a coolly professional distance since they met? One assumes it’s all about Mike’s relationship with his son, a Philadelphia cop who was shot by corrupt colleagues because he wouldn’t accept bribes. It’s a crime Mike feels implicated in because he was on the take when he was on the same force. (See “Five-O” in Season 1.) His defense of Nacho feels, perhaps, like a do over.Who was tailing Jimmy and Kim as they drove from the Kettlemans’ office? Your Faithful Recapper wanted to run the number on the license plates of the car, then remembered that the show is fictional. And that he doesn’t know how to “run the number” on anything. So, please, speculate in the comments section, along with any other thoughts about this stellar pair of episodes. More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’: There Will Be (Way More) Blood

    The “Breaking Bad” prequel is back for its final season. Here’s what to remember about where we left off, as Jimmy’s transformation into Saul nears completion.It’s been two years since anyone watched a new episode of “Better Call Saul,” but the characters presumably haven’t aged a minute.So before the Season 6 opener, which debuts on Monday, let’s take a moment to remember exactly what was happening to this menagerie of sociopathic drug kingpins and morally compromised lawyers as the closing credits rolled on Season 5. And let’s take it one burning question at a time.Where was Lalo Salamanca headed in that last scene of the finale?Toward revenge. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) just survived the world’s most incompetent home invasion-cum-assassination attempt, having outmaneuvered a handful of heavily armed men using little more than a frying pan of boiling oil, borrowed weapons and the artful use of his own underground escape tunnel. He knows who sent these guys — the rival meth wholesaler and fried chicken entrepreneur Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito).Gus has been a few steps ahead of Lalo ever since this newest Salamanca showed up in Season 4. It was Gus who engineered Lalo’s arrest and imprisonment for murder — a crime Lalo did, in fact, commit — then promptly got him sprung when the mustachioed villano proved he could wreak plenty of havoc from behind bars.Having lost his beloved cook, and apparently everyone else on his staff, Lalo will now be looking for maximum retribution. We know this will not involve killing Fring — he is alive and well in “Breaking Bad,” this show’s sequel — but he can presumably cause chaos and damage. At minimum, he can forestall the opening of the meth super lab, which is arguably the cause dearest to Gus’s heart and most important to his bottom line.Don Eladio and Nacho Varga (Steven Bauer, left, and Michael Mando) had what may prove to have been a very meaningful tête-à-tête in the Season 5 finale.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures TelevisionIs Nacho Varga doomed?Seems like it! Nacho (Michael Mando) let those Mexican assassins into Lalo’s fortress, then split as the mayhem began. Now that Lalo has survived the carnage, it will be pretty obvious to him that Nacho played a role in it.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel returned April 18 for its final season.Season 6 ​​Premiere: The new season began with back-to-back episodes. Read our recaps of “Wine and Roses” and “Carrot and Stick.”A Refresher: After the show’s two-year, Covid-induced hiatus, here’s where things left off.Serious Success: Bob Odenkirk was a comedian’s comedian — until “Better Call Saul” revealed him as a peerless portrayer of broken souls.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.Cast Interviews: Rhea Seehorn and Tony Dalton told us how they created the complex Kim Wexler and the murderous Lalo Salamanca.But consider this. In the last episode, Nacho had a lengthy discussion with the cartel leader Don Eladio (Steven Bauer) about how he would manage the business in New Mexico now that there isn’t a Salamanca around to replace Lalo. Was that a waste of viewers’ time? It is if Nacho never runs operations in Albuquerque.However this pans out, it’s safe to assume that Nacho will retain his title as the Most Tormented Character in this series. Pound for pound, no one has endured more physical and psychological abuse.How bad is Kim Wexler breaking?Very bad. At the end of the last season, Kim (Rhea Seehorn) was persuading Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) to help frame her former mentor and boss, Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian), in some kind of career-ending act of fraud or malfeasance. The contours of this plot are unclear, but Kim is adamant that Howard deserves the worst that she and Jimmy can conjure.One obvious motive here is money. With Howard sidelined in a scandal, she and Jimmy will collect about $2 million from a long-percolating class action lawsuit against a retirement home. It’s more than that, though. Kim loathes the guy in a way that even Jimmy — no fan either — finds excessive.The hatred is complicated and worth an essay of its own. Suffice to say, Howard has a history of patronizing and demeaning Kim — he once made her toil in a poorly lit room with first-year associates back when she was an up-and-comer at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, essentially punishing her for Jimmy’s sins. But Kim and Howard had good years, too, and he forgave her student loan debt when she quit the firm.Kim (Rhea Seehorn) turned out to be a better liar under pressure than her shifty husband.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Sony Pictures TelevisionNot to mention the other side of their ledger. Kim gut-punched Howard, figuratively speaking, when she and Jimmy found a very underhanded way to steal a blue-chip client from H.H.M. So they have issues, and it brings to mind the truism that you can deeply hate only the people you once liked.Kim is shaping up as one of the most intellectually rich characters on this show. (Gus is her only rival.) In her exit scene from Season 5, she was dreaming of opening a law firm to help the poor, which is about as altruistic a career move as an attorney can imagine. She was also conniving to destroy a man because, as she put it, he needed to be taken a peg.Watch your back, Howard. Watch your front, too.What’s next for Jimmy?Therapy, one hopes. When last seen, Jimmy had endured the roughest 48 hours of his life, starting with a horrifically botched effort to transport $7 million in cartel money from Mexico to Albuquerque — bail for his client, Lalo. Instead of a simple handoff, Jimmy came within a millisecond of an execution-style death, then watched his would-be killer get shot, the start of a deadly spree orchestrated by Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), who turned in his finest sniper performance to date.That was the easy part. Jimmy and Mike then hoofed it through the desert overnight, dragging heavy sacks of $100 bills and barely escaping death by dehydration. Then Lalo decided that Jimmy’s version of his bagman travails — that he simply had car trouble and then walked all night — had holes in it. Specifically, bullet holes, which he discovered on Jimmy’s car when he examined it during his bail-skipping drive to the Mexican border. Lalo visited Jimmy and Kim at their apartment to confront Jimmy and was saved only by Kim’s gift for improvised lying.Whither Gus and Mike?Expect some rage from the usually even-tempered Mr. Fring over the Lalo fiasco. Expect also some countermeasures to thwart whatever vengeance Lalo has in mind, especially if it means delaying the already delayed super lab.Things were a little tense between Gus and Mike (Giancarlo Esposito, left, and Jonathan Banks) when we last saw them. But it could have been worse. Greg Lewis/AMCMike, his favorite in-house heavy, will surely provide the muscle and close combat skills needed in the coming battle. Mike and Gus have been through a rough patch. Mike took a few orders he despised, most notably shooting the heartsick super-lab engineer, Werner Ziegler (Rainer Bock), for the German’s verboten efforts to briefly reunite with his wife.Maybe this is why Mike came close to an act of disobedience that verged on career suicide. He had a rifle scope trained through a window on Lalo during that confrontation in Jimmy and Kim’s apartment. If he had actually shot the guy, he would have wrecked Gus’s plans and been forced to run for his life.Better call Gene?Let’s talk about the story set after “Breaking Bad,” in which Jimmy lives in Nebraska under the assumed name Gene Takavic.The previous five seasons of “Better Call Saul” have started with a brief visit to Omaha, where a post-Saul Jimmy lives and works at a Cinnabon in a mall, having fled Albuquerque as a fugitive. (In a clever