A Dialogue in Two Parts
PART 1: BEFORE THE END
Better Call Saul, on which you've been working for over almost a decade now, is the only prominent TV series that puts notions of behavioural economics at the very forefront.
If nothing else, we did have an entire episode that gets its title from the behavioural economics literature, episode 303, Sunk Costs. In the last scene of this episode Kim Wexler decides to help Jimmy with his misconduct charge and when Jimmy wonders why, she says: “Let’s just call it the fallacy of sunk costs.”
The fallacy of sunk costs refers to situations where people throw good money after bad – where they keep investing into doomed projects to which they feel committed for irrational reasons.
Exactly. We liked the layers of irony here, too—Kim knows what the fallacy is, and is aware of the risks she's taking and yet she still takes the dive. I'm not sure if that's irrational or counter-rational; is there a term for when you recognize an unconscious motivation in yourself and lean into it? Like Macbeth being told his tragic future and racing towards it …
Oh, that raises multiple deep questions from where I am coming from. In strategic situations, “games”, as we call them, where your actions impact on other peoples’ rational calculus—it can be rational to engage in the seemingly irrational if that sways your counterpart's behaviour in the desired direction. But that entails the idea here, if we want to resurrect Kim’s rationality, that she is foreseeing the future. Or at the very least, that she believes that her move might possibly alter the fundamentals.
I think she's playing the odds. She knows that she is making an investment into a very risky project but she wants to believe in it at this stage. She wants to believe in Jimmy. She wants the self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether that's rational or not, I don't know. Does the rationality of a decision in a game depend on the payoff?
Absolutely. The idea is that players maximize a weighted average of the possible payoffs, with the weights being determined by their expectations. Or, to put it differently, from an empirical stance, we would think that players’ actions reveal their underlying hidden payoffs. And when it comes to emotional things the payoffs can be huge, of course. So, you think that Kim thinks that she can sway Jimmy, because it’s after all a kind of a love story?
Hmm. Yes and no, I'd say. Sure, it’s a love story, but I think she knows that she might be making a mistake. Still, she wants to believe that it will all be okay. Yet, she is aware that at some time in the future, then in retrospect, it might very much look like the sunk cost fallacy. She has to gamble not that Jimmy can change—whether people truly change or their character is simply revealed is a major theme of both Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad—but that Jimmy is already the person she hopes he is. .
There is branch of game theory analyzing so-called “psychological games” where the players’ payoff is directly influenced by their beliefs. Just holding a certain belief might make them happy or sad. And when there is evidence that forces them to update their beliefs because they are no longer in line with reality, this can cause depression or joy.
If I have learned anything in the last five years, it's that belief is stronger than reality. Seems like we really can only see reality through our beliefs—Althusser got that right, at least. And Kim definitely gets something out of her sheer belief in Jimmy’s possible goodness and she just has to hope that their future is set and it comes out okay.
When you say “the future is set” there are two ways of reading this – as a denial of free will or a belief in some sort of equilibrium where things happen because of choice.
Well, the show embraces the idea of choice. It would be boring otherwise. Drama is about seeing people make choices when the stakes are high, right? But my understanding of 'tragedy' is that it troubles that idea. In tragedy, the future is set, and the characters struggle mightily against that fact, so all their choices are partial. They're phantasms; they look like choices until the end reveals there never was a choice at all. But if you play that too hard, like I say: very, very boring. Or deeply, absurdly depressing. Samuel Beckett territory.
Yep, to view your life as a TV show that somebody else created wouldn’t be easy to bear. So let’s look ahead at an undetermined future. Of course, we agreed that you wouldn’t spoil anything and we have, at the time of our discussion, still the last season to go—
If we actually manage to finish it!
I certainly hope you do! But at the end of season 4, when you came to the WZB and we started talking, Jimmy utters his “It’s all good man” phrase—the phrase which gives him his new name, Saul Goodman—as a moment signifying that Kim’s investment will go foul.
Since we talked in Berlin in 2019, season 5 also aired and I don't think it made Kim's bet on Jimmy look any better! Although I might argue that Jimmy's bet on Kim has never seemed stronger. All that said, it doesn't look good overall, no. Whether there's any coming back from it, any redemption—for either of them... remains to be seen.
It’s good that you mention redemption. American movies like to offer it for their characters but not so the Breaking Bad universe which hasn’t been very generous in bestowing redemption on its protagonists so far.
Perhaps with the exception of Jesse.
But is Jesse’s future in Alaska, that shines somewhat bright at the end of El Camino, proper redemption?
It's a good question. Does suffering expiate sin? Does doing good? Repentance? Recognition and profession of wrongdoing? I don't know. I feel like Jesse suffered, and I think he certainly knows he did bad, but I'm not sure he is washed of his sins. But it looks like he is getting away without paying the ultimate price: he lives to fight another day.
Redemption on earth, not necessarily in heaven.
That's interesting! Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't think of any mention of heaven in this universe. But Walt does tell Jesse that they're already doomed to hell for what they've done. So, there's no metaphysics of reward, only of punishment. It's a moral universe where people understand evil but struggle to grasp goodness. I think Jimmy especially is consumed by the wrong question about himself. He's so worried that he is bad, as an ontological condition, an ineluctable truth about himself—that he neglects to do good. I think all these factors make redemption feel like a fever dream. Or at least partial, temporal. Earthly, like you say. And if you can be redeemed on earth, you can also backslide into perdition; it's not a permanent state of being.
