Liars and Saints

 One TV character who haunts me is Kim Wexler, and I'm grateful to the critic Alan Sepinwall for shedding light on Kim's place in the landscape. Sepinwall argues that the antihero trend reached its climax with "Breaking Bad." That particular story--the story of the difficult man, sinking and sinking--couldn't really be improved upon. We'd seen Walter White, Al Swearengen, Dexter, Don Draper, Tony Soprano, Omar Little. Enough already! (Sepinwall fails to explain the role of Philip Jennings or Shiv Roy in TV history. Oh, well.) In Sepinwall's (initial) reading, "Better Call Saul" is *not* centered on an antihero. An antihero wants to do bad things (even if the world, NM-with-Walter-White-style, insists on misreading the antihero as decent). But Jimmy McGill generally does not want to do bad things. He wants to do good; the world, fixated on Jimmy's past, demands that Jimmy be seen as bad. But wait. Sepinwall later back-pedals. "Better Call...

  An hour I love is "Chicanery," from "Better Call Saul." People call this the high point of the series. Here's how I understand it. Chuck, a troubled man, needs an outlet for his own pain, so he antagonizes his brother, Jimmy. He ensnares Jimmy by getting him to admit (on tape) that he has bent the law. Jimmy's reasons for having strayed from the path of rectitude are defensible, but Chuck won't open his ears. At the same time, Chuck's rage means that he is also bullying himself. Chuck has persuaded himself that he has an allergy to electricity ("AIDS seemed bizarre, too, when the stories first began to emerge"). Jimmy must show that Chuck is out of his mind--so that Chuck's case gets dismissed. But the process of course requires one brother to humiliate another brother. Chuck is a monster--but he is also, obviously, dealing with intense suffering. In a flashback, we see him trying to woo his ex-wife. He can't just tell her the sto...