inversion of the norm, scenes set in the show’s future are shot in black and white.) In the Season 5 opener, Jimmy is confronted by a guy who seems to recognize him, suggesting that his cover has been blown.In flash-forwards to the time after “Breaking Bad,” Jimmy is hiding out as Gene Takavic, a Cinnabon employee in Nebraska.Warrick Page/AMCIt’s worth noting that the promotional poster for this new season shows Jimmy as the milquetoast Takavic — mustache, close-cropped hair, glasses. It’s possible that far more than a few minutes of the coming season will happen in Nebraska. There could be whole episodes. We may see him blackmailed. Or pursued by the feds. Or running, again.And, given that nobody knows Kim’s future, it’s at least possible that the two will meet in this time period, assuming she survives the machinations of the show’s present tense. Which is not a safe assumption.Which actor’s name should viewers be most stoked to see in the opening credits?Norbert Weisser. He plays Peter Schuler, the hyper-anxious executive — who in the future commits suicide — running a division of Madrigal Electromotive, a German conglomerate, and helping Gus build the meth super lab. He has been in exactly one episode of “Breaking Bad” and one of “Better Call Saul,” and both were exceptional.Anything else?The show is gradually docking with the starting moments of “Breaking Bad.” So Jimmy will soon fully embrace his alter ego, Saul Goodman, who has made only fleeting cameos thus far. We might get reacquainted with some old friends, too. Like the libertarian and obscure music aficionado Gale Boetticher (David Costabile), who helps set up the super lab. And producers have hinted that Walter White and Jesse Pinkman (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul) could turn up.If we meet Mr. White in his pre-“Breaking Bad” incarnation, he’ll be a nebbishy chemistry teacher with plenty of unrealized ambition — and the world’s most famous pair of Wallabees. More

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    Bob Odenkirk’s Long Road to Serious Success

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.When Bob Odenkirk’s agent first called him about playing an oily bus-stop-ad lawyer named Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” — at the time a little-watched cable show in production on its second season — Odenkirk hadn’t seen a minute of it, much less heard about it. But he readily accepted the gig.He was in no position to turn down good work — even if it was a minor role, intended to last only a few episodes. “I needed money!” he told me. Odenkirk’s pedigree was in comedy, where he enjoyed a paradoxical status: legendary and obscure. He studied improv under the visionary teacher Del Close and performed for packed crowds at Second City alongside buddies like Chris Farley. He had a hand in writing sketches that helped define the ’90s era of “Saturday Night Live.” He acted on “The Larry Sanders Show” (excellent and underseen), wrote for “Get a Life” (excellent and canceled swiftly) and did both for “The Ben Stiller Show” (excellent and canceled even more swiftly) and for one of the all-time-great American sketch series, “Mr. Show,” a cult hit that he created for HBO in 1995 with his friend David Cross. When it ended after four seasons, Odenkirk tried directing feature films with decidedly mixed results, failed to get a litany of other projects off the ground and turned to mentoring younger talents whose love of sketch comedy matched his own.So when the offer came in 2009, he flew from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, watching “Breaking Bad” — about a mild-mannered New Mexico chemistry teacher named Walter White who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and, in the midlife crisis that ensues, becomes a coldly calculating meth kingpin — for the first time on the plane. “I didn’t even watch a whole episode, but I didn’t need to, I got it,” Odenkirk recalled. He also didn’t bother to memorize the reams of cascading, hucksterish dialogue that the writer Peter Gould had crafted for him, certain that these lines would be cut way down by the time he stepped on set.They weren’t. And, 12 years later, on a Friday night this December, Odenkirk was still in Albuquerque, still playing Saul Goodman. The role had not merely changed his life but, to a significant and not-unwelcome degree, commandeered it.“Breaking Bad” grew into a prestige-TV-defining smash on the order of “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men.” And Saul proved such an enjoyable part of it that, when the series ended, its creator, Vince Gilligan, decided his next TV project would be a prequel, created with Gould and titled “Better Call Saul,” focused on the surprisingly poignant question of how this scumbag lawyer came to be quite so scummy.Odenkirk and Bryan Cranston in Season 5 of “Breaking Bad,” in 2013.Ursula Coyote/AMC“Better Call Saul,” Season 1, 2015.Lewis Jacobs/AMCMy first glimpse of Odenkirk came via a pair of monitors wedged into the open garage of a suburban home, on the northeast side of town. It was a punishingly cold evening, which seemed even colder thanks to a scattering of fake snow arranged outside the house. Crew members huddled in winter coats, and production vehicles sat humming up and down the block. Odenkirk, who’d recently turned 59, was here to shoot a scene from an episode that will air later this year during the show’s sixth and final season. Gilligan himself was on hand to direct, adding to the last-hurrah ambience: “We have to be out of here tonight,” Gilligan told me in the garage, eating a slice of pizza from the catering truck before darting back inside, “so there’s a little time pressure.”It was Odenkirk’s fourth consecutive night shooting in the house, his workday starting around dusk and ending around dawn. But when I said hello to him between setups in a spare bedroom, where he sat reading Mel Brooks’s autobiography, he was feeling voluble and introspective. “This has been the biggest thing in my life,” Odenkirk told me from behind a Covid-protocol face shield, “and it’s emotional to say goodbye to it, and to all these people I’ve been working with for so many years.” He grinned, then added, “I guess people who work on, you know, ‘N.C.I.S.’ would say the same thing. But would they mean it?”If “Better Call Saul” hasn’t been a hit on quite the epochal scale of “Breaking Bad” — few things are — it might wind up being the greater artistic achievement. Odenkirk and the show’s writers are close to pulling off a tricky double transformation: First, they wound Saul back from the two-dimensional opportunity for levity he was on “Breaking Bad” into a tragicomic antihero called Jimmy McGill — the man Saul Goodman used to be, who wrestles with near-pathological unscrupulousness while trying to win the respect of a prideful older brother (Michael McKean) and a devoted girlfriend and fellow lawyer (Rhea Seehorn) whose belief in him he can’t seem to help betray. And then they started to turn Jimmy, piece by piece, back into Saul again.The show’s central question is whether a flawed person can truly change for the better, and the implicit answer, given that we know who Jimmy is on his way to becoming, is grim. The result has been a decade-plus, nonlinear experiment in character development spanning multiple seasons of two different series, the closest precedent to which might be Michael Apted’s “Up” documentaries. Emmy voters nominated Odenkirk for best lead actor in a drama four times, and you can imagine the shock of those who knew him from “Mr. Show”: How did the guy who did that manage to do this?Talking in the spare bedroom, Odenkirk was dry and earnest, underscoring that the lunatic places he has been able to push himself onscreen are exactly that: places he pushes himself. Now, with the role that made him an unlikely star finally ending, it was clear that Odenkirk was ready to push somewhere new. He’d parlayed a frustrating yet fruitful comedy-writing career into a frustrating yet fruitful comedy-acting career, pivoted to a frustrating and unfruitful directing career, then stumbled into a celebrated dramatic-acting career so fruitful that Alexander Payne (“Nebraska”), Greta Gerwig (“Little Women”) and Steven Spielberg (“The Post”) all cast him in movies. Odenkirk, of course, foresaw none of this, nor that he would write a memoir of his life, “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” to be published next month by Random House — much less that he would star in an action movie called “Nobody,” written by the creator of “John Wick,” which grossed $55 million worldwide last year, about an ex-government assassin who, seeking revenge after a home invasion, leaves a trail of destruction that puts his family in far more danger