If I think about Kim, I hope for her sake you have a better outcome in store for her. The internet is rife with speculations that you will ultimately have to kill her off – basically because she doesn’t appear in Breaking Bad.
I, too, have heard those speculations! And we love that people are so invested. Of course, we try to remind fans she could have just left; she could have stayed and been just off screen the whole time; she could have been in prison! There's a whole world of possibilities, and death is a very narrow one. And not always a dramatic one, either. The dead are done with their conflicts. I wonder if there's some pull of nihilism in thinking that death is the only end that has a moral or emotional consequence.
Now you strike the Wagnerian chord in me!
Oh, I completely blame the Romantic tradition—and the Wagnerian impulse is perhaps the summit here—that intertwines love and death. And that makes death the best consummation for true lovers! I feel like all the internet commentators who angrily tell us not to "do anything" to Kim secretly yearn to have Jimmy sing his Liebestod over her body, and break all our hearts together.
And wouldn’t that be a nice task for Dave Porter to find a riff on the Liebestod for that scene …
It would have to be very hidden, very scrambled so not to be in your face. That motif has seen its fair share of use on the screen.
Vince Gilligan once said that, if there is another spin-off in the Breaking Bad universe it might center around Kim, so that gives some hope that we will be spared the tears.
Could be another prequel! "The Young Kim Chronicles!..."
Kim’s College Chronicles would have even more alliteration. I would love it! But you would have to find an actress who lives up to Rhea Seehorn’s Kim. Difficult one.
Yep, that would be a tough act to follow. And really, I think we all wish there was more wiggle room to see Kim in action, yet it feels like her story is bound up in Jimmy's. Then again Vince originally had the same impulse with Saul Goodman. This prequel turned out okay, I hope, so who knows?
The understatement of the year but let us get back to the role of behavioural economics, or more broadly, the role of deviations from rationality for story-telling. Aristotle demands in his Poetics a very strict form of consistency for the plot of a story – to quote: “… the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed.” To me this definition is very much in the same spirit as the definition of Nash equilibrium, which forms the foundation of modern game theory and economics – that every player must behave optimally given the actions of other players, because otherwise the “whole” will not make sense.
But aren’t you conflating plot consistency with individual rationality here? Nash equilibrium, as far as I understand, is about the implication of individual rationality for outcomes or plots, if you like, if everyone is rational and everyone knows that everyone is rational and everyone knows that everyone knows and so forth.
That is correct. It’s about the interplay of individual rationalities.
But then it strikes me that by equating Aristotle with Nash you demand more from plots than the Poetics. In fact, that's a conversation that is near-constant in the writers' room: who knows what, how do they know it, and do the other characters know that they know. It's truly epistemological quicksand. But when we start getting pulled in, usually the thing that pulls us out is to get out of the rational and go by "feel" as dramatists. So, it becomes less a knowledge question than one about finding the compelling action that fits—leaning more on the Unity of Action, perhaps, than that of Time or Place in Aristotelian terms.
“Feel” is an interesting notion where I would argue that evolution has hammered consistency into us. So “feel” might just mirror a demand on rational consistency and when I look at all the dramatic work that survived over decades and centuries it strikes me that epistemological consistency is a real plus, if not a necessary condition.
Italian opera aside.
Touche. Music changes things.
True. I often argue with people about whether lyrics matter in pop songs, because they're only a small fragment of how the emotion is conveyed—and really, the smallest, least compelling part in my opinion. The band Sigur Ros sings in a literally made-up language much of the time, but I find their songs deeply emotional. And I could take the argument one step further, and put it in more general terms: sound changes perception. It can seduce in a way that's distracting, subliminally or more directly.
And with Dave Porter you have a master of seduction on the team.
Indeed. Our whole sound team is filled with magicians. They weave these spells with soundwork that make you feel things as you watch, without necessarily knowing what's carrying the emotion. Dave's music of course stands out in that regard, but he's always careful to only score where we absolutely need it. If a scene stands on its own—"dry" as we say, meaning without music—he's the first to say we should play it dry. And I think you can trust the music more in that regard. It doesn't only show up when we have to fudge our inconsistencies, as sometimes happens elsewhere.
So back to Italian opera! But, in other genres I am reluctant to give up on the assumption of some basic form of rationality – in the sense of: people do things for a reason – because otherwise I’m hermeneutically in a dead end. Without some basic form of rationality I simply can’t interpret characters’ actions.
But you're a behavioural economist!
Yes, I am …
You should know way better than I do about all the inconsistencies in decision making.
I sort of do but where does this leave me when I try to understand the plot of a drama? I mean, as you know, I have been working on the interpretation of musical drama, specifically, Wagner, on the basis of simple rationality assumptions.
Perhaps looking for rationality in drama is a behavioural inconsistency in your own work.
I hope not a fatal one …
You know, there's a different line from Aristotle that I found that might be apt here. In the Poetics where Aristotle is describing what he demands of character, he writes that characters should be “consistent and the same throughout; even if inconsistency be part of the man (…) he should still be consistently inconsistent.”
That’s a good one that I didn’t remember. But I guess it’s key to understanding psychologically flawed characters such as Jimmy and Kim.
