Breaking Bad, "ABQ": Seven thirty-seven coming out of the sky

Spoilers for the "Breaking Bad" season two finale coming up just as soon as I underwrite a fun run...

"If I tell you the truth, will you stay? Stay, and I will tell you everything." -Walt
"Whatever it is, I'm afraid to know." -Skyler

I was half-tempted to eschew a finale review altogether and just post my lengthy season post-mortem interview with Vince Gilligan. As it is, I strongly suggest you start reading that first, because Vince and I talk for a while about the meaning of that final scene, how they tried to tease it out over the course of the season (starting with the titles of all the episodes featuring the teddy bear flash-forward, which combined spell out "Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ"), whether Vince feels they've played fair with the audience, etc. So go read that -- at least through the part where Vince says we shouldn't expect Walt to get crushed to death by a falling jet engine -- and I'll wait.

You're back? Good.

Now, given all the speculation about the cartel coming to get revenge on Heisenberg and/or or Gus Frings taking out an unreliable element, about which combination of characters would be in the body bags on the driveway, who the teddy bear belongs to, etc., I imagine some of you will feel disappointed, if not outright mad, to find that none of your guesses were right -- and that all of this seems the result of an act of God.

But as Vince talks about, and as the finale makes clear, if it's an act of God, it's the act of a vengeful God who wants to make "a cosmic indictment of Walt's life choices of late." Walt has brought this on himself, not just in terms of karma, but in terms of setting in motion the chain of events that led to this crash. Walt recruited Jesse as his partner, which led to Jesse losing his grandmother's house, which led to him moving in next door to Jane. Walt is the one who pressured Jesse to expand their operation, which led to Combo's death, which led to Jesse luring Jane off the wagon, and in turn to Jane introducing Jesse to heroin. Walt is the one who, in trying to shake Jesse awake, caused Jane to roll over onto her back before she began to vomit, and he's the one who declined to save her life when given the opportunity, which in turn led to Jane's father being too consumed by grief to properly do his job as an air-traffic controller...

... which led to those two planes colliding more or less directly above Walt's pool.

This is on Walt's head, every last bit of it, and so it feels right for fiery judgment to be rained down on that head.

Walt will likely never truly understand how he caused this particular catastrophe, but after the events of this finale -- after Jesse beats himself up for a death that Walt knows is really his fault, after Skyler confronts him about all she's learned (and all she doesn't want to learn) about his double life and orders him out of their house and out of his family's life -- you have to think that even Walter White, the king of denial, would be able to recognize some of the pain he's unleashed on the world.

You can see some of that recognition earlier in "ABQ," in that wonderfully squirmy scene where the TV news crew comes to film the feature on Flynn and SaveWalterWhite.com(*). Walt already hates all of this: the attention, as well as the realization that these reports will lead to actual donations from strangers, as opposed to the money-laundering operation Saul Goodman set up. But as Flynn begins to extol his father's virtues in the kind of hero-worship language every dad hopes to hear from his kids -- "He's just decent, and he always does the right thing, and that's how he teaches me to be." -- you can see how much it pains Walt, who at least has the clarity to recognize that he's not decent, that he's doing a whole lot of wrong things, and that over the course of this season (notably during the tequila incident in "Over"), he's been teaching Flynn all sorts of bad ways to be. Just a brilliant acting moment, in an episode -- and a season -- full of them for Bryan Cranston.

(*) As many people pointed out last week, the site went live after the episode aired, and actually funnels its donations to the National Cancer Coalition. Nicely-done, "Breaking Bad" people.

Just as amazing with their own showcase moments were Anna Gunn and Aaron Paul, who both got to do a lot with volume. Paul got to be big and loud and anguished at the shooting gallery, and then quiet and empty and haunting at the chi-chi rehab facility, and the quieter Gunn got in the scene where Skyler confronted Walt, the scarier and more focused her anger became.

Again, Walt's not in danger of being killed by an airplane -- I can't see the show transforming halfway through its run into a buddy cop show about a DEA agent who bottles his own beer and the sidekick who reluctantly puts up with his ethnic barbs -- but Walt finds himself in a bad place going into next season. And based on the genius that was apparent throughout this year, I can't wait for more.

Some other thoughts on "ABQ":

• Speaking of ol' Hank, he continues to be much smarter than any of us wanted to give him credit for at the start of the series. He knows Jimmy isn't Heisenberg, and sooner or later he's going to find the blue meth in another town, and maybe find a way to trace it all the way back to Gus Frings -- that is, assuming Gus the genius isn't constantly paying visits to the Albuquerque field office to go over the details of that fun run. I was alarmed when Gus got a look at Walt's picture on the cancer fund kitty, but as Vince astutely points out in our interview, a guy as clever and careful as Gus would have known Walt's brother-in-law was in the DEA a long time ago. At most, he now knows about Walt's cancer -- which, for now, seems to be a non-factor.

• And speaking of that photo, I thought it was a lovely touch by director Adam Bernstein to first show Hank holding it right in front of the Wanted posters at the field office -- which is exactly where Walt's picture should belong.

• Great casting, as usual, on both the big parts, like Jonathan Banks from "Wiseguy" as Saul's jaded investigator/fixer, and on the extras, like the bald guy Walt bumps into -- basically a shrunken, skin-and-bones funhouse mirror image of Walt himself -- while entering the shooting gallery to look for Jesse.

• Straw poll: do you want Walt's goatee to stay, or would you rather he go back to the dead caterpillar mustache? Either way, I thought the Van Dyke was a clever way to illustrate how much time had passed since the surgery -- the first notable time jump since the series began.

