By Matt Zoller Seitz
Press Play Contributor
EDITOR'S NOTE: This piece contains spoilers for Breaking Bad, season four, Episode 5. Read at your own risk.
Tonight's Breaking Bad, titled "Shotgun," ended with a scene that did what TV drama does best: define characters so completely that you feel as if you know them as well as you know yourself.
The scene was a family dinner at Hank and Marie's house, with Walt, Skyler and their kids as guests. Earlier in the episode, Hank had convinced himself that the murdered Gale's lab notebook proved Gale was Heisenberg, Walt's alter ego — which in turn meant that the DEA could stop looking for Heisenberg, and Walt could breathe easy, at least for a little while. Then Walt, who already seemed tipsy, excused himself to get more wine from the kitchen; the camera lingered on Walt in the foreground as he poured and drank a glass and then poured another one, his family's voices echoing in the background. Would Walt control himself and let his DEA brother-in-law continue to think that Gale was Heisenberg, thus ending or seriously delaying the investigation? Or would Walt give into macho pride, or intellectual conceit — the two are intertwined for him — and hint that the real Heisenberg was still out there?
Walt just had to be Walt.
The chemist's Achilles' heels are intellectual vanity and a kind of beta male machismo. After living most of his life as a schnook, to quote Henry Hill at the end of GoodFellas, he got a taste of what it's like to be rich, innovative and important (within his criminal circle, which is admittedly limited, and invisible to everyone who isn't already part of it). Dangerous, too; he's a killer now, remember? Now Walt wants to be treated like he's The Man. Whenever he's forced to bow, you can see how miserable and angry it makes him.
To read the rest of the recap, click here.
PressPlay founder and publisher Matt Zoller Seitz is the staff TV columnist for Salon.com. His video essays about Terrence Malick, Oliver Stone, Budd Boetticher, Wes Anderson, Clint Eastwood, Michael Mann and other directors can be viewed at the at the online magazine Moving Image Source.
That is why Eastbound & Down’s second season, which arrived on 
When a representative from Tampa’s major league team, the unnamed Bay Rays, reveals that he wasn’t officially authorized to offer Kenny a deal, our anti-hero flees to Mexico to lick his wounds. While there, Kenny replaces Stevie with Aaron (Deep Roy), a pugnacious, switchblade-wielding dwarf from Bombay who winds up robbing Kenny at knife-point twice (see the season two outtakes reel to see Roy taunt a victim about his “burrito” and threaten to cut off his “titties”). Stevie leaves his job at a Starbucks-type coffee house in order to track Kenny done using credit card receipts (Kenny’s been using Stevie credit card to pay for $22,000 worth of debauchery, including cock-fighting, prostitutes and hallucinogens).
Stevie is so madly in love with Kenny that at the end of season one, he quits teaching just to follow in his hero’s footsteps—all the way to Tampa from North Carolina with no promise of a job or recompense beyond being able to bask in Kenny’s dickish glory. But Kenny shuts that idea down in the season one finale even before he learns that there is no job waiting for him in Tampa. He would have rejected Stevie earlier but he just didn’t know how.
But there was something about the series that was intrinsically at odds with a huge swath of the people living in the part of the country where the show was set. Yes, NBC screwed the pooch from the git-go, marketing to teen boys a show that often centered on Tami giving birth control tips to girls. Then it tried selling at steep discounts online, adding desperation to the mix. Then NBC announced that reruns would appear on ESPN and the female-friendly Bravo network after which it debuted a killer new tagline: “It’s about life.” Finally, NBC struck a co-financing deal with DirecTV. Which meant that at various times, the show might be available on DirecTV only, or DirecTV and then NBC.