Jimmy wavers all the time between trying to do the right thing and seeking his advantage. And of course, trying to figure out why it is that there's a difference between those two impulses: why is his advantage not automatically "right?"
Phew. You’re really playing the economists’ game now. The whole traditional mainstream of our discipline, starting from Adam Smith, is built on the idea that the individual’s seeking of his own advantage leads to collectively good outcomes.
If there are markets, right? That's Smith's contention...
Yes, if there are many actors where the direct influence of one person’s decision on another’s well-being is negligible.
So, not in more intimate situations like in our show? Where people might actually find themselves in prisoners’ dilemma type situations.
Absolutely. Which, to me, suggests an interesting angle on Jimmy’s creeds. Maybe he just misunderstood Adam Smith …
I wouldn’t be surprised if he read the Wealth of Nations. It shows up on Stringer Bell's bookshelf in The Wire if I'm not mistaken. Maybe they have that in common.
That’s funny. But in any case, I guess, to refer to another well-documented behavioural phenomenon; he's doing everything he does a bit myopically, not thinking through all the possible consequences of his actions.
Very much so. Short-sighted and consistently inconsistent.
Which is why in one moment we see him trying to screw his brother, Chuck, and in the next, rescuing him.
Until he can’t anymore.
Until he can’t. Because Chuck goes up in flames. That’s a horrible moment and when I re-watched the first four seasons before your visit to Berlin it struck me as a key moment for Jimmy’s development: when the one crucial force for good in his life, his brotherly love, disappears—when Chuck dies, he loses all his empathy and becomes Saul Goodman.
Consistently inconsistent. Although I might say what and who "Saul Goodman" is—his essence—is very tricky for us to define. We've thought he'd "be" Saul Goodman numerous times, and every time it turns out that even if he adds another part of the persona, it doesn't go all the way to the core. Maybe there is no core to Saul Goodman. It could be that Saul is all mask. Or he's an asymptote of a persona—you can only approach being Saul, but never actually achieve being Saul.
I’m tempted to replace “Saul” with “soul” in what you said. You can only ever approach having a soul, but never actually achieve having one.
Yes! Which either sounds again like nihilism, or some blighted strain of misanthropy. Or if you're thinking more optimistically, it's like existentialism, where your soul isn't a thing that's issued to you before you exist, but comes from all your struggles and the choices you make. However, that doesn't really work if you're chasing an essential self/soul. Maybe that's a layer of the tragedy for Jimmy—he mistakes his own soul as a thing he can claim, and it's always receding away from him. He's Tantalus, and the grapes are the self...
Game theorists have tried to model such dual-self problems – with one person being governed by two decision makers, one that is smartly looking forward, and one that is looking just for immediate gains.
I think I remember something like that in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow?
Yes, he is one of the fathers of that model of human behaviour.
But with Jimmy it’s not just about the short versus the long run, it’s also about morals.
Aren’t they intertwined?
Maybe so. I wonder if there's a duration to a moral act. Like we were saying earlier, there's a question about when an act becomes moral, or is revealed as moral. I wonder if morality has an expiration date, if something that was good or ethical stays so forever... So I guess I'm talking myself around to your point. There's a tension between those frameworks. Like in Season 5.
You’re talking now about Jimmy or Kim?
About both of them. Jimmy’s concerns at the very end of Season 5 are very much long run. Kim can pitch that there's a "good" that comes from screwing Howard, but Jimmy's still trying to figure out if he's good or bad for Kim—and on what time scale. If he's good for her now, does that mean he's not having long-term ill effects? And that she's not having long-term ill-effects on him, for that matter. There's that strange give-and-take that happens when you're in a relationship that almost makes the relationship its own, separate third party—and I might argue that one big question is what their relationship is doing to them both as separate entities. Like the distinction between a corporation and its members, and the culpability that applies to both.
Dilution of responsibility looms large in organizations or any type of groups. Individuals like to hide behind others’ majority actions.
For sure. But here everyone is pivotal, after all it’s just about two players, so to speak, Kim and Jimmy. There's nowhere to hide, except behind themselves.
But are you saying that when they look at possible consequences of their actions they take into account the judgement of that third illusive party – the two of them?
Not in a conscious way, perhaps, but I can't help but think they feel that shadow on them, on their decisions, especially the deeper they get with one another.
This might be modelled in psychological game theory as a payoff that depends on the possible overlap of beliefs of the intertwined individuals. But I don’t believe anybody has ever examined models like this.
I like that! Let's say it's that.
I promise to think about how one can model this mathematically. How the entity of a “couple” can affect both its members. I like the question.
Oh, then I'm glad this conversation came up with something new to you! You hadn't considered that question before?
No, I didn’t. But that’s the heritage of 20th century economics. Where everything has to have its roots in the individual.
Sure. And if an individual is complex, two individuals in relation are nearly too complex to consider. Which is lucky for me, since that's how drama keeps refreshing itself. But you think you can resolve the problem mathematically?
I think I can. I mean couples only exist as two individuals and everything that makes them a couple is bound up in what one believes about the other and what they believe about the other’s beliefs and so on. This can be modelled by psychological game theory. Your intriguing suggestion here is that “the existence of a couple” might impose restrictions on what type of beliefs the two can hold over each other.
In an equilibrium model?
That would be the starting point but an equilibrium would require that beliefs are correct …
But arent’t we then back at square one? Where you aren’t quite sure that equilibrium analysis helps in this sort of dramatic situation? Because actions and beliefs of all players might not match up perfectly?