than the initial intruders ever did.Odenkirk in the film “Nobody,” 2021.Universal Pictures“I’ve done all these different things, and there’s been a great degree of failure,” Odenkirk told me later, adding, “I don’t wanna be a dilettante. I would feel horrible if that’s how I was characterized.” He paused, then assumed a tone of mock grandiosity. “Or!” he said, smiling. “Am I the best dilettante that ever lived?”Inside the house, a cameraman captured a beguiling tableau: There was a glass-topped watch winder, lined with felt and fitted with three fancy-looking timepieces, each traveling in its own hypnotically undulating orbit. A few inches away stood a framed photograph of a dog and, next to this, a squat urn.Framed from overhead, Odenkirk shuffled into the shot and planted himself in front of these things, telegraphing a faint, happy drunkenness, with just a few grunts and an impressive economy of motion. He set down a glass of liquor next to the urn and proceeded to pluck the watches from the winder, stuffing them into his coat pocket. Slowly, the camera tracked forward, making clear that Odenkirk stood on a balcony overlooking a living room — and, a beat later, revealing a jarring sight on the floor below. Lagging behind the camera, Odenkirk casually peered over the balcony’s edge and, spotting the thing in question, reacted with a jolt, his boozy contentedness giving way, abruptly, to a silent-comedy pantomime of terror.“This is the God’s-eye view,” Gilligan called out to Odenkirk, explaining the mechanics of the shot. “We see something a second before you do.” They filmed one take, then another, the sequence short but demanding precisely timed interplay between camera and actor. “It’s really funny,” Gilligan told Odenkirk of his performance. “Let’s do one where you hang out there a touch longer.”“Maybe the camera shouldn’t move till I touch the urn?” Odenkirk suggested.“Yeah,” Gilligan replied, “but let’s perfect this version first, where we see it before you do. That’s how the Coens would do it, and I love those guys.”Much like Coen brothers’ films, “Better Call Saul” is a show about audacious schemers — some of them drug lords, some thieves, some hit men, some cops, one veterinarian and many lawyers — who put elaborate plans in motion that those of us at home are routinely kept in the dark about, left to guess where they’re headed.Saul is, first and foremost, a rhetorical safecracker. Odenkirk realized early on that virtually every time the character speaks, his aim is to entrance people with a slick spell of words until he gets what he wants. “He’s trying different tacks, looking at the person he’s talking to, going down one road, seeing if it’s working,” Odenkirk told me. But one of the dramatic tensions of “Better Call Saul” is that his mouth rarely stops running when it should, even when it gets him into trouble. “It’s almost like he thinks the more complicated his scheme is, the better,” Odenkirk said. “Like Huck Finn: I know how we’ll sneak into the house — first, you pretend to be a widow. … ” Odenkirk laughed. “Like, Hold it, why not just go through the window?”That night’s shoot required something besides verbal acrobatics, though. Gilligan showed me an iPad with a schematic of the set, upon which he’d diagramed Odenkirk’s looping path through the house and the camera angles he devised to capture it. “I think it’s going to be a very shocking and dismaying sequence for the audience and one that does not have the benefit of dialogue,” Gilligan told me. “Bob doesn’t say a single word, and what he’s known for is his mouth,” but “he really made himself indispensable to this show because we realized there’s so much more to him than his mouth.”Like its predecessor, “Better Call Saul” is about a man who descends in fits and starts into his worst possible self, and who finds that descent irresistible in comparison with a straight-and-narrow life spent, as Henry Hill puts it at the end of “Goodfellas,” as “a schnook.” Or, as Saul himself puts it at the end of “Breaking Bad,” as “just another douchebag with a job and three pairs of Dockers,” managing “a Cinnabon in Omaha.” One of the dark jokes on “Better Call Saul” arrives in a series of flash-forwards, when we discover that, after fleeing New Mexico, Saul is indeed living under an assumed identity in Omaha, overseeing a food-court Cinnabon — a drab and joyless existence, shot in black and white.Both shows resemble updated westerns, depicting lawlessness on the onetime frontier of a now-fading empire. And both suggest that the impulse to cheat, cut corners and get over on chumps, if not inflict harm upon them outright, is far from some aberrant pathology in the American identity but rather a constitutive force. One of the more provocative implications of “Better Call Saul” is that Jimmy’s truly unforgivable transgression isn’t that he behaves unethically but that he does so as an uncouth underdog: driving a junky yellow car, wearing garish suits and lacking the decency to launder his self-serving behavior behind a fancy law-school diploma.From behind his face shield, Odenkirk explained that his first impulse as an actor and a writer is to search for layers of buried motivation and stress-test the script for emotional falsity — even when that material consisted of him descending a staircase as quietly as possible, hoisting a makeshift weapon over his head. But he acknowledged that there was “no subtext here.” When he was younger, he said that he could be a “pissy guy” with a “chip on his shoulder,” but after this many years of playing Saul, he’d learned when to trust people like Gilligan and Gould — to simply shut up and do what his collaborators told him.Odenkirk’s abiding conviction is that “the best comedy has anger in it.”Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York TimesFor five hours I watched as he sneaked around the house, engaging in a weird cat-and-mouse game with another character. “This is optional,” Odenkirk told Gilligan after some sneaking, his brain unable to resist subtextual probing, “but I think part of him enjoys this? The romance of danger?”Gilligan nodded, by way of saying no: “I think you need to play it more like, Ah, I gotta get outta here,” he replied, “otherwise it’ll play weird.”Whenever a new shot was being prepared, Odenkirk retreated to the bedroom to read, chitchat with the scene’s only other actor (rather than risk a possible spoiler, I won’t name him) and make phone calls. At one point he sent for me, and I found him on his cellphone with someone on the crew, proposing a plot that, I soon gathered, involved hoodwinking Gilligan.“They say we’ll be done at 2 a.m., but it’s not gonna happen,” Odenkirk said into his phone, sketching out a subterfuge that he thought would help “motivate Vince” to bring things in on schedule. This required leveraging a 45-minute break in some mildly duplicitous way, and I was amused to see that Odenkirk, making his show about an inveterate schemer, wasn’t above a little scheming of his own.When the call went around the set for “lunch” — at 11 p.m., disconcertingly — there was much left to finish. For some people on the crew, this was a chance to nap, but for Odenkirk it was an opportunity to read the script for the series finale, which Peter Gould had written and delivered to him under strict orders to share it with no one. An assistant on the show said, “I’m supposed to take anyone out who tries to read it besides Bob.”“Peter’s coming to the house tomorrow afternoon, and we’re gonna talk about it — you can’t be there for that,” Odenkirk told me. “But why don’t you come over beforehand?”Odenkirk shares a home in Albuquerque with Rhea Seehorn and another actor from the show, Patrick Fabian (who plays the manicured law partner Howard Hamlin). I arrived the next morning and found Odenkirk in the kitchen, wearing jeans and running sneakers, showing no signs of the all-nighter he pulled. The house was built in the 1940s, Odenkirk said, by a contractor who specialized in office buildings, which accounted for its slight resemblance, from the outside, to a dental clinic, down to a ribbon of ornamental glass bricks installed beside the front door.Photographs of his wife, the comedy manager Naomi Odenkirk, and their two children hung on the walls alongside pictures of his roommates’ families. (Seehorn got the master bedroom, downstairs, while Odenkirk and Fabian claimed bedrooms upstairs.) Odenkirk decided to live with fellow cast members a few years ago, to help alleviate the isolation he felt when “Better Call Saul” began. “It’s about loneliness,” he said, when I asked if the roommate arrangement reflected some method-style immersion. Making the first season, Odenkirk lived by himself at a condo owned by Bryan Cranston, the star of “Breaking Bad,” who vacated it when that show ended. Odenkirk likened that experience to living “on an oil rig,” his mind gnawing at its own edges after draining shoots. “It gave me great sympathy for someone like James Gandolfini, who talked about how he couldn’t wait to be done with that character, and I think Bryan said similar things: ‘I can’t wait to leave this guy behind.’ I finally related to that attitude.”This surprised Odenkirk, at first: “I always used to scoff and roll my eyes at actors who say, ‘It’s so hard.’ Really? It can’t be.” And yet, he discovered, “the truth is that you use your emotions, and you use your memories, you use your hurt feelings and losses, and you manipulate them, dig into them, dwell on them. A normal adult doesn’t walk around doing that. Going: ‘What was the worst feeling of abandonment I’ve had in my life? Let me just gaze at that for the next week and a half, because that’s going to fuel me.’”In Odenkirk’s case, this meant dwelling on painful childhood memories, “putting myself back to being a 9-year-old,” he said, “and my dad wakes me up at 2 a.m. to tell me he’s leaving and he’ll send me money to pay the bills, and I’m thinking, I don’t know cursive enough to write the check, so how am I going to pay the bills? ‘Let me just make myself that kid again, because I’ll take that feeling of loss and fear and play it tomorrow!’” He added, “If there was one thing that let me do this, it was some access I have to the emotional, even traumatic spaces inside me that maybe isn’t the most healthy person to be.”Growing up outside Chicago, in the town of Naperville, Odenkirk was one of seven siblings. He readily discusses his father, and his loathing for him, referring to him in his memoir as “a hollow man” with a short temper, who spent his days with drinking buddies when he was around at all and who did an abysmal job of caring for his children. “It’s not that I didn’t love my dad,” Odenkirk told me. “He just wasn’t around, and he was a kind of a blank, shut-down guy, and he did things that were tortuous to me and my older brother, because he was drunk. He was always telling us, ‘The family’s broke, I don’t know what we’re gonna do and where we’re gonna live.’ And we’re little kids! Like: ‘I’m 5! I can’t help you with that!’”Odenkirk’s response was to dissociate, “reading” his father as though he were some literary grotesque out of Dickens. In his memoir, he describes his father’s death — which came when Bob was 22, by which point the two were fully estranged — with remarkable coolness: “Saying goodbye to him was a shrugging affair.” When I asked if the wound had really cauterized so neatly, Odenkirk said: “I’ve often felt like I must be hiding something, or not acknowledging something, or can’t see something. There’s no question I wish I had a father figure in life, especially as a kid, especially a good one. Wouldn’t that have been nice? There are definitely things I’ve had to deal with there, because I had nothing, an emptiness.”Odenkirk says that the “tension and trauma” his father generated is “one reason my brothers and sisters and I are so close.” His younger brother Bill earned a Ph.D. in chemistry before Bob assisted him in achieving his own dream of becoming a comedy writer, on shows like “The Simpsons” and “Mr. Show.” Their older brother, Steve, is a banker in Tucson, Ariz. Other siblings have pursued various careers: water-table tester, retail worker, funeral director and real estate agent. “Bob was born with a really independent streak,” Bill Odenkirk told me, “more so than anyone in our family. He’d probably argue that he’s had to discover who he is, but I feel he was born with a very strong sense of what he didn’t want to do and what he did want to do, which was performing and being out there doing something other than a conventional job.” Which, Bill added, “wasn’t the thinking at our house.”Bob’s role at home was the resident ham, putting on shows in the kitchen for his mom and siblings. By adolescence, the negative influence of his father and the positive influence of “Monty Python,” which began airing on PBS in the 1970s, instilled in him a mocking disrespect toward authority: “With any authority figure, I had so much resentment, and of course that was all unfair and unhelpful — except, maybe, in my comedy.” His abiding conviction, in a paraphrase he attributes to Eric Idle of “Monty Python,” is that “the best comedy has anger in it.”“You have to be a guy who doesn’t fit and says, ‘I’m doing my own thing and you guys don’t get it!’” Odenkirk said.Photo illustration by Zachary Scott for The New York TimesOdenkirk’s belief that truly great jokes carry some irreducible amount of anger — and that this anger’s noblest function is to torpedo pieties and hypocrisies — helps explain his lifelong commitment to sketch comedy. Sketch can be irreverent verging on assaultive, not merely in terms of content, but on the level of form itself. An audience goes into a sketch ready for all manner of rapid-fire experimentation, a wildly porous fourth wall and extreme narrative deconstruction. There are internal laws of physics governing a good sketch, keeping everything on the right side of total nonsense, but these laws tend to be mutable, ephemeral and contradictable to a degree seldom seen in, say, sitcoms or feature films. For a few minutes, everyone agrees to inhabit a world radically untethered by the kinds of rules they teach in screenwriting classes. In any given sketch, as Odenkirk put it, “there’s a disrespect for the form itself.” You can end a sketch by trashing it, he said, “and that’s perfectly fine and wonderful.”For this reason, he said, “most people have a phase of liking sketch comedy, and it ends around 30. And I get it, because it’s just ideas and ideas and ideas, and somewhere around that age, life clicks in and people can’t take 10 more ideas every night. They go: ‘Can you just have the friends show up and do the same thing and behave the same way? I have enough going on in my life.’” That sketch comedy is a young person’s game, he went on, is compounded by its driving ethos that “the world is a bunch of clowns. As a young person, you get such delight out of someone saying that. You’re so happy to hear it, for a couple reasons. One, part of you is an angry young person. And another, which I can see in my own kids, is the intimidation factor of the world. It’s a safety mechanism of saying: ‘I don’t have to feel intimidated by this insurmountable world that I’ll never make my way in. I can just call it all [expletive].’”Odenkirk was describing a perspective that he is proud to have only partly outgrown. Even as he has worked in other forms, his commitment to sketch comedy has been unwavering, whether this has meant shepherding younger acts like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim or reuniting with David Cross and most of the old “Mr. Show” roster for “W/ Bob and David,” a resuscitated version of the show that they made for Netflix in 2015. (The first episode featured a time machine, capable of traveling in real time only, fashioned from a porta-potty.) “Nothing Bob does creatively is more important to him than sketches,” Cross told me, praising “the ability and patience he has to go, ‘This seems like a really awful idea, but let’s dig through it, and there might be a nugget we can take everything else away from, start from this tiny, dismissible joke and build out from there.’”Odenkirk with Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim in “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” in 2008.Adult SwimOn “Mr. Show,” which refracted the silliness and social bite of “Monty Python” through a Gen-X prism, Odenkirk frequently sublimated his anger into deranged satires and loopy parodies. In one celebrated sketch, called “Thrilling Miracles,” he played a sadistic daytime-infomercial cookware pitchman who, it emerges, thinks that saucepans talk to him and scalds a kindly homemaker with boiling milk. In another, he played a tracksuit-wearing mob boss named Don Corelli: a tyrannical paterfamilias who insists to his lackeys that “the highest number is 24” and threatens violence against any who challenge this inane edict. Other sketches achieved an anarchic silliness: In “The Story of Everest,” which Odenkirk co-wrote with Jay Johnston, he plays an aged father who guffaws and bellows and speaks in an old-timey voice as his son, back from a triumphant ascent of the mountain, keeps losing his balance and falling into wall-mounted shelves lined with his mother’s thimble collection — over and over and over.Odenkirk’s path to “Mr. Show” was bumpy. In the late ’80s, Lorne Michaels hired him for the “S.N.L.” writing staff, where Odenkirk wrote one of the show’s most famous sketches — about a self-hating motivational speaker named Matt