This newsletter contains minor spoilers for BETTER CALL SAUL
Like most of America, I used the first few months of COVID-induced quarantine during 2020 to catch up on some television shows that I had missed. Back in 2013, I had waited until the last season of BREAKING BAD was about to air before binge-watching the entirety of the show. It’s only fitting that I only began watching BETTER CALL SAUL once the penultimate season had aired.
Over three months, I absorbed the first five seasons of BETTER CALL SAUL. What can I say? It’s a damned good show. In fact, I might even go as far as to say that I like it more than BREAKING BAD. What appeals to me the most about BETTER CALL SAUL is that, despite the show being set in the years preceding the events of BREAKING BAD and audiences knowing full well how that show’s shit went down, there isn’t the same sense of doom hanging over the air.
We know that Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill and Jonathan Banks’ Mike Erhmantraut are going to find their lives upended once they cross paths with Walter White and his meth business. We also know that so many of the characters we have been introduced to in BETTER CALL SAUL such as Rhea Seehorn’s Kim Wexler and Michael Mando’s Nacho Varga aren’t around when the events of BREAKING BAD begin. Even with the brief glimpses at Jimmy’s future post-BREAKING BAD - where he works as a manager at a Cinnabun in an Omaha mall, constantly in fear that his identity will be discovered - I still have hope that Jimmy finds his happy ending. I still cling to the possibility that the flash-forwards have been a misdirect and Jimmy and Kim have successfully escaped and are enjoying life together in Omaha.
When I was younger, I loved downer endings. The more fucked-up and depressing an ending, the better. “Happy endings aren’t realistic,” I would shout to the heavens whenever asked to explain my weird preferences (or, honestly, regardless of whether or not I was asked - I was a mouthy, opinionated kid). Realism means despair and pain and tragedy. That’s the truth of the world and storytelling should reflect that.
Insert hand jerking off motion.
I don’t know if it’s because I’m now 37, or because I spent the last twenty years living in a post-9/11 world where new and exotic tragedies were being introduced every few months like society was perpetually in Sweeps but I’m sick and tired of downer endings. Yes, realistically most of us don’t get what we want. Our lives fall short of expectations and the dreams that we hold close to our hearts very rarely come to pass.
But there’s always a chance.
I have chosen to live my life as an optimist. It was hard to rewire my brain, but it was necessary. If I continued to embrace the glass-half-empty mentality of my youth, I would have given up a long time ago. Life can always get better. The world can change. People can change. People can make mistakes, pay terrible prices, but come out the other end having learned from their mistakes and be a slightly better person because of the experience.
Happy endings are not an impossibility. They are hard to achieve and they are almost never given to you without a shit-ton of hard work and sacrifice, but they exist. I no longer see happy endings in film, television, and literature as trite or cliche. I see them as aspirational, as a reminder that I shouldn’t give up or quit or crawl into a fetal position and never get out of bed.
I’m rooting for Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler because I’m also rooting for myself.