• The song playing over the surgery montage was "Life," by Chocolate Genius.

Well, that's it for another season of "Breaking Bad." I imagine we won't see the show back again until early 2010. I look forward to watching, and talking about it with you all.

What did everybody else think?

Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan post-mortems season two

As we come to the end of "Breaking Bad" season two, it's time to talk to series creator Vince Gilligan about the implications of the teddy bear, the journey Walt has taken, and how much longer Vince sees the story going. (My review of the finale is here.) Spoilers coming up immediately, so click through carefully...

I want to start with the ending, with the planes colliding over Walt's house. When I saw that the season premiere was called "Seven Thirty-Seven," my initial thought was, "Well, this must have something to do with an airliner." And then instead it turns out to be the amount he thinks he needs to leave behind for Skyler. But now we have an actual 737, or something like it, crashing in Walt's backyard. Was that intentional?

Yes it is. And you are the first person to make that connection. Not only that, but if you look at the names of all the episodes, in particular the episodes that have the strange black and white teaser, they spell out a hidden message.

What's that?

Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ.

Wow. That's cool.

We came up with the number $737,000 dollars, then we reverse-engineered the math. And then the next episode where you have the same black and white teaser, it was called "Down."

When I saw "Over," I just assumed the title referred to Walt assuming his career as a drug dealer was over.

We worked very hard to give them proper dual meanings. So "Over" was over, and in "Down," Jesse was down and out, that's the one where he fell through the blue stuff in the toilet. "ABQ," I don't know what (else) that means, but you go with it.

So what's the point of the ending, in your mind? Why is judgment falling from the sky onto Walt?

In simple terms, we just wanted a giant moment of showmanship to end the season. And what better way than to have a rain of fire coming down around our protagnoist's ears, sort of like the judgment of God? It seemed like a big showmanship moment, and to visualize, in one fell swoop, all the terrible grief that Walt has wrought upon his loved ones, and the community at large.

And it could seem like a deus ex machina moment, but of course Walt has created that moment by letting Jane die and sending her father over the edge.

In that moment, at the end of season two, he doesn't realize it, but he's responsible for the whole world figuratively coming to an end around him. It's not deus ex machina, there's another term we were talking about, Lucifer ex machina, "Devil from the machine" -- it's the opposite. It almost could feel kind of random, but it's not. It's a butterfly effect. All these gears have been turning, this particular outcome was stuff Walt put into motion a long time ago by choosing to cook crystal meth.

In reading all the speculation on what the teddy bear sequence might mean, nobody has come close to guessing this.

Good. (evil laughter) I figured somebody was going to guess it, but I'm glad nobody has. It's not about fooling people. It's about surprising people, and delighting them. "Delight" is a weird word to use with such awful plot twists. But people like to be surprised.

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment. I liked the ending, but I can imagine some people – who had built it up in their minds that the Mexican cartel was coming for Walt, and/or that the bodies in the bags were Skyler and Ted Beneke, or whatever -- feeling cheated that it's not remotely what they thought it was going to be.

There may be some folks who feel that way. By and large I hope they don't feel that way. If folks figure it out for themselves, or learn about the meaning of the names of the episodes, they'd realize we were planning this for a very long time. It's not a random event, but in fact a cosmic indictment of Walt's life choices of late. And my philosophy is if you can guess it's the cartel, and it turns out to be the cartel – well, as a viewer, I'd rather be surprised.

Is this the ending you didn't get to do at the end of season one because of the strike?

We never dreamed of this way back in season one. This is something that came to us in the first few weeks of mapping out season two. The big ending we were going to do (back then), it involved bad things happening to Hank and his partner, but I don't want to give away much more than that, because we may go back to that well later on. It was a lot of death and destruction and personal suffering on Hank's part and Walt's part.

Is it a safe assumption that the bodies in those bags on the driveway are just random airplane passengers?

Yes.

And is it also a safe assumption that you're not going to kill off your leading man midway through the series by dropping an airplane on him?

We're back in the writers' room now, plotting out season three. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say Walt is front and center, as always. The way I see it, if a jet engine fell on his head and crushed him, he'd be getting off too easy. He's not getting off nearly that easy.

Well, let's talk about that. When the series started, Walt was the sympathetic one, and Jesse was, if not the bad one, then the one we didn't really trust or relate to. And now the roles have reversed, and Walt's the monster in need of judgment, and Jesse is more and more his victim.

We want to be as honest as we can be about a character who chooses a life of crime, who actively chooses to do bad instead of good. This character takes us where he takes us. I noticed in one of your postings where you quoted me about how this show is going to take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface. That's where it takes us. You can't be Scarface just on the surface. You have to be Scarface all the way through, right to your core. Otherwise, you're just pretending to be Scarface.

The character continues to surprise us, the writers, in the writer's room. "What would he do now?" "I think he would do this." "Maybe he should do this instead." It's a little hard to believe for folks who don't spend every waking moment in the writer's room plotting out a fictional character's life, but they do kind of come to life for us. They become, in a sense, separate from us. They demand certain moments and bits of behavior that we, in a sense, don't want to give them. It sounds a little precious to put it that way, but they do. If we're going to be honest about a guy who sets out to be a criminal, we have to see where it takes itself.