You are pushing me. But, yes, I have to admit that I feel uncertain about this. And, to make things worse, let me confess that I feel the same kind of uncertainty with many applied equilibrium models and their empirical specifications in my field.
You mean, to pick something something I think you've mentioned in our conversations before, like in merger analyses or some such. Do I have that right?
Yes, indeed. And as you mention mergers I am guilty as charged. After all I have written a paper that shows how firms that used to maximize profits behave differently after a merger occurs.
Really, that's fascinating. So there's not consistency of the players' behavior across that disjunction? I would've expected that to be pretty stable...
No, not in our data.
But then why assume consistency in the players of our show?
You're really putting me through my paces!
No, no, I'm just curious!
Ok, so maybe equilibrium is too much. As you said earlier, with equilibrium there are no surprsises. But I’m not willing to give up on hermeneutics that require some sort of an actor’s will.
Of course not—what German thinker worth their salt would ever give up on the will? (Sorry, I couldn't resist). But really, in the writers' room, we work closer to what you're describing anyway. We know we need to be consistent to a degree and that's non-negotiable. But we also know that there are tolerances within the system to inconsistencies, which we can exploit for entertainment. Or, as one of my bosses puts it, we have to navigate between two extremes: confusion for the audience on one side, and boredom on the other.
Phew. You had me to the back the wall. I feel like a gamer who has lost a life but has one left to continue the game.
Ha! All right. Let's put that life to good use...
Yes. Let’s go back to where we were with Jimmy and Kim. When I watched Season 5, I felt strangely redeemed myself. It had been sort of my pet theory about your show that it was about the impossibility to do good in the real world. There was Jimmy, always torn, but always, in the end, going for the right thing, like not letting Chuck die or trying to make things good with Irene. But then the end of Season 4 came with its “It’s all good, man.”
But nothing is ever definitive! Not over till the fat lady sings, as they say, bringing it back to opera...
Because we’re making choices.
Again and again. Although for us, as we're wrapping this discussion, the fat lady is warming up her voice for the final season.
Yes, so here at the end of the last-but-one season, the theme of characters being morally torn is suddenly doubled when Kim turns, how shall I put this, evil?
Evil, I don’t know. Dark, for sure. Maybe with a little of Jimmy's decadence in her. All the way back to episode 201, we've seen Kim very much enjoy taking part in Jimmy’s shenanigans. She’s always been morally ambiguous, as well.
I do remember that, of course, but, compared to Jimmy, she’s always been, well, a beacon of morality.
Compared to him, sure. You're right. But I assume that you are not suggesting that morality is purely relative? I don't mean to split hairs, though. You're right, that is a big turn. And it catches Jimmy flatfooted! We'll have to see what fruit it bears. All I can say at the moment is that I promise we have thought long and hard and then long and hard again about what that means for Kim, Jimmy and the moral course of the show.
You’re teasing me. And I guess it will be hard to stay with this nicely defined black-and-white reading of Jimmy and Kim.
Sounds like you could use a rewatch of Breaking Bad?
You are funny, Gordon.
I'm just saying, you know this is the sort of moral game that these shows play. I always say that nuance is our biggest special effect! And you clearly pay attention to our nuances.
I do. At the same time I have to admit that I have always been a rather naïve viewer of movies and TV shows, easily fooled.
Hmm. I wonder why. Would you say you prefer narratives with unambiguous narratives? Or at least, that portray worlds without ambiguities?
Would be easier. But maybe I’m just enjoying being constantly surprised. Forming simple expectations and getting screwed.
Because the actual world is so ambiguous! You've made a whole career out of trying to understand that rift inside humanity—between the rational and the irrational. And it's a pretty big rift, full of ambiguity. Even if the world was straightforward, drama would be boring without ambiguity. To bastardize Voltaire a little, if there was no Satan making things messy, dramatists would have to invent him.
I guess social scientists in general struggle with the notion of ambiguity or true uncertainty where it’s impossible to assign subjective probabilities to possible states. Maybe there are states that you just didn’t deem possible. But then they happen. Brexit. Trump. Covid.
If we tell a story where you can predict everything you'd find it boring. And if we tell a story where you can’t predict anything you'd find it preposterous. I think viewers who can maintain a certain naïveté are in a better position to enjoy the work—it keeps them from sliding into a facile cynicism. Like, the kind you find where people only look for greater and greater "twists" from the narrative, greater shocks and surprises, whether those make sense or not.
Sheer randomness is hard to fathom.
And boring as well. I'm put in mind of aleatory composers like Xenakis or Cage, who would use randomness to generate raw musical material, but then they would also shape it, using their human aesthetics—they'd bring some order to the chaos. Even the most ambiguous narratives have some kind of structure—I'm thinking of Surrealism here, which seems to me about as far as you can go narratively without crossing over into pure abstraction. Or at least, where the structure is amorphous, there's a visceral, emotional response that positions the audience in a certain way. Good drama mines those productive ambiguities – to generate the possibility of suspense and surprise.
Which is limited in a prequel, isn’t it? I mean in terms of your degrees of freedom for telling Jimmy’s story you face very tight bounds because of the very nature of BCS. We know, after all, in many dimensions where this is going to end.