Yet FNL was still, for five years running, a continual pop culture presence via new or repeated episodes. For five years it was just kind of, like, around. If you followed TV at all, you knew about it, you knew it was worth watching and having an opinion on and it wasn’t hard to find out where and how to see it. And still, beyond a wonderfully passionate fanbase, the prospect of roping in an even moderate following remained a chimera. Hats off to Peter Berg and his collaborators for having the skill, the vision, the steel-plated balls to create five seasons of simple, messy truths. And there may be more: as I type this, there’s tentative news on the FNL front. Following in the footsteps of 
Now, it’s admittedly a sketchy business performing cultural obituaries and looking for meaning in failure. But this is all kinds of different. This series failed to become even a modest hit, despite being ludicrously, specifically good, and having multi-corporate media muscle pushing it (however ineptly) directly but warmly with things that are now driving a country collectively off the rails. Maybe we should look at what’s rusting those rails.
By the finale, Tim Riggins has rejected a college scholarship in order to work in his garage business and build his dream house. We see Luke, son of an unstable, Bachmann-esque mother, getting on a bus for service in the Army—but there’s a sinking feeling regarding the wars started by the regime that was in power when FNL premiered. Better to focus on Tyra, whose hard road to education has paid off. She’s in college. Her lovable dork of an ex, the indie-guitar-playin’ Landry, is in college, too. Ditto that picture of soft-spoken Texan gentility, Matt Saracen (
back in a different way. Ron's wife Ilene (
it's ONE YEAR LATER and Larry sits across from his divorce attorney Andrew Berg (Paul F. Tompkins) making the final arrangements on his divorce. Larry is going to get to keep the house and it sounds as if he's getting a pretty good deal. As he emphasizes to Berg, Larry wants to look like he's being a good guy, but he doesn't want to be a good guy. I do wonder if this episode marks Cheryl Hines' swan song on the show. In the closing credits, she's listed as also-starring as usual but in the following two episodes in which she doesn't appear, her name is absent. At the same time, Susie Essman's name remains in the credits though Susie Greene doesn't appear in the second episode. Even though Larry David plays a fictionalized version of himself, you have to think that Hines has become a victim of circumstance given David's real-life, well-publicized divorce from his wife Laurie.
Some other highlights from "The Divorce": A classic Susie Greene moment when Larry, the Greenes and the Funkhousers have brunch together and Jeff tells her that if they ever split up, he'd just divide everything 50-50 and give her the best of everything to which Susie replies, "What are you fuckin' kiddin' me? You think we're gonna have a nice divorce if we ever get divorced? I'm takin' you for everything you've got, mister. I'm taking your balls and I'm thumbtackin' them to the wall." Bob Einstein always has been a delight as Marty Funkhouser when he has appeared, but he's hitting it out of the park in all three episodes so far this season. In "The Divorce," he announces at the brunch that he's going on a business trip to London and Larry innocently asks why his wife Nan isn't going, only to get the dirtiest look from Marty when Larry sells Nan (Ann Ryerson) how wonderful London is this time of year. Later, Marty confronts Larry about how he's ruined his getaway because all they do is stare bored at each other or she'll talk over him. Larry asks why he doesn't get divorced. "I'm lazy," Marty admits. Later, he drops by Larry's elated as Leon (J.B. Smoove, still hanging around), Larry and Jeff are playing pool to announce that he's getting a divorce too. He asked Nan for one and she said yes. Leon suggests he tie strings of cans to his car like you do when you get married that say JUST DIVORCED. Jeff is terribly jealous — Larry and Marty are getting divorces, Leon doesn't need one and he's stuck with Susie. It's just a warmup for what Einstein gets to do in the second and third episodes.