Walt really has, in our minds, too, turned into something of a monster, throughout this whole 20 episodes we've done so far. The conceit that he's doing this all for his family, has gone by the wayside quite a long time ago. To me, that's what's interesting about the show, and makes me get out of bed every morning, enthused to be a part of it, is we're not leaving this character static. We're changing him in increments, sometimes small, sometimes large, and we don't know exactly where he's going to end up. If you leave aside the cancer storyline, the incremental changes Walt makes week in and week out, tells us that the show can't go indefinitely. It has to wrap up in X number of seasons. It can't go on like "Law & Order," which is a great show, but not the same kind of show as our show.

When we spoke before this season, you said you envisioned the show running four seasons, which would put us at the halfway point now. Did anything about this season change that estimation in your mind?

I haven't added to that. We appreciate the kind reviews, and anecdotally the folks we hear from who are watching, but that doesn't change my mind: "Oh, we can go five seasons." You don't want to leave anything on the table, but you don't want to overstay your welcome, either. You want to leave 'em wanting more. I think we can get through four. That's my hope. I'm not speaking for the company, for AMC or Sony, just for myself.

When you say the characters do things that you as writers don't always expect or want them to do, were there any moments this year where their behavior was particularly surprising or troubling?

There were two moments. The biggest was Walt watching Jane choke to death. I've gotta say, AMC and Sony are ballsy. AMC particularly, they don't ever second-guess us. They don't ever say, "Gee, is this too out there? Is this too raw-boned or rough-edged?" Having said that, the one time this season they were a little freaked out was when we sent them the outline, they went, "Wait, Walt lets her choke to death on her own vomit?" They were right to worry about the audience losing their desire to want to watch the guy: "Are they going to lose their empathy for him forever?" I said, "I don't know." We danced around it, talked about shooting multiple endings where he leaves and she chokes to death out of his sight. But then we said, "Go big or go home." That was our ethos for last season: go big or go home. We figured in for a penny, in for a pound. We've come this far, let's be honest about it. I give 'em great credit. We talked about it and talked about it, and they almost convinced us not to do it. They didn't give us any grief about it, they raised their concerns, we said, "This is the way we want to go," and they said, "Go for it."

The other moment was in the episode before that, written by George Mastras, he's the father of two little girls. That was his episode, and the way it works is we break the outline in the room together, and the individual writer goes off and writes it. We got to the ending of that episode, and we said, "He should be ready to go to the biggest drug deal of his life, and that's when the baby comes, because Murphy's Law says it's going to be at the most inconvenient moment, and he decides to go through with the drug deal." George really was, "I hate this guy! I don't want to write that!" I kinda sorta cajoled him into writing it. I think it was a great ending for Walt and for that episode, but the writer of it wasn't too sure of writing it that way. But he wrote it, and did a great job at it.

Some people said they spotted the teddy bear at the abandoned motel where Walt does the deal with Gus's people.

People have got amazing eyes. That's why I'm surprised nobody figured out the plane crash thing. I'm told the teddy bear was in one shot there. I think the writer and director of the episode took it upon themselves to tuck it into a corner, in a "Where's Waldo?" way.

So there's no deeper meaning to its presence there?

No. Just a little Easter Egg for the people who notice things on that level.

In the finale, Skyler finally puts enough of what Walt is doing together to want him out of her life. But what's she telling Flynn about why his dad can't live at home anymore?

Good question, and that's been a big focus of conversation in the writers room here in season three. I can't tell you too much. It's stuff you'll see in the first episode, but I can give you this: I don't think she's telling folks too much. You're asking the right question, let me put it that way. When a woman is going to leave her husband, everybody needs to hear a reason. What reason do you give if the reason you're leaving is that you don't know what he's involved in, and you don't want to know. What do you tell folks?

One of the interesting things about Skyler was that she seemed to be more morally upright than Walt, but then we get these implications that she had something going on with Ted Beneke, and then she continues to work with him after finding out he's been cooking the books.

I have a real penchant for starting the obvious, but what's great about human nature is we have an infinite capacity to rationalize our behavior. It's at the heart of "Breaking Bad." -- what makes (these characters) empathetic to an audience. If we're being honest with ourselves, we know we rationalize things we do, thoughts we have, hundreds of times a day. "I ran a red light, but nobody got hurt, and I have to get to work to feed my family." We all rationalize things. "I didn't tell the truth to my best friend, because it's a white lie, it's not a dark lie." Name anything. But those who are capable of rationalizing little can also rationalize big. There are a lot of evil Nazis, but then there were a lot of morally weak Germans who said they were just following orders. "I was part of the killing fields in Cambodia, but if I didn't do it, somebody else would have, and they would have killed me for refusing." Where do you draw the line?

It interests me how people can sort of explain things away to themselves in order to be able to sleep at night. Walt is a version of this writ very large and writ very dramatically. He really is one of us. To my way of thinking, I understand why folks might find him uncomfortable to watch. his behavior's getting worse. People may have tuned in assuming he was just sticking it to the man, trying to help his family. But more and more, it's not that.

Well, does this leave Flynn as the only morally uncompromised character left on the show?

I guess you could put it that way. And who knows what season three will bring? But I'd like to refine it a little more. It's not about us wanting to compromise our characters. It's about us wanting to deepen the audience's understanding of them, to make them more three-dimensional. Skyler was never a balloon of moral rectitude that we wished to pop. Rather, we wanted to know more about her, and surprise the audience and herself, when she agreed to go back to work with Ted Beneke after she found out he was cooking the books.

Walt's cancer hasn't been cured, but thanks to the treatment and the surgery, he's doing a lot better than he was at the start of the series. Why did you decide to do that?