In some ways, yes. It's been that way from the very beginning of BCS—a really tight constraint that gets tighter and tighter as we’re nearing the end. This has also huge consequences for the production design, costuming... all the visual components. We have to make sure, after all, that when things start to converge, they look the same – we also need a visual consistency aligning the end of BCS with the beginning of Breaking Bad. Or, we need to do our best!
You faced a similar challenge when you were shooting El Camino, the Jesse sequel to Breaking Bad.
It cost our crew some long days and a lot of sweat to make some of those strategies work!
Which are nicely documented in the Making of.
Yes, I recommend watching it.
One of the big treats of the Making of is that one can see how the marvelous destruction scene is done. But, crucially, there is nothing that the creators give away, and I don’t mean spoilers. Of course, there won’t be spoilers but I guess there is always the temptation to give some hints for interpretation. Which really spoils the integrity of a story.
Or becomes a part of it. Vince Gilligan sometimes says that it's our job to make the show, and it’s the audience's job to interpret it, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. But then some of those interpretations become inseparable from the work, like you say.
Which could be an interesting concept for a series – composed of scenes from the story and scenes from the writers’ room.
Very Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. Or Pirandello's characters looking for their author...
Where the characters meet with the author to discuss the story.
That could be a cool concept for a TV show—I don't think I've ever seen that!
I haven’t seen anything like it – could be a cool pitch with the right kind of plot and characters.
Unreal has an element of this where we see the behind-the-scenes of a reality program, but I feel like that's more like an unveiling of the truth of the construction of the "real." Something more like Baudrillard's sense that every act and action is mediated these days.
Yes, like a meta-version of Flann O’Brien as both characters in the TV drama and their creators are “real”.
Unreal is definitely one of the most epistemologically complex shows around. It’s fun to keep track of what the characters know about each other and about their makers and what everything knows about the knowledges of the others and what everybody knows about that knowledge. But I think the Flann O'Brien version could be great. Perhaps literally with him as the central author character—especially when you wonder, is he Flann O'Brien, Myles Na'Copaleen or Brian O'Nolan? Which name is the real author? Which voice is the true person? Or the representation of the true person? Maybe it's not so far off from our universe with its Saul and Jimmy and Gene—different faces, different voices, different men... but bound together by one story.
Please, please, go ahead with a pitch for this!
It’s good to know that there would be an interested viewer for it! If nothing else, I think the world is finally ready to see the glamorous life of the writers room in hideous detail: a bunch of schlubby folks sitting around, badly dressed, talking for hours in a room. Or now, on Zoom. TV "authorship" is so far from the Romantic vision of The Author, I think people would be genuinely shocked. For all of season six, I was literally standing in my kitchen to do the work!
In our work about Wagner we have sometimes been criticized for not accounting for the author’s intentions. In a first step we always took the action on stage or perhaps rather in the libretto at face value.
Always trying to get rid of the author, aren't you!
Not completely, we did try to cite the author’s thinking in support of our interpretations.
But the author is not an actor in your work?
At most a very passive one.
So you don't think that the author pulls all the strings in a drama?
Not after the work is finished. Then he is out.
That's interesting. I wonder how you feel about the distinction between filmed drama and staged. In TV in the U.S., the writer often takes a very active hand throughout production. That feels very different from something like Brecht or Chekhov, where the text is a sort of template of action and character that gets re-examined—and refreshed—with new productions. Or are you focusing more on the interpretation of the text, whether it's filmed or staged?
You might not have intended it but you are really hitting a nerve with this. My whole more academic engagement with TV shows goes back to my interaction with the late and great Sir Peter Jonas with whom we had Vince on stage at the WZB in 2013. Peter had been, no question, the world’s most important opera intendant and his mantra was that new productions of old operas had to be a form of, I quote, “rape”, that is they had to violate the author in some way to be justified. So, from my hermeneutic perspective, I would say, hey, what can you do. Once it’s out it’s no longer the author’s. If the author wants himself present, he has to do the Flann O’Brien move.
But still, doesn't it give a bit too much agency to the audience to say that we can ignore the author if he doesn’t show up in person in a play; but have to acknowledge him when he or she has has a role on stage. Wouldn't the character of the author be equally compromised as a representation? Maybe even more so! I for one am not sure I have the ability to present a version of myself that's accurate—I'm not really convinced anyone does. A character based on me, written by me, would be a copy of a copy of a copy of a version I tried to make for some specific reason ...
And whatever the latest copy, a German theatre director would somehow invert it. So, my take is, when it comes to interpretation, as viewers we can only try to interpret what we actually see/read/hear. Neither do we have to resort to the original (by saying but the author intended something else) nor do we have to do engage in the meta multiverses of possible alternative stagings. And when it comes down to it, I imagine the original works, the plays in writing, TV shows in their first incarnation, or other works surviving, while biographical details get lost. We have this situation with Homer or the architects of the Pyramids.
Good examples but I wonder if a real, "true" reading of such works would account for the author/maker.
Conceded.
But then, maybe truth is beyond us as beings. Maybe the true is to hard. It feels like a thing that would crush us if we could touch it. But backing up, is your feeling now that for any good interpretation you want to refer to the author’s intentions?
Ok, fine, so tell me about the last season of BCS.