Foley, played by Chris Farley, who lives “in a van down by the river” — and co-wrote another, about schlubby Chicago-area dudes obsessed with “Da Bears.” But Odenkirk says that the triumphs were few and that he struggled to find his stride. He incorrectly assumed that he and his cohort, that included Robert Smigel and Conan O’Brien, could radically remake “S.N.L.,” when in fact they were there to serve the prerogatives of an institution. “My inability to grasp what was happening around me, and what that show was, speaks to my myopia and the kind of myopia you need to have when you’re young and doing creative work,” Odenkirk said. “You have to be a guy who doesn’t fit and says, ‘I’m doing my own thing and you guys don’t get it!’”Odenkirk in various “Mr. Show” sketches from 1995 to 1998. Clockwise from top left: “Prenatal Pageant,” “24 Is the Highest Number,” “Thrilling Miracles” and “The Story of Everest.”HBOThat attitude was bred into Odenkirk by Del Close, the acting teacher, in Chicago. Close’s earlier students included Gilda Radner and Bill Murray, and his later students included Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert. Close died in 1999, but he remains an enormously important shadow figure looming over contemporary comedy — one who never enjoyed a fraction of the mainstream success of his best-known disciples. In “Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama,” Odenkirk quotes Close as saying, “I belong in struggling organizations,” which he took to mean that there was more freedom to experiment if you remained a scrappy upstart, pleasantly installed on the culture’s fringes.Odenkirk internalized that lesson. His brother Bill told me: “I think I have a wider love of comedy than Bob. He’s more of a purist and someone who wants his comedy to be more challenging and more to the bizarre side of things.” Until “Breaking Bad” came along, Odenkirk had in fact conducted his career almost entirely on the fringes, leaping from one struggling organization, as it were, to the next. When he writes in his memoir that “I had no intention, ever, of making it big,” you believe him, instead of suspecting false modesty, because while he’s inarguably ambitious, that ambition has always seemed to point somewhere other than mass adoration. It’s important to remember that, while “Breaking Bad” finally did confer fame, the show wasn’t a hit until a few seasons in, when Netflix began streaming it and put it in front of millions more people than had seen the original broadcast, on AMC. In that light, you could argue that Odenkirk never left the fringes for the mainstream; rather, the mainstream finally came to him.Odenkirk stood with Rhea Seehorn at the kitchen island in their house, talking about the finale of “Better Call Saul” — very carefully, because I was there. Odenkirk read Gould’s script the night before, and Seehorn didn’t try to hide her curiosity.“You have 13?” she asked, eyes wide, referring to the episode number. “You like it?”“It’s a lot in there, a lot to think about,” Odenkirk replied. “I think I like it, but I was pretty wiped out when I read it in the middle of the night. I think it’s a challenging way to go, to finish the series. It’s not flashy. It’s substantial, and on some level it’s things I hoped for, for years, in this character’s brain. On the other hand, yeah, I have to read it again. But what I like about it is, it’s not cheap. It’s not easy. It doesn’t feel cartoonish. It’s pretty great, I think. It’s pretty great.”He added: “I would wanna end with this kind of character-development focus. That’s what it’s about, instead of something that just has guns in it. I guess there’s a few guns, but they’re not like in other episodes.” He turned to me, explaining: “I spend a fair amount of time doing crimes this season. Just stupid crimes.”By the end of the fifth season, Saul has embraced full criminality, symbolized by an unsavory pilgrimage through the New Mexico desert, with the wonderful Jonathan Banks, who plays the baldheaded heavy Mike Ehrmantraut, at which point his metamorphosis is nearly complete: from a morally elastic but ultimately well-meaning guy into one who decides his good intentions have been punished so relentlessly that he should probably set them ablaze once and for all.Of Season 6, Seehorn said: “It’s quite funny, and then very dark — brutally dark. They turned the volume up on all of it. Whatever direction someone was already going in, they made it more extreme.”Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn in Season 3 of “Better Call Saul,” in 2017.Michele K. Short/AMCSeehorn and Odenkirk interacted with an easygoing, lived-in affection — one that they’ve been building for years, onscreen and off, but that deepened last summer, when Odenkirk collapsed on set in front of her and Fabian. It was a heart attack, and as he lay there without a pulse, it was their screams that alerted a medic.“I’d known since 2018 that I had this plaque buildup in my heart,” Odenkirk said. “I went to two heart doctors at Cedars-Sinai, and I had dye and an M.R.I. and all that stuff, and the doctors disagreed” on treatment, with one suggesting he start immediately on medication and the other telling him it could wait. He listened to doctor No. 2 and was fine — until this year, when “one of those pieces of plaque broke up,” Odenkirk said. “We were shooting a scene, we’d been shooting all day, and luckily I didn’t go back to my trailer.” Instead, he decamped to a space where he, Seehorn and Fabian liked to retreat during downtime: “I went to play the Cubs game and ride my workout bike, and I just went down.” He added, “Rhea said I started turning bluish-gray right away.”The soundstages “Better Call Saul” calls home are “massive,” Odenkirk said. After a few agonizingly long minutes, the show’s health safety supervisor, Rosa Estrada, and an assistant director, Angie Meyer, arrived, administering CPR and hooking him up to an automated defibrillator. It zapped him once, then once more, producing an irregular pulse that quickly disappeared. “The third time,” Odenkirk said, “it got me that rhythm back.”An ambulance took him to Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, “and around 5 a.m. the next morning they went through right here” — Odenkirk showed me a scar on his wrist — “and blew up the little balloons and knocked out that plaque and left stents in two places.” Later that morning, Odenkirk’s wife and children arrived in Albuquerque, staying with him at the hospital as he recovered for the next week.Odenkirk has no memory of any of this. He cobbled together his account from Seehorn and the others who helped save his life.“That’s its own weirdness,” Seehorn said. “You didn’t have a near-death experience — you’re told you had one.”Seehorn asked Odenkirk how the night shoots had been going, commiserating about the disorientation of keeping nocturnal hours. “I had to do it with Vince,” she said, “when I go out to — ” here, she whispered something Kim does this coming season, that, if I heard correctly, was just enough of a spoiler to omit here. “My character doesn’t usually do things at night,” she told me. “Not outside. She’s like an indoor cat! But this year I had things to do that usually only Bob does.”Seehorn is a deft, sensitive actor, and her performance opposite Odenkirk, along with Michael McKean’s, constitutes the show’s emotional core. Whereas “Breaking Bad” explored an operatic birth-of-a-supervillain premise, “Better Call Saul” works in a more muted — and, to me, more affecting — register. Seehorn’s Kim is a Type A striver with a rebellious streak; she wants to do work more meaningful than representing a regional bank and finds something alluring in Jimmy’s reckless heterodoxy. Meanwhile, McKean’s Chuck McGill, a revered senior partner at the type of high-powered law firm that necessarily represents an array of high-powered malefactors, looks down on his brother with mistrust and scorn and tries to get Kim to do the same. These three characters love one another, and help one another, and yet they continually hurt one another too, in ways that can be as devastating as they can be small.Contrasting the two series, Peter Gould told me that “Better Call Saul” is “about a guy who, in a lot of ways, really wants to be loved and feels rejection tremendously, more than he wants to show. Walter White maybe finds out that what he really wants is power, and he’s very happy to have people fear him, but Jimmy wants love, and even when he’s trying to intimidate people, there’s an undercurrent of wanting approval and acceptance. And it’s something he never quite gets.”Odenkirk pointed out the window toward the Sandia Mountains. If we hustled, he told me, we could fit in a hike before Gould showed up. We drove to a trailhead Odenkirk knows and