It's two things. One is a somewhat mechanical element, which is, we're having fun telling this story and we want to milk it for everything that's worth. As is often the case in real life, sometimes cancer treatments are efficacious. They do some good, some folks get a diagnosis and die within two months, or they live eight years. I'm not saying Walt will go that route, but it happens.

The more interesting aspect, story-wise, is that when you take Walt's biggest reason for what he's doing off the table, then you're left with a character who needs to be looking at himself very closely, and why he continues to do these bad things that he does. That he continues to do these things says a lot about him. I always said from the get-go, if we had a character who was simply doing what he does for his family -- he cooks a big load of meth this week, and then leaves the money in the dryer too long, it burns up, and he's back at square one -- you can't put him back at square one for too long. You have to go the whole nine yards and look at this guy closely. Once he gets his 737,000 dollars, he'll rationalize the need to have more. Once cancer isn't first and foremost in his mind, he still continues to cook. Why does he do this? He becomes in some ways, less and less likable, but to my mind, more and more fascinating. Why does he do the things he does?

And you have Cranston to play that transition from sympathetic family guy to monster.

God, yeah. There's a lot of great actors out there who could do all the technical aspects of acting that are called for in this show, but they wouldn't have the likability. You wouldn't want to watch him after some point. Bryan allows us to stay on the air because people want to keep watching him.

Can you talk about what the additions of Saul and Gus have brought to the show this year?

The more (the show goes along), the more that Walt loses his soul. I liken it to him taking a hammer and chisel and chipping away at his own soul. The darker things potentially get, the more I feel a desire to have more humor. I want humor in the show, as much as it can reasonably exist. Saul Goodman is a good outlet for that. He's not a clown -- he's a character who seems clownish on the surface but is better than that. He's a character who doesn't lie to himself. He knows he's a dirty lawyer, he knows he's in it for the money. He doesn't have any illusions that some day he's going to chuck all this and make it to the Supreme Court. That is such a 180 degree difference from a guy like Walt who does nothing but lie to himself. To me, it's refreshing on two levels: the humor is refreshing, and that he doesn't lie to himself.

Gus is, I think, going to be a similar guy to Saul. I don't mean to say he's funny or doesn't possess gravitas, because he does. But he knows his place in the universe. It's a different thing, in a sense, though, because he presents a very different face to the rest of the world than the one he possesses. Gus seems like a pillar of the community, good businessman, honest as the day is long. Like Walt, he pretends to be somebody he's not. But unlike Walt, I think he really knows who he is. He can lie to anybody else in his life, but he can never lie to himself.

And in the finale, we see him finding out a whole lot about Walt during his visit to Hank's office.

The way we see it, in the writer's room, is that was not a surprise. Gus is, in our minds, like Bobby Fishcer. He's a master chess player, always thinking 12 or 20 moves ahead. He would never have gotten into business with Walt in the first place without doing due diligence: "Oh, he's a high school chemistry teacher, he has a brother-in-law in the DEA," etc. In my mind, Gus would be less than he is if he was to be surprised by that. It was interesting for us, putting those two worlds together.

While I enjoyed the first season of the show, it feels like there was a significant jump up in quality this year. What lessons did you learn from that first year that helped you this year?

I'd never run my own TV show before. I'd been a good number two or number three on a well-run TV show and learned from observation. But being in the captain's chair, as it were, a lot of season one was spent with me nervous all the time. I'm nervous all the time still, but it derives from me being nervous about making the show as good as possible, where last year it was nervousness about whether I could do the job. That anxiety kind of goes away at some point.

Everybody knows the job better now, my writers know the characters and the job better. The crew is running like a well-oiled machine. In season one, as with any new show, these things happen with fits and starts. I think there's a lot of good reasons. And the actors, as wonderful as they were from day one, everything gets better the more you do it.

Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com

Pushing Daisies, "Window Dressed to Kill": I'm no Superman

I'm trying to take it easy this weekend, but I'm sure many of you want to discuss last night's return of "Pushing Daisies," even if it was only for Summer Burn-Off Theatre, so fire away.

Now, I know the remaining two episodes have already aired elsewhere, and are therefore available via file-sharing programs, but we're going to follow the same rules here that we do for a show like "Doctor Who" -- if it hasn't aired yet here in America, we're not going to talk about it. Confine all comments to this episode and the ones before it, please.

My Boys, "Spring Training": For love of the game

I've been meaning to write about the "My Boys" season finale for a couple of days now, but other things keep getting in the way. In the interests of giving the small group of that show's fans who hang around here a chance to discuss the episode -- and this brief season as a whole, which was a welcome return to form after last year -- I'm just going to ask what you all thought of it. If I have time later, I'll pop into the comments.

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 1: "Ebb Tide" (Newbies edition)

As we did last summer, it's time to revisit "The Wire," the greatest drama in TV history, this time moving on to season two. And, as I did last summer, I'm going to do two slightly different versions of each review: one for people who have already seen the entire series and want to be able to discuss how events in these episodes impact or are echoed by events down the road; and one for people who are slowly working their way through the series and don't want to be spoiled for episodes they haven't been to yet. (If you want to see how they differ, you can go back to check out the veteran and newbie editions from season one.)

Newbie-friendly spoilers (the veteran edition is here) for the season two premiere, "Ebb Tide," coming up just as soon as I take note of the mileage...