Ha! You know, when you talk about the author and television—at least, American TV in most of the incarnations I know—that question of "intent" becomes so hard to pin down. For example, I have a role as a writer in the room, pitching story ideas. I have a role as a writer of the episode to take whatever the showrunners have landed on for the story and commit it to the page. But then, that's just one stage of the production—the director, producers, cinematographer... all the departments put their fingerprints on the final product. And that's not even including the actors! Someone asked me once if the final image of episode 305 after Chuck's breakdown on the stand was in the script, and I had a hard time answering that question. Because the "exit sign" is absolutely called out there, but the composition of that shot—and how it lands in the cut—that's the result of the work of Dan Sackheim, who directed, and Marshall our DP, and Skip, our editor, and the sound team found the perfect buzz for it. For that matter, I think we needed to build that sign so that we could adjust it to camera. Anyway, I could be more exhaustive, but my point is just: where is the intent? Whose intent? It's such a synthesis of different arts and artistic visions, so it gets slippery to ask "who made this? And what did they have in mind?"
Dissecting what you are saying there are two aspects – the role of teams and the possibility that even a single author might not be easily be captured by the ideal notion of the one – ever consistent – genius.
Yes, please, let's say goodbye to auteur theory! It's been the justification for so much bad behavior in the business, essentially letting those dubbed "geniuses" off the hook because they're justified by their genius. But I'm digressing. Back to the final season: all I can say is, I hope that our team brings the story to a close in a way that's satisfying. I think there are a lot of narrative lines that we've been drawing that will become much clearer once everything is out there. In a lot of ways, season six is the wildest one we've done, so I'll be interested to hear how it works for you. Hopefully it does!
PART 2: AFTER THE END
So, there's been a break here, during which the final season has aired, and now we can perhaps reflect on some of earlier conversation, and put it up against what we learned in those final episodes.
By all means.
The gap has mostly been my fault, I know—just putting in the work on the final season during the COVID era took a lot. But now I'm ready to mull it over! One thing I keep thinking about endings is one of Nietszche's aphorisms—and I'm paraphrasing here—that the purpose of a melody is not its ending, and yet if a melody has not reached its end, then its meaning can't be seen. I wonder if you think the meaning of Saul is something that became clearer to you now in the light of the ending.
Oh my god, the meaning question! I have always been thinking that if it’s possible to sum up the essence of a piece of art by spelling out its meaning – that the art has failed then. Why bother with the complications of verse or the subtlety of the brush strokes if it all can be said in mere prose? I have thirty-year old notes for an essay I wanted to write about this and I had a title for it: Theorie der Lyrik. So, let me just say, for now, that I am not falling into your trap.
You think I'm more of a trickster than I am. No traps here!
I know that, of course, but I did want to make sure that nobody who digests our conversation leaves confused about what we mean by interpretation. We can interpret a scene by delving into the micro-motives of a character or the allusions implied by some scenery or prop but never can interpretation be a substitute for the work itself – its final meaning will always be between its creator or, in the case of TV, its creators and the singular viewer.
Totally. I'm absolutely willing to concede your point. Far be it from me to argue for Interpretation with a capital "I"—the one, the true, the Meaning that blots out the text. I was weaned on post-modernism like the rest of us! But let me rephrase—cautiously—did aspects of your interpretation change or become clearer in the light of the ending of the show?
That’s a very difficult question, Gordon.
Great! That means you'll have a smart answer.
SH I'm struck by how much is left unresolved at the ending of the show. As if the melody is still hanging in the air like an unresolved Tristan chord. Only that, in contrast to Wagner, you don’t make the choice between total annihilation and a Liebestod. Something is left hanging.
SH I'm struck by how much is left unresolved at the ending of the show. As if the melody is still hanging in the air like an unresolved Tristan chord. Only that, in contrast to Wagner, you don’t make the choice between total annihilation and a Liebestod. Something is left hanging.
I'm not half the Wagnerian you are, but I'll consider that the impossibility of a non-Wagnerian ending, yes. And such non-Wagnerian endings become just another edge where the work meets the world.
The actual world where a Liebestod remains a fantasy.
I like the way that sounds, yes.
So, we have to talk about possible endings that are satisfying for an audience and are not Wagnerian?
I can try! But first, maybe we talk about Better Call Saul.
Fair enough.
Have you been secretly hoping for a Wagnerian ending?
I might have been.
And were you disappointed?
I was not.
Really? Pinky swear?
No, I was not, Gordon, pinky swear.
So you had the sense of a true ending? Despite what you were saying about the absence of a Liebestod?
I did. In any case, true endings, it seems to me, can only exist for specific characters or story lines. These might involve surprise but will only be satisfying if there was an ex post credible path to them. They have to be in the support of some kind of equilibrium distribution …
You can always out-math me, Steffen! But if I understand the gist of what you're saying, it's that there's a tension between the Ending, with a capital E, and all the smaller endings that lead up to it, all the pieces of endings that make up the final end.
That’s nicely put. But to be more precise, what strikes me is the question of what different types of unresolved questions might exist that can persist after an ending. A cliffhanger is not an ending. But why? Because either something fundamental about the fate of a character or the mechanics of a plot remain unresolved. This is sort of obvious but leads analytically to the question what “fundamental” means for the fate of characters or the mechanics of a plot
I see what you're saying. I would say that for us, we had a series of endings in our final season. In fact, we just kept on ending. Our first victim was Nacho, whose story found its end in episode 603. Then Howard Hamlin found his ending, then Lalo. And all of those were fatalities. But then, before any more death could come along, we essentially ended the main body of our story in episode 609 with the end of Jimmy and Kim's relationship.