That second episode, "The Safe House," ramps up the laughs even higher. So often, Larry ends up getting punished for his actions or his "rules" as how society should function. Too often what gets overlooked is that Larry either has good intentions or he's just right. The opening scene of "The Safe House" offers a perfect illustration of this. Larry is minding his own business, walking down the wide aisle of a grocery store to pick up a carton of a certain ice cream he wants. In front of the case holding the flavor he seeks are two women — one (Miriam Flynn) comforting the other (Tymberlee Hill) who is crying and visibly upset about something. The aisle contains no one else but the three of them and Larry tries his best to coax them to move over just so he can get his ice cream and be on his way, but the woman doing the comforting turns on him — insisting she's done her best to be polite and ask him to give them a minute. Larry appears to leave and the woman tells the bawling woman not to pay any attention to"that jerk" then we see one of the best sight gags ever as Larry's arms creeps through the freezer as the women continue to stand there. Of course, Larry was right. Why should anyone have to wait to get one item when the other two, one of them upset or not, could have easily moved elsewhere? Later in the episode, Larry arrives home in time to catch the woman (Michaela Watkins) who has been walking her dog and letting him go on his yard. Larry yells at her for not bringing a plastic bag with her. "A dog without a bag is incomplete," he tells her. She claims forgetfulness, but he counters that she forgets every time. "You didn't have to yell," she says. "I'm not just yelling for me. I'm yelling for society!" Larry shouts. Honestly, don't we all want to yell for society sometimes? It turns out that both the crying woman and the dog walker are battered women who now reside in a "safe house" a few doors down from Larry which he learns when the other woman knocks on his 
door and introduces herself as Margaret. She wants Larry to come to apologize to the women to give them "a positive male" image. Larry doesn't think he has anything to apologize for, but agrees to do it anyway, though he's puzzled when one of the women living in the house, Dale, turns out to be a big gal that he thinks is pulling a scam because she looks as if she could take care of herself. If she looks familiar, she's played by Jen Kober, with a different look and demeanor than her role as Melissa Leo's friend Andrea on Treme.
launched by Funkhouser in a scene where he's a veritable one-liner machine. He informs Jeff and Larry over a meal that Richard Lewis has yet another new girlfriend and that she's a burlesque dancer with quite impressive breasts. Lewis joins them briefly, but says he has an audition that he is running late to because of a phone call. Lewis finds it annoying that Funkhouser told the others what his girlfriend did for a living and denies that her breasts were the attraction, going on to defend the tradition of burlesque, saying that without burlesque we wouldn't have Charlie Chaplin. "Chaplin was a great pole dancer," Funkhouser comments. Lewis swears that it's her inner beauty and spirituality that attracted him. After a pause, Funkhouser asks him, "Have you set a day aside when you're finally going to look at her face?" Jeff and Larry can't stop laughing and since this is an improvised show, who knows if that laughter was in character?
themselves, that it throws me off when they are supposed to be a character. They've done this before with Michael McKean and Tim Meadows, here they do it with Larry Miller. As soon as I see him, I assume he's supposed to be himself so it takes a little acclimating to realize that he's playing a completely fictional character. The food at Al-Abbas' Original Best Chicken turns out to be as great as its word-of-mouth indicated, but it's definitely not a Jew-friendly place with lots of anti-Israel posters lining the walls. Larry tells Jeff that if someone who's Jewish wanted to cheat on their spouse, this would be the place to go because they wouldn't get caught. Larry spots an attractive Palestinian woman (Anne Bedian) and suggests to Jeff that perhaps she could be the next Mrs. David, but Jeff thinks that if she's going to get over her anti-Semitism, Larry wouldn't be the man to bring her around. Larry admits that is part of the attraction. "You're always attracted to someone who doesn't want you, right?" Larry says. "Here, you have someone who not only doesn't want you, but doesn't even recognize your right to exist."
When they have the dinner party where Ron's wife annoys with the "LOL" and Larry hits the Lexus, they finally learn where Funkhouser has been hiding. He tells them that he has had a midlife crisis and rededicated his life to Judaism, meeting with this new rabbi every day and wearing his yarmulke all the time. The Greenes have puzzled everyone by bringing daughter Sammi (Ashly Holloway, the same actress who has played her since the second season classic "The Doll" in 2001). During the dinner, it comes up that Al-Abbas plans to open a second location — next to Goldblatt's Deli. Susie decides to organize a protest. Some argue that they have a right in the U.S. to open where they want to but, as they've done before, Curb has sneaked some parallels to a real controversy, in this case the whole Ground Zero mosque brouhaha, into a story, but for laughs. I'm not going to spell out in detail all the twists and turns in this week's episode just so you can enjoy it all the more, but I have to say that they do give Sammi Greene more than she has ever had to do before and, as Larry says to her, "Boy, you're really your mother's daughter, aren't you?"
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