loves, he traded his sneakers for hiking boots and we began climbing. “We might want to hustle just to warm up,” he said, proceeding to charge up 1,015 feet of elevation on a snowy mountain trail a matter of months after his collapse.As we walked, I mentioned one of my favorite things he did in recent years. It’s a sketch on Tim Robinson’s excellent Netflix series, “I Think You Should Leave,” in which Odenkirk plays a sad-sack guy enjoying a lonely meal at a diner, who desperately pressures a stranger and his child, one table over, to help him pretend that his life isn’t as bleak as it is — to corroborate the fantasy that he has friends, owns “every kind of classic car,” including “doubles” and “triples” of some, that he doesn’t live in a hotel and that he married an ex-model whose face he first saw hanging on a poster in his garage.It’s a fantastic sketch that, despite its preposterousness, undoes any neat distinction invoked in the title of Odenkirk’s memoir between “comedy” and “drama.” To tweak Odenkirk’s paraphrase of Idle, it’s comedy with despair in it. With snow crunching underfoot and conifers looming above us, I asked Odenkirk if he thought he could have mustered a performance like that before “Better Call Saul.”Odenkirk in “I Think You Should Leave.” Netflix“I think I’ve gotten more capable of striking a tone of melancholy and making it honest in a comedy piece,” he said. He thought back to his days acting opposite Farley, at Second City. “I actually remember being onstage with Chris and Jill Talley once, doing an improv scene, and thinking to myself, If I was in the audience, I’d be watching them, not me. And I kept thinking, as we were doing the scene, If I was in a drama, I could be the funniest guy, and the way you’re watching Chris Farley in this scene, you’d be watching me. And there was a part of me that thought I could do it, maybe one day. But then I didn’t try. It was just a stray, existential thought that I noted and never acted on, because I love sketch comedy. I thought, It’s fine if you like Chris more than me. It’s fine if you like David Cross more than me. I like those guys more than me!”The best-loved sketches from “Mr. Show” contain only hints as to the depth of Odenkirk’s dramatic talent. But he reminded me of one, “Prenatal Pageants,” in which he plays the beaten-down father of an unborn child whom he and his wife enter into a beauty contest for fetuses. This role could be a total throwaway, but for some reason Odenkirk decided to play it with depth, supplying a sketch aimed at our image-obsessed society with a palpable sadness: This is a simple, slow-witted man, who takes a string of demeaning jobs in order to enter his unborn child into beauty contests. “I remember doing that and saying, ‘I’m immersing myself in this character at a level I don’t normally do, and it feels very true,’” Odenkirk said. Cross told me: “One of the things that made ‘Mr. Show’ stand out is there’s pathos to a lot of those characters. I’ve been saying this for years, but there’s a humanity to some of those characters that you don’t really see that often in sketches.”Odenkirk had been thinking about that particular performance recently, he said, in the context of an upcoming project: a faux-documentary series about cults, co-starring Cross, in which the two will play gurus. “We’re trying to go to another level with it,” Odenkirk said, adding that, after the “Mr. Show” reboot for Netflix, they decided that “we needed to move into a new area, but one that connected to our comedy.” Cross described the show as having “elements of seriousness and drama to it, not like a ‘Law & Order’ episode, but these guys are gonna be real human beings.” Playing them would require a kind of “emoting that we might have once been a little gun-shy about,” Cross added, “but not anymore.”Odenkirk said his ambition was to “do our comedy, but maybe take all that we’ve done in the intervening years and put it to some use, of digging into character and playing it with some sensitivity, having some levels but also be funny.”If you tried to unite the various strands of Odenkirk’s career, you could do worse than to say that they are by and large about “damaged men,” as Cross put it to me, living in (deranged by?) an America in decline: buffoonish authority figures he lampoons with wit and venom, underdogs he invests with a complicated, warts-and-all tenderness. Perhaps it’s because Odenkirk came of age in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but this was true of Matt Foley on “S.N.L.,” true of any number of “Mr. Show” characters, true of Saul Goodman, true of Jimmy McGill and true of the bruiser he plays in “Nobody” — a guy whom Odenkirk regards, much like Jimmy, as a cautionary tale. (The movie was inspired by two real-life break-ins that Odenkirk declines to discuss in any detail.) “My hope is we get to do a trilogy, and he ends up with nothing,” he said. “He destroys everything he loves.”We reached a vista, some 9,500 feet above sea level, overlooking Albuquerque. “Better Call Saul” would keep Odenkirk here at least until mid-February. “I wanna stay under the radar,” he said, imagining what came next, “and get to be this guy who gets to go over here and then gets to go over there. Because some of these things I’ve done feel opposed. They don’t live in the same Venn diagram. But I think that’s cool.”Odenkirk thought about this for a second. “I like being able to get away with it,” he said. “And that’s something that gets harder if people know you too well.”Prop Stylist: Jess Danielle. Hair and makeup: Cheri Montesanto.Jonah Weiner is a contributing writer based in Oakland, Calif., and he writes the style and culture newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. His last feature for the magazine was about the actor and comedian Seth Rogen. Zachary Scott is a photographer and faculty member at the ArtCenter College of Design and California Polytechnic State University. He last photographed Adam Sandler for the magazine’s cover. More

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    12 Things Our Critics Are Looking Forward to in 2022

    ‘Better Call Saul’ returns, Cecily Strong stars in a one-woman show, and Faith Ringgold gets an overdue retrospective.As a new year begins in uncertain times (again), our critics highlight the TV, movies, music, art, theater, dance and comedy that promise a welcome distraction.Margaret LyonsThe End of ‘Better Call Saul’Bob Odenkirk stars as Jimmy McGill in AMC’s “Better Call Saul,” which returns for its final season this spring.Greg Lewis/AMC, via Associated PressI’ll be sad forever when “Better Call Saul” is over, so part of me is actually dreading the sixth and final season. I never want to say goodbye to Jimmy or Kim — but man, am I dying to see them again. By the time “Saul” returns on AMC this spring, it will have been off the air for two full years. (Bob Odenkirk, its star, recovered from a heart attack that occurred on set this year.) If there was ever a show that knew how to think about endgames, it’s this one, among the most carefully woven dramas of our time. Of course, thanks to “Breaking Bad,” we know exactly where some of these characters are headed but not how they get there or how they feel about it or whom they’ll hurt along the way. Hurry back! But also, go slow.Salamishah TilletA ‘Downton Abbey’ Sequel Travels to FranceThe sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is partly set in the South of France; from left, Harry Hadden-Paton, Laura Carmichael, Tuppence Middleton and Allen Leech.Ben Blackall/Focus FeaturesOK, so yes, it was weird that my friends Sherri-Ann and Amber and I were the only Black people in the theater when we saw the movie “Downton Abbey” in 2019. At the time, we agreed that despite the absence of people of color in the theater and onscreen, we still found delight in the grandeur — the clothing, the castle, the cast of characters, especially the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Violet Crawley, marvelously played by Dame Maggie Smith. Now that we’ve set our calendars to March 18, 2022, for the sequel, “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” I’m looking forward to seeing how the franchise tries to reinvent itself on the cusp of a new era, the 1930s, and how it fares in the current racial moment. (A Black female face pops up in a trailer.) Partly set in the South of France after the Dowager Countess learns she has inherited a villa there, the movie sends the upstairs Crawley clan and their downstairs employees off on another adventure, with another wedding. While Julian Fellowes, the creator of “Downton,” has a new show, “The Gilded Age,” premiering on HBO in January — which seems to be a bit more thoughtful in its take on race, class and identity — here’s hoping that this sequel to “Downton” takes a bow in grand Grantham style.Jesse GreenCecily Strong in a One-Woman ShowCecily Strong, left, and the director Leigh Silverman; Strong is starring in “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” at the Shed.Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesJane Wagner’s 1985 play “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” was custom-made for the chameleonic gifts of her life partner (and, later, wife), Lily Tomlin. Who else could have inhabited its 12 highly distinct characters — among them a runaway punk, a bored one-percenter and a trio of disillusioned feminists — with such sardonic sympathy? When Tomlin won a 1986 Tony Award for her work, it seemed to seal the idea that the performer and the play were forever one. But in the kind of casting that makes you smack your head with delight, Cecily Strong takes up Tomlin’s mantle in a revival directed by Leigh Silverman at the Shed, expected to open on Jan. 11. Strong — whose “Saturday Night Live” characters include Jeanine Pirro, the Girl You Wish You Hadn’t Started a Conversation With at a Party and, most recently, Goober the Clown Who Had an Abortion When She Was 23 — seems like another custom fit, nearly four decades later.Jon ParelesAfrofuturism at Carnegie HallSun Ra Arkestra will perform its galactic jazz as part of the Afrofuturism festival that starts in February.Nate Palmer for The New York TimesStepping outside its own history as a bastion of Western classical music, Carnegie Hall will be the hub of a citywide, multidisciplinary festival of Afrofuturism: the visionary, tech-savvy ways that African-diaspora culture has imagined alternate paths forward. Carnegie’s series is expected to start Feb. 12 with the quick-cutting, sometimes head-spinning electronic musician Flying Lotus. (One challenge might be the main hall’s acoustics.) Shows at Zankel Hall include the galactic jazz of the Sun Ra Arkestra with the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu and the spoken-word insurgent Moor Mother (Feb. 17); the flutist Nicole Mitchell leading her Black Earth Ensemble; and the clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid with her Autophysiopsychic Millennium (Feb. 24); the African-rooted hip-hop duo Chimurenga Renaissance and the Malian songwriter Fatoumata Diawara (March 4); and the D.J., composer and techno pioneer Carl Craig leading his Synthesizer Ensemble (March 19). There’s far more: five dozen other cultural organizations will have festival events.Anthony TommasiniThe Metropolitan Opera Rethinks VerdiThe set model for a new production of Verdi’s “Don Carlos,” which is expected to open at the Metropolitan Opera in February.Metropolitan OperaVerdi’s “Don Carlos” may not be a flawless opera. But it’s a profound work; I think of it as Verdi’s “Hamlet.” Written for the Paris Opera, it nodded to the French grand style and included epic scenes and massed choruses. But at its 1867 premiere, it was deemed overly long and ineffective. Verdi revised the opera several times, making cuts, translating the French libretto into Italian, leaving a confused legacy of revisions. The Metropolitan Opera is giving audiences a chance to hear the work as originally conceived in its five-act French version, which many consider the best. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has led superb Met performances of the Italian adaptation, will be in this pit for this new production by David McVicar. The starry cast, headed by the tenor Matthew Polenzani in the title role, includes Sonya Yoncheva, Elina Garanca, Etienne Dupuis, Eric Owens and John Relyea. When performances begin on Feb. 28, be prepared for a five-hour show with two intermissions; I can’t wait.Mike HaleTrue-Crime, Starring Renée ZellwegerRenée Zellweger is starring in the true-crime mini-series “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThis winter brings more than the usual number of big stars taking time out for the small screen, like Uma Thurman (“Suspicion”), Christopher Walken (“Severance”) and Samuel L. Jackson (“The Last Days of Ptolemy Gray”). The one that piques my interest the most is Renée Zellweger, taking on only her second lead television role in “The Thing About Pam,” premiering March 8 on NBC. Zellweger can be hit or miss, but her hits — “The Whole Wide World,” “Chicago,” “Judy” — keep her in the very top rank of American actresses. Here she plays Pam Hupp, who is implicated in multiple deaths and is currently serving a life sentence for one of them, in a true-crime mini-series whose showrunner, Jenny Klein, was a producer on solid TV offerings like “The Witcher” and “Jessica Jones.”Jason FaragoAt 91, Faith Ringgold Gets a RetrospectiveA retrospective of the work of Faith Ringgold opens at the New Museum in February and will include “Dancing at the Louvre: The French Collection Part I, #1,” from 1991. Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY and DACS, London, via ACA GalleriesWhen the Museum of Modern Art opened its expanded home in 2019, its most important Picasso suddenly found itself with a new companion: a tumultuous, panoramic painting of American violence that Faith Ringgold painted in 1967. Ringgold, born 91 years ago in Harlem, has never been an obscure figure: Her art was displayed in the Clinton White House as well as most of New York’s museums; her children’s books have won prizes and reached best-seller lists. But she has had to wait too long for a career-spanning retrospective in her hometown. The one at the New Museum, which opens Feb. 17, will reveal how Ringgold intertwined the political and the personal: first in her rigorously composed “American People” paintings, which channeled the civil rights movement into gridded, repeating, syncopated forms; and then in pieced-fabric “story quilts” depicting Michael Jackson or Aunt Jemima, and geometric abstractions inspired by Tibetan silks and embroideries. The show comes with a major chance for rediscovery: the first outing in over two decades of her “French Collection,” a 12-quilt cycle that recasts the history of Paris in the 1920s through the eyes of a fictional African-American artist and model.Maya PhillipsA Viking Prince Seeks RevengeAlexander Skarsgård in a scene from “The Northman,” a story about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father, directed by Robert Eggers.Focus FeaturesRobert Eggers has directed only two feature films, and yet he’s already known as a maker of beautifully strange, critically acclaimed movies. “The Witch,” from 2016, was followed three years later by the grim and perplexing “The Lighthouse.” Both established Eggers as a stylistic descendant of the Brothers Grimm, a crafter of macabre fables that descend into torrents of madness. Which is why I’m excited to see his third feature film, “The Northman,” expected to premiere on April 22, about a Viking prince who seeks revenge for his murdered father. Steeped in Icelandic mythology, the story is based on the tale of Amleth, the inspiration for Prince Hamlet, my favorite sad boy of English literature. Eggers wrote the screenplay with the Icelandic poet Sjón, so we can surely expect an epic with epic writing to match. There’s also a stellar cast, including Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Anya Taylor-Joy, Willem Dafoe — and Björk as a witch. I’d watch for that alone.Gia KourlasTransformation, Via Tap and Modern DanceA still from Ayodele Casel’s “Chasing Magic”; from left, Anthony Morigerato, John Manzari, Casel and Naomi Funaki.Kurt CsolakThere are times, however rare, when a virtual dance can be just as stirring as a live one. Ayodele Casel’s joyful and galvanizing “Chasing Magic,” presented by the Joyce Theater in April, was just that. Now the tap dancer and choreographer unveils a new version of the work, directed by Torya Beard, for the stage — an actual one — starting Tuesday, barring any Covid cancellations. And the following month, “Four Quartets,” an ambitious evening-length work by the modern choreographer Pam Tanowitz, lands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Feb. 10-12). Based on T.S. Eliot’s poems, the production features live narration by the actress Kathleen Chalfant, music by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and a set by Brice Marden; in it, Tanowitz continues her exploration of the relationship between emotion and form. It’s true that one is tap; the other, modern dance. What do they have in common? Both have much to say and to show about the transporting, transformative power of dance.Isabelia HerreraThe Rapper Saba Explores TraumaSaba, a rapper from Chicago, will release a new album, “Few Good Things,” on Feb. 4.Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesDiaristic and quietly intense, Saba, a rapper from Chicago, is the kind of artist who navigates grief with a cool solace. In 2018, his record “Care for Me” considered this theme in the aftermath of the murder of his cousin and collaborator, who was stabbed to death a year earlier. Out on Feb. 4, his next album, “Few Good Things,” confronts equally gutting life challenges: the anxiety of generational poverty and the depths of survivor’s guilt. It reprises Saba’s slithering and poetic flows, which breathe out a profound sense of narrative. The beats are still buttery, jazzy and meticulously arranged. But this time around, there is more wisdom — a recognition that living through trauma means finding gratitude and affirmation in the moments you can.Jason ZinomanComedian Taylor Tomlinson on TourThe comedian Taylor Tomlinson in her Netflix special “Quarter-Life Crisis,” from 2020; a new one is in the works.Allyson Riggs/Netflix“Quarter-Life Special,” the debut stand-up special from Taylor Tomlinson, introduced a young artist with real potential. Tomlinson tautly evoked a clear persona (cheerful but not the life of the party; more like, as she put it, “the faint pulse of the pot luck”) and told jokes marked by a diverse arsenal of act outs and manners of misdirection. She covered standard territory (dating, sex, parents, kids) with enough insight and dark shadings to get your attention. Most excitingly, every once in a while, she let her thought process spin out into deliriously unexpected directions, like the story that led her to imagine a test for sadness conducted by the police. “Instead of a breathalyzer,” she explained, “they have you sigh into a harmonica.” This Netflix special made a splash, but it would have probably been a bigger one if it didn’t come out in March 2020. One pandemic later, she has another hour ready, and another Netflix special on the way. She’s now performing it on tour, which is expected to stop in New York in January at Town Hall and then the Beacon Theater. More

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    6 TV Tie-In Podcasts to Enhance Your Next Binge

    Who’ll be the last one standing in “Succession”? Is “The Good Place” heaven or hell? These are the audio companions to keep the conversation going around some of your favorite shows.For a true TV devotee, watching the latest episode is just the beginning. Depending on the show at hand, there are plot twists and character revelations to dissect, theories to discuss and historical context to plumb. Fans have been gathering online to do all this since before the turn of the century, but in recent years, shows have started producing their own post-episode debriefs.Starting in the early 2010s, the TV “after-show” became a subgenre. Immediately after a new episode aired, a host would interview the stars and creators about what just happened, in programs like AMC’s “Talking Dead” and “Talking Bad,” HBO’s “After the Thrones,” and more recently Netflix’s “The Netflix Afterparty.” But as Hollywood seems to be realizing, the format works just as well (if not better) in audio form.As a result, there’s now a huge selection of official tie-in podcasts for your favorite TV shows. Some of these offer real added value, while others are skippable puffery. These six are worth your time.‘HBO’s Succession Podcast’Since fans of HBO’s towering, dramatic family tragicomedy have had to wait a full two years for new episodes, audio stepped in to fill the void. Beginning last summer, the host Roger Bennett (best known for the soccer podcast “Men in Blazers”) conducted interviews with the “Succession” ensemble, diving into the psychology of the power-hungry, emotionally stunted Roy clan. Now that the long-awaited third season has finally debuted, the podcast has switched up its format, swapping out Bennett for the veteran Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher (host of The New York Times podcast “Sway”). The focus now is less on the show itself, and more on the realities of the kind of power it depicts — Episode 1 features a conversation with Jennifer Palmieri, a former White House communications director, who weighs in on a politically charged moment from the season premiere. Though it may not please every fan, this shift in focus sets it apart from other tie-in podcasts.Starter episode: “Rich Doesn’t Equal Smart (With Jennifer Palmieri)”‘The Crown: The Official Podcast’One of the great pleasures of watching Netflix’s richly drawn royal drama “The Crown” is looking up the real historical events portrayed in each episode, and identifying what’s fact versus fiction. Hosted by the Scottish broadcaster Edith Bowman, this companion podcast helps to scratch that itch, offering additional context on the research that goes into depicting figures like Princess Diana and the divisive British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Each episode features Bowman alongside a variety of guests from the cast and creative team, who share behind-the-scenes stories and insights into the vast scale of the production. Sadly for fans of Claire Foy’s era, the podcast didn’t debut until Season 3 of the show, but will continue through its already-confirmed fifth and sixth seasons.Starter episode: “Episode 1: Goldstick”‘Better Call Saul Insider Podcast’Way back in 2009, when podcasts were still niche and held no interest for TV networks, the team behind AMC’s then under-the-radar drama “Breaking Bad” started putting out a roundtable podcast called “Breaking Bad Insider Podcast.” As the series gradually snowballed to become one of the most iconic series of all time, the podcast remained charmingly unchanged — with Kelley Dixon, an editor on both dramas, and Vince Gilligan, the creator of both, hosting an affable weekly chat about every aspect of the production. This dynamic continued with the introduction of the also acclaimed prequel series “Better Call Saul.” The hosts genuine warmth and camaraderie distinguishes this from many similar roundtable-style podcasts, and their insights into the nitty-gritty of production are invaluable for fans and aspiring creatives alike.Starter episode: “101 Better Call Saul Insider”‘The Good Place: The Podcast’There are layers upon layers to peel back in Michael Schur’s existential NBC sitcom “The Good Place,” which follows a ragtag group of recently deceased characters trying to navigate a zany afterlife where the rules keep changing. So it’s not surprising that the show makes ideal fodder for a podcast, which is hosted by the actor Marc Evan Jackson (best known to fans for playing a mysterious demon named Shawn). Offering episode-by-episode conversations spanning the entire series, the podcast features a revolving door of actors, writers and producers, as well as set decorators, props masters, and costume and production designers.Starter episode: “Ch. 1: Michael Schur”‘Late Night With Seth Meyers Podcast’Late-night talk shows aren’t generally first in line to get the podcast treatment, but this is less of a companion show than an alternative way to enjoy Meyers’s incarnation of “Late Night,” on NBC. New episodes typically drop two or three times a week, and feature highlights from the satirical nightly show, including Meyers’s opening monologues, interviews and signature recurring segments like “A Closer Look.” Guests run the cultural gamut — interviews from the last few weeks include Senator Elizabeth Warren, the cast of “Ted Lasso,” and Meyers’s onetime “SNL” colleague Colin Jost. Some episodes of the program are devoted to a sub-podcast, “Late Night Lit,” which features the “Late Night” producer Sarah Jenks-Daly discussing books and interviewing authors. Throw in the odd behind-the-scenes segment with Meyers and the producer Mike Shoemaker, and there’s something here to entertain just about anyone.Starter episode: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren | Southwest Contradicts Fox News, Says Chaos Not Caused by Vaccine Mandate: A Closer Look”‘The Chernobyl Podcast’If you devoured HBO’s riveting 2019 mini-series “Chernobyl” but skipped the tie-in podcast, you’re missing out on the full experience. Peter Sagal, best known as the host of NPR’s beloved quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” led this five-part conversation with the “Chernobyl” writer Craig Mazin, who co-hosts the long-running screenwriting podcast “Scriptnotes.” Their combined audio experience is evident in their effortless back-and-forth, which blends behind-the-scenes anecdotes with fascinating historical insights into the 1986 nuclear disaster and its fallout. Mazin’s enthusiasm for the subject matter is palpable, and the episode-by-episode discussion allows for a detailed breakdown of key moments. If you’re the kind of die-hard TV fan who pines for DVD audio commentaries, this is the next best thing.Starter episode: “1:23:45” More