But you could consider the death of their relationship a fatality as well
Very true! It's a character, and its end is truly the death knell for Jimmy McGill. There's only the shell of Saul left.
But I would say that all of those endings reveal an important truth, either about the nature or future of a character or about the how, who, why, or when.
Yes. Even if there's a residue left, an uncertainty, there's a truth. And in the final moments, hopefully there's another truth revealed about Jimmy and Kim and what their relationship meant.
I agree and I might offer this proposition: endings that leave questions open to the how, who, why and, when can only be satisfying if they leave no ambiguity with regards to the fate of the central characters. Also, the space of possibilities regarding can’t be too large. I would say if there are more than two or perhaps three possibilities it’s no fun.
Oh no! Would that mean we left too much ambiguity for satisfaction? Are you really now re-iterating your advocacy for satisfying endings requiring a Liebestod or at least some form of death? There aren't any more questions open then …
Ok, now, I have to say: touché! So, on second thought, maybe there's a place for ambiguity going beyond my proposition. But I do worry about the viewer. It might be hard to tell whether an ending with lots ambiguity is challenging or lazy. And clearly that is situation that the story teller might wish to avoid.
True. But I wonder if that's a risk a storyteller has to take, sometimes. Or you know, as I think about it more, I think I might offer an alternate hypothesis: an ending can have ambiguity, as long as the central characters' change has resolved. Other givens can be in the air—will Jimmy and Kim see each other again?—but only if we understand that the change from one state to another is complete. That's when the melody is over and you understand its meaning. Am I making any sense?
You are. The listener knows the next note or is fairly certain of it … So, you're saying endings that leave open the truth about the nature or fate of a central character must be constructed in a way that allows the viewer to come to her own conclusion on what comes next, the unheard note that does resound nevertheless — on the balance of evidence …
Something like that, yes. The audience can extrapolate about the ending-beyond-the-end as long as the character's arc is pointing in a clear direction.
Yes, but there must be sufficient clarity. If an ending leaves open the fate of a character the possibilities can’t be too extreme, otherwise we are in the realm of the cliffhanger, no?
That's fair and interesting to me, because a lot of our fans read the ending of Saul as a cliffhanger, or that there was ambiguity as to what the final moments between the characters meant. Specifically, they thought there was ambiguity about how they felt about one another, and more importantly what they were going to do about it in the future, after the end point of the show. I'm not going to correct them, but I will say that we in the writers’ room felt there was not ambiguity.
That’s intriguing. Neither ambiguity about your characters’ nature, say, their guilt or their acknowledgment of knowledge of guilt, nor about their fate, say, their sheer survival?
You know, we absolutely talked about guilt, and even more, its expiation. I had a little note at my work station with the word "atonement" written on it. Just to remind me that it's not just punishment or guilt that mattered for our journey, but whether there was redemption. When you're telling certain kinds of moral stories, I think, you have to suspend certain kinds of judgement. Are they guilty? Are they good? I think I'd rather think of guilt and goodness as states a character can move through, not absolutes.
That’s a fascinating notion. So perhaps a good ending should leave not too much room for ambiguity but can have some, and if there is a space open for the fate of the character, then keep the space of possibilities more fluid excluding that both, the best and the worst, are still permissible: she might die or suffer; or she might survive and either thrive or get by; but we don’t want the full range from dying to thriving.
Yes, that's where too much possibility, becomes not enough ending-ness. The melody hasn't ended. The melody is meaningless
We have to understand its motion. We have to be able to anticipate in a meaningful way …
That’s what I’m saying.
It strikes me that this brings up an interesting distinction: the difference between the ending of a story and stories just stopping.
Very good point, one dramatized quite distinctly by shows that get canceled and leave the story open. They've stopped, but it's hard to say they've ended, per se.
Being a mere viewer I have often wondered about that. Wouldn’t you always want to construct the end of your current season such that it could stand as one with a proper ending if the show was cancelled? Of course, for you guys that was probably never a real issue as the show was so successful such that you always knew that you could dictate its future. But, in particular, for first seasons where the economics of it all remains unclear until after the airing of the final episode that question must be on the story-tellers’ mind
You're right, we were in a privileged position to figure out when and how to end the series. The trick of it is, let's say you wrap up your show pretty well at the end of a season—you leave the minimum amount of dangling threads. Now it's easy for the studio/network to cancel you. Why not? No one will mind—you've wrapped up the story! I think the balance is to make an end of a season that brings to a conclusion some part of the plot but not the story. In season 4, for example, the death of Werner Ziegler wraps up a big piece of the plot, but it doesn't end Lalo's quest to get at Gus. So there's a conclusion, but it resolves only a part. I think of course of the end of a movement in a concerto. Or for that matter, the end of a song on an album (if the album is the kind that has a consistency, like OK Computer or The Black Parade). There's no good way to get canceled, though. Your creative control goes away.
What about if a show gets canceled mid-season? Couldn't it be a blessing in disguise? Studio 60 comes to mind. Otherwise, if you are not Vince Gilligan, you have to seek season endings that could be sort-of real endings …
Hmm. I see what you're saying. You don't feel the pressure to "end" because as far as you're concerned, you're not ending. You can let all the threads dangle. You don't need to chase phantom endings. To me it feels like the difference between being shot in the face and shot from behind.