"It's all about self-preservation, Jimmy -- something you never learned." -Jay Landsman

As I wrote when I reviewed "The Target," the first episode of season one, "The Wire" is a show that teaches you how to watch it. And even here, with a full season under its belt, the series still needs to offer up reminders that it's going to play by its own rules.

Having spent the 13 hours of season one introducing this huge cast of characters, explaining how they work together, or against each other, you might expect season two to pick up with a quick re-assembly of Lt. Daniels' task force to go after Stringer Bell and the remains of the Barksdale drug operation, or after a similar drug crew. Instead, it's like we're back at square one.

There are some familiar faces, but they're often in new and marginalized places, like McNulty working on the boat or Daniels in the evidence room. Characters who were marginal last year, like Prez's well-connected father-in-law, Major Stan Valchek, are now major players, and we're introduced to a whole new cast of characters down at the docks.

Because the stevedores are a predominantly white group, you might assume that "Ebb Tide" is in some way an attempt to reboot the series and try to draw in a larger audience. You would be wrong (though this was the show's highest-rated season). Outside of Prez's monologue in Valchek's office, in which he offers his own brief synopsis of the Barksdale investigation, there's no attempt at hand-holding, no effort of any kind to make this world fathomable to a new viewer. I could barely follow the action with Bodie and Shamrock and Stringer in this one the first time through, and I'd watched the first season religiously. This is the start of volume 2 of the Great American Novel for Television, and good luck to you trying to crack it open at this point.

No, what David Simon, Ed Burns and company are doing here is revealing that "The Wire" is going to be far more than a cops vs. drug dealers saga. It's not a crime show. There's a lot of crime in it, yes, but it's a story about the death of an American city (really, the death of the American city), and little by little the show is going to take us into every corner of that city. Last year, it was the projects and the drug war raging within them. This season, our focus turns to the ports, and to the state of blue-collar, industrial America, which has been phased out in favor of a service economy that many of these guys just aren't equipped for. As Simon referred to it in a few interviews, it's "a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class."

As has been said many times before, the opening scene of each "Wire" premiere is like a mission statement for that season. We open with McNulty riding forlornly on the boat, staring out at the many abandoned factories ringing Baltimore's harbor. Once upon a time, these places were thriving concerns that provided jobs for any man willing to put in the work, no matter his background or skill level; now they're rotting husks, relics of a time that barely exists anymore. Jimmy looks at those factories and thinks wistfully about the way things used to be, the lifestyle his father and his father's friends had. Then he and his partner Claude answer a distress call from a party boat filled with yuppies who couldn't care less about Bethlehem Steel or Domino Sugar; they just look at the harbor as a place to get their drink on while dancing to "Blue Skies." Jimmy notes that they have to tow the boat out of the shipping channel, but at the same time, the harbor seems so dead that it hardly seems worth the bother; it's been a long time since cargo ships were constantly coming and going from this port.

Recognizing all of this, Jimmy takes a bribe to tow the boat to an out of the way location where the party can keep going, and there you have your season in a nutshell: the port workers are dinosaurs, being replaced by wealthy people looking to party (or buy condos with waterfront views), and the only real money to be made around here is through bribery.

And it's in that capacity that we get to know the new season's central character, union leader Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer). I don't want to go too deep into discussing everything Frank is up to, but he makes some of it clear in his argument with union rival Nat Coxson, and in the actions we see him take involving his nephew Nick, the mysterious "Greek," and Father Lewandowski at the local parish. Because the grain pier has fallen into disrepair, and because the shipping channel isn't deep enough any longer, not enough ships are coming to the port to employ all stevedores that Frank represents. So he's taking bribes from the Greek to slip shipping containers past customs, and then using that money to get close enough to politicians -- with a little help from his favorite priest -- who might be able to help him get the canal dredged.

But in buying a new window for the church nave -- and in making an offering higher than the one the Polish cops and firemen could afford -- Frank has now put himself on the radar of the petty but politically influential Stan Valchek. And in trying to help the Greek and his people import a shipping container (or, as they'll be referred to mostly from here on out, "can") full of dead girls, he's about to get a whole lot more.

Again, without wanting to give too much away, let me offer the best I can in terms of an explanation of who some of the key new (or more prominent) figures are so far:

• Frank Sobotka: Head of the stevedores union. Keep in mind that there are several different types of stevedores involved at the port, but the primary group, and the one Frank and these others are a part of, are the checkers, who are responsible for identifying and tracking all the cans as they move in and out of the port, and who have the ability to help smuggle items in.

• Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreiber): Frank's nephew, such a junior checker that he struggles to get shifts when there are so many senior guys ahead of him and so few ships to work. He's Frank's go-between with the Greek.

• Ziggy Sobotka (James Ransone): Frank's bumbling (but well-endowed) son, who can be as charming as he is obnoxious.

• Horseface (Charley Scalies): Frank's heavyset sidekick

• Stanislaus Valchek (Al Brown): Commander of the Southeastern district of the Baltimore PD, which covers most of the remaining white ethnic neighborhoods in the city, as well as the port; he's Prez's father-in-law.

• Spiros "Vondas" Vondopoulos (Paul Ben Victor): Nick's soft-spoken contact; is either the Greek, or at least a Greek

• Beadie Russell (Amy Ryan): Port cop whose job largely involves driving around the stacks of containers to make sure nothing's amiss; she's the one who notices the broken customs seal on the Greek's can.

This is a lot to take in, I know. Lots of new people, and lots of old friends still absent for now. No Bubbles, or Omar, or D'Angelo, and a bare minimum of Bunk, Kima, Avon and others. But just as I imagine lots of you were completely lost at this stage in season one, only to grow to understand and love it as you went, I suspect you're going to have a similar learning curve here.

Some other thoughts on "Ebb Tide":

• To make it clear that the show hasn't forgotten about the Barksdale investigation, and that it views every part of this city as connected in some way, we spend a decent amount of time in the premiere following Bodie trying to pick up a non-existent drug shipment, and then on Stringer trying to find out why their supplier left them hanging. What makes it particularly inscrutable is the way we keep seeing Bodie and his partner Shamrock from the perspective of Tank and Country, the two older hands Stringer has sent along to make sure the young guys aren't stealing. It's sound strategy on Stringer's part, but it makes the subplot more complicated than it probably should have been in the middle of an episode that's already incredibly dense.

• That subplot does give us two wonderful Bodie moments that echo season one. First, we have him being confused by the idea that the radio stations change when you leave Baltimore (and then being disgusted when the first Philly station he tunes in is playing "A Prairie Home Companion"), which is very much in keeping with Wallace not even knowing what things are like on the east side of town, let alone in the country. Second, we have him scolding -- in an echo of one of D'Angelo's lectures to him last season -- one of his new soldiers about the futility of always thinking of violence as the first solution to any problem in this business.

• One final point on that subplot, and a holdover from the veteran discussion of last year's premiere. A commenter, Boones19, suggested that the Dominican drug crew that Fitz from the FBI was investigating (with the help of one of Jimmy's informants) would turn out to be Avon and Stringer's supplier, but when I caught the lawyer telling Stringer that his client was under investigation from the DEA, not the FBI, I checked with David Simon, who says they're two unconnected outfits.

• A new season means a new -- or, in this case, the Tom Waits' original -- version of "Way Down in the Hole," and a new opening title sequence, this time filled with images of the port. As I did last year, I suggest taking a look at Andrew Dignan's analysis of each of the first four seasons' title sequences at The House Next Door, though I'd steer clear if I was a newbie, as it's filled with spoilers about this and later seasons.

• "The Wire" is nothing if not patient, as is Jimmy McNulty, and the show is willing to take the time to show Jimmy taking the time to screw over Bill Rawls and Jay Landsman (who, we find out, was the one who gave away Jimmy's fear of the marine unit, rather than Jimmy himself doing it out of self-loathing over what he did to Kima and D'Angelo) by going over the tide charts for proof that the dead woman fell into the water within Baltimore PD jurisdiction.

• This show loves its parallels, and here we get Daniels and Bunk tearing apart the evidence room for the material on the Gant case at the same time Bodie, Shamrock and the mechanics are searching the car for the drugs that are supposed to be there.

• The band playing at the stevedore bar is The Nighthawks, who enterprisingly put a banner with their website on it in the background of the shot.

• This qualifies less as a spoiler than it does a fair warning for the newbies: get used to Ziggy showing off his large (albeit, to our eyes, clearly fake) male appendage.

Coming up next Friday: "Collateral Damage," in which the dead girls cause a stir among various law-enforcement agencies, Avon's sister pays him a visit, and Valchek's vendetta begins.

What did everybody else think?

The Wire, Season 2, Episode 1: "Ebb Tide" (Veterans edition)

As we did last summer, it's time to revisit "The Wire," the greatest drama in TV history, this time moving on to season two. And, as I did last summer, I'm going to do two slightly different versions of each review: one for people who have already seen the entire series and want to be able to discuss how events in these episodes impact or are echoed by events down the road; and one for people who are slowly working their way through the series and don't want to be spoiled for episodes they haven't been to yet. (If you want to see how they differ, you can go back to check out the veteran and newbie editions from season one.)

Veteran-friendly spoilers (the newbie edition is here) for the season two premiere, "Ebb Tide," coming up just as soon as I take note of the mileage...

"It's all about self-preservation, Jimmy -- something you never learned." -Jay Landsman

As I wrote when I reviewed "The Target," the first episode of season one, "The Wire" is a show that teaches you how to watch it. And even here, with a full season under its belt, the series still needs to offer up reminders that it's going to play by its own rules.

Having spent the 13 hours of season one introducing this huge cast of characters, explaining how they work together, or against each other, you might expect season two to pick up with a quick re-assembly of Lt. Daniels' task force to go after Stringer Bell and the remains of the Barksdale drug operation, or after a similar drug crew. Instead, it's like we're back at square one.

There are some familiar faces, but they're often in new and marginalized places, like McNulty working on the boat or Daniels in the evidence room. Characters who were marginal last year, like Prez's well-connected father-in-law, Major Stan Valchek, are now major players, and we're introduced to a whole new cast of characters down at the docks.

Because the stevedores are a predominantly white group, you might assume that "Ebb Tide" is in some way an attempt to reboot the series and try to draw in a larger audience. You would be wrong (though this was the show's highest-rated season). Outside of Prez's monologue in Valchek's office, in which he offers his own brief synopsis of the Barksdale investigation, there's no attempt at hand-holding, no effort of any kind to make this world fathomable to a new viewer. I could barely follow the action with Bodie and Shamrock and Stringer in this one the first time through, and I'd watched the first season religiously. This is the start of volume 2 of the Great American Novel for Television, and good luck to you trying to crack it open at this point.

No, what David Simon, Ed Burns and company are doing here is revealing that "The Wire" is going to be far more than a cops vs. drug dealers saga. It's not a crime show. There's a lot of crime in it, yes, but it's a story about the death of an American city (really, the death of the American city), and little by little the show is going to take us into every corner of that city. Last year, it was the projects and the drug war raging within them. This season, our focus turns to the ports, and to the state of blue-collar, industrial America, which has been phased out in favor of a service economy that many of these guys just aren't equipped for. As Simon referred to it in a few interviews, it's "a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class."

As has been said many times before, the opening scene of each "Wire" premiere is like a mission statement for that season. We open with McNulty riding forlornly on the boat, staring out at the many abandoned factories ringing Baltimore's harbor. Once upon a time, these places were thriving concerns that provided jobs for any man willing to put in the work, no matter his background or skill level; now they're rotting husks, relics of a time that barely exists anymore. Jimmy looks at those factories and thinks wistfully about the way things used to be, the lifestyle his father and his father's friends had. Then he and his partner Claude answer a distress call from a party boat filled with yuppies who couldn't care less about Bethlehem Steel or Domino Sugar; they just look at the harbor as a place to get their drink on while dancing to "Blue Skies." Jimmy notes that they have to tow the boat out of the shipping channel, but at the same time, the harbor seems so dead that it hardly seems worth the bother; it's been a long time since cargo ships were constantly coming and going from this port.

Recognizing all of this, Jimmy takes a bribe to tow the boat to an out of the way location where the party can keep going, and there you have your season in a nutshell: the port workers are dinosaurs, being replaced by wealthy people looking to party (or buy condos with waterfront views), and the only real money to be made around here is through bribery.

And it's in that capacity that we get to know the new season's central character, union leader Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer). I don't want to go too deep into discussing everything Frank is up to, but he makes some of it clear in his argument with union rival Nat Coxson, and in the actions we see him take involving his nephew Nick, the mysterious "Greek," and Father Lewandowski at the local parish. Because the grain pier has fallen into disrepair, and because the shipping channel isn't deep enough any longer, not enough ships are coming to the port to employ all stevedores that Frank represents. So he's taking bribes from the Greek to slip shipping containers past customs, and then using that money to get close enough to politicians -- with a little help from his favorite priest -- who might be able to help him get the canal dredged.

But in buying a new window for the church nave -- and in making an offering higher than the one the Polish cops and firemen could afford -- Frank has now put himself on the radar of the petty but politically influential Stan Valchek. And in trying to help the Greek and his people import a shipping container (or, as they'll be referred to mostly from here on out, "can") full of dead girls, he's about to get a whole lot more.

Again, without wanting to give too much away, let me offer the best I can in terms of an explanation of who some of the key new (or more prominent) figures are so far:

• Frank Sobotka: Head of the stevedores union. Keep in mind that there are several different types of stevedores involved at the port, but the primary group, and the one Frank and these others are a part of, are the checkers, who are responsible for identifying and tracking all the cans as they move in and out of the port, and who have the ability to help smuggle items in.

• Nick Sobotka (Pablo Schreiber): Frank's nephew, such a junior checker that he struggles to get shifts when there are so many senior guys ahead of him and so few ships to work. He's Frank's go-between with the Greek.

• Ziggy Sobotka (James Ransone): Frank's bumbling (but well-endowed) son, who can be as charming as he is obnoxious.

• Horseface (Charley Scalies): Frank's heavyset sidekick

• Stanislaus Valchek (Al Brown): Commander of the Southeastern district of the Baltimore PD, which covers most of the remaining white ethnic neighborhoods in the city, as well as the port; he's Prez's father-in-law.

• Spiros "Vondas" Vondopoulos (Paul Ben Victor): Nick's soft-spoken contact; is either the Greek, or at least a Greek

• Beadie Russell (Amy Ryan): Port cop whose job largely involves driving around the stacks of containers to make sure nothing's amiss; she's the one who notices the broken customs seal on the Greek's can.

This is a lot to take in, I know. Lots of new people, and lots of old friends still absent for now. No Bubbles, or Omar, or D'Angelo, and a bare minimum of Bunk, Kima, Avon and others. But just as I imagine lots of you were completely lost at this stage in season one, only to grow to understand and love it as you went, I suspect you're going to have a similar learning curve here.

Some other thoughts on "Ebb Tide":

• To make it clear that the show hasn't forgotten about the Barksdale investigation, and that it views every part of this city as connected in some way, we spend a decent amount of time in the premiere following Bodie trying to pick up a non-existent drug shipment, and then on Stringer trying to find out why their supplier left them hanging. What makes it particularly inscrutable is the way we keep seeing Bodie and his partner Shamrock from the perspective of Tank and Country, the two older hands Stringer has sent along to make sure the young guys aren't stealing. It's sound strategy on Stringer's part, but it makes the subplot more complicated than it probably should have been in the middle of an episode that's already incredibly dense.

• That subplot does give us two wonderful Bodie moments that echo season one. First, we have him being confused by the idea that the radio stations change when you leave Baltimore (and then being disgusted when the first Philly station he tunes in is playing "A Prairie Home Companion"), which is very much in keeping with Wallace not even knowing what things are like on the east side of town, let alone in the country. Second, we have him scolding -- in an echo of one of D'Angelo's lectures to him last season -- one of his new soldiers about the futility of always thinking of violence as the first solution to any problem in this business.

• One final point on that subplot, and a holdover from the veteran discussion of last year's premiere. A commenter, Boones19, suggested that the Dominican drug crew that Fitz from the FBI was investigating (with the help of one of Jimmy's informants) would turn out to be Avon and Stringer's supplier, but when I caught the lawyer telling Stringer that his client was under investigation from the DEA, not the FBI, I checked with David Simon, who says they're two unconnected outfits.

• A new season means a new -- or, in this case, the Tom Waits' original -- version of "Way Down in the Hole," and a new opening title sequence, this time filled with images of the port. As I did last year, I suggest taking a look at Andrew Dignan's analysis of each of the first four seasons' title sequences at The House Next Door, though I'd steer clear if I was a newbie, as it's filled with spoilers about this and later seasons.

• "The Wire" is nothing if not patient, as is Jimmy McNulty, and the show is willing to take the time to show Jimmy taking the time to screw over Bill Rawls and Jay Landsman (who, we find out, was the one who gave away Jimmy's fear of the marine unit, rather than Jimmy himself doing it out of self-loathing over what he did to Kima and D'Angelo) by going over the tide charts for proof that the dead woman fell into the water within Baltimore PD jurisdiction.

• This show loves its parallels, and here we get Daniels and Bunk tearing apart the evidence room for the material on the Gant case at the same time Bodie, Shamrock and the mechanics are searching the car for the drugs that are supposed to be there.

• The band playing at the stevedore bar is The Nighthawks, who enterprisingly put a banner with their website on it in the background of the shot.

• This qualifies less as a spoiler than it does a fair warning for the newbies: get used to Ziggy showing off his large (albeit, to our eyes, clearly fake) male appendage.

And now we'll talk about some elements of the premiere and how they'll play out down the line:

• You know I like to keep track of the many minor tragedies along the way that have to happen for the big tragedies (Wallace's death, Randy's foster mom getting burned) to take place, so I'm going to be keeping a close eye on the events that lead to Ziggy's downfall. First up: if Nick's car hadn't broken down, he wouldn't have needed Ziggy to drive him to the Greek's diner, and Ziggy might never have gotten involved with Double-G and the others. (And note Double-G calling Ziggy "malaka" -- the final insult that will inspire Ziggy's shooting rampage -- under his breath while Ziggy is up at the bar studying a menu.)

• I'm going to be watching these at the same rate I'll be blogging on them, so I can't remember how many more episodes it took before we found out for sure that Vondas wasn't the Greek, and that the unassuming guy at the counter was. Still, it's funny to watch him sitting there, casually reading his newspaper and listening in on everything his underlings are doing.

• Even though Beadie seems bored with her job in the early going, note that she's still observant enough to spot the broken seal, and tough enough to go into the can on her own to investigate. Lester and Bunk are going to teach her a lot about detective work, but she has some good raw material to work with already.

• "Always Boris." Still funny.

• Kima's disinterest in Cheryl's fertility treatments (and dismay at the expense), not to mention her discomfort at being a "housecat" in the asset forfeiture unit, are the first signals that this relationship, the healthiest of season one, isn't going to last.

Coming up next Friday: "Collateral Damage," in which the dead girls cause a stir among various law-enforcement agencies, Avon's sister pays him a visit, and Valchek's vendetta begins.

What did everybody else think?

'Breaking Bad' ends killer second season - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I look back on the brilliance of this season of "Breaking Bad," which you would know all about if you've been reading my episode reviews.

Back Sunday night with a review of the finale, and a Vince Gilligan interview.

The plan for 'Band of Brothers'

"Alright, I want mortars and grenade launchers on that building till it's gone. When it's gone I want 1st to go straight in. Forget going around. Everybody else, follow me."

If you know the context of that quote from "Band of Brothers," then you should be psyched when I start reviewing the miniseries next week. And if not, then you have much to discover and enjoy. A quick explanation of how it's going to work coming up just as soon as I find some Vat 69...

After everybody pledged to read and comment, I sat down and thought about how I was going to do this, given several factors: 1)For the people without the DVDs, the episodes are only up On Demand until June 8, 2)I've been watching the episodes while exercising and therefore haven't taken notes, 3)I have all my thoughts on the episodes rattling around in my head now and want to get to discussing it already, and 4)Even though it's summer, my schedule is already pretty swamped as it is with summer shows, plus "The Wire" and "Sports Night," plus the usual Star-Ledger obligations.

So here's the deal: on Monday, I'm going to post some thoughts on "Curahee," and then I'm going to keep doing these write-ups as quickly as I can over the next few weeks, whenever I have some free time in my day to do so. These won't be remotely as long or as detail-oriented as the "Wire" reviews, nor will I be recapping the plots like I did with "Freaks and Geeks." Just whatever thoughts I happen to have on each episode, followed by an opportunity for you to discuss it. (And if you don't hold up your end, you'll get the Sobel treatment.) In an ideal world where I had unlimited free time, I'd do this more in-depth for posterity's sake, but this is what I can do now.

Also, while I do these separate newbie/veteran versions of the "Wire" reviews, in the interest of keeping things simple here, it's gonna be one version per episode. I'll be as vague as I can about what's coming, but I can't not discuss anything that's to come, and I imagine you guys -- most of whom seem to have seen the miniseries already -- will have a difficult time as well. We'll do our best to not include major spoilers, like that time Guarnere kidnapped Ava Braun... ooops. Shouldn't have said that. But if I say something like, "This episode sets up Hubler's interest in finding a Luger, which will be a running element," or "this guy now doesn't appear for a few episodes," I think that's fair game, under the circumstances.

So, see you on Monday for this one.

Leaving on a high note?

Last week, we discussed what shows we might have saved from cancellation if we had my allegedly mighty "Chuck