That's rather gory!
Yes, sorry. I just mean: do you want to see your own end coming? To what extent is ignorance of an end still blissful?
Now I get it. I often thought about this myself, I mean, for me, personally, and I tended to think let’s be shot from behind. But a few months ago a friend of mine was arguing differently. He said, you want to know that it’s happening and you want to experience it. Because that singular experience will be the biggest and most profound in all your life. But we shouldn’t get sidetracked. So, let’s go back to the difference between a stopping and an ending. On the surface of it, stopping and ending appear almost synonymous but I guess everybody would feel that they differ in terms of an audience's beliefs about what might come next—with endings generating a subset of the future possibilities that arise after a mere stopping.
That sounds good on the surface. But I think that a good ending, paradoxically, generates more possibilities. It evokes an "after," in a way that stopping simply doesn't.
I have to think about that. So, you are saying that a stopping means that it’s easy for the viewer to tell what’s next because it’s somehow trivial while an ending implies that the viewer has keep thinking?
Not really. if you stop, then there are, in effect, infinite potential endings that will never come to be. So it's either too simple or it's too complex to be satisfying if you just stop.There is not much point in thinking about the possibilities and it that sense there just aren’t any. With an ending that’s different. It shows you how to extrapolate. So, yes, there are fewer possibilities but more possibilities that can be examined, that are worth your thoughts.
Which is why cliffhangers don’t work as an ending.
They do not. An indeterminate ending, sure—Butch and Sundance may not die before your eyes, but the ending is not uncertain. In a way, the cliffhanger is pretty binary—and therefore there's not much to think about. The hero falls from the cliff or she doesn’t. That’s fifty-fifty, the toss of a coin. Again, not much to think about.
I like that. With a Wagnerian ending there is nothing to think about, we can just revel in its beauty. But we don’t have to engage in reasoning. No cognition required. And the same if there is too much ambiguity, a stopping or a cliffhanger, in either case it’s not worth to imagine the future. It’s just too uncertain or, as you say, a trivial coin toss. Thanks. I’m getting it now. There are more possibilities to think about with non-Wagnerian but yet proper endings …
I'm glad you're finding an alternative to Wagner!
I don't know that I would go that far. But can I ask another question then. Are you saying that the ambiguity left about the future, about the story after its told end, must rest in the characters’ free will? His preferences and abilities to make a conscious choice?
I wasn't thinking about it in those terms, but yes, I see what you're saying. Maybe that's one reason to really emphasize the clarity of a character’s arc. If the change is not complete, there will be too much uncertainty about what a character wants, his or her internal makeup. But if the arc points in a clear direction, the viewer has all the ingredients that are necessary to picture plausible futures. Schrödinger’s cat simply can’t live in that state forever.
The poor cat. Eventually it will be dead! So, let me try to summarize. You are essentially saying that satisfying endings are either Wagnerian or involve a clear sense of the main characters’ free will by which they will make the next important choices but that, at the same time, we have learned enough about the characters’ mental and moral changes to be able to predict what will happen next with some sufficient certainty?
That's an interesting formulation! It has a good German precision to it. But, yes, there has to be some sense of what the characters will do next, predicted by the arc of change
Such that we are left with a set of possibilities for what may happen after the end—shrunken by that arc – a set we can fathom and contemplate about, that invites us to analytical thought.
Yes. And now I feel like you're inventing the calculus of character. The area under the curve for the function of the character... But if it's done right, it should be simple. Or it should feel simple to the audience. They don't want to see the mechanism. If they glimpse the machinery, fine, but if it's just clanking away, the whole thing feels... rote, dead. Mechanical. The viewer has to understand the characters’ development. She has to empathize with them such that she feels confident in her understanding of what drives them at the end. But not consciously. She should feel it more than understand it. The change from one state to another in the character should resonate with her.
That’s an important qualification to my earlier summary stressing the cognitive side. Essentially it looks like you are saying that the understanding must be driven by empathy. Which, of course, makes your non-Wagnerian ending ever so slightly more Wagnerian.
Yes. If a show fails to generate empathy, it just fails.
I am wondering how the question of shrinking the set of possibilities drove your decisions for the BCS ending in the writers’ room.
My oh my, that's a hard one to answer. As we approached our ending, we certainly felt that there were paths not taken that suddenly became paths we could never take, and that was sad but necessary. You can do many things at any given point, but you can't do all things at any given point. You have to "kill your darlings" as Faulkner and others have put it—let go of good ideas for better ones.
Leaving those open that were consistent with Jimmy’s and Kim’s arcs.
Yes. As many as made sense. We explored a few, but there weren't many endpoints that really tracked.
And you were just left with few enough to say it wasan end and not a stop … And it’s not for us and certainly not for you to describe those. It’s the viewer who has to make up her mind …
Yes and I guess we are, here, approaching either an end or stop a of our conversation, too.
How meta!
I know, I know. I hesitated to even mention it. But now I'm wondering: will we come to an ending? Or simply a stopping? What would an ending mean for a conversation like this?
I suppose if we consider ourselves characters, then we could determine if our fates were open or closed...
Now my brain is officially broken! I suppose at some point, if the melody stops, then it's up to the audience to determine if it has ended or if they just can't hear it anymore.
Maybe the music is just playing in another room...
I like that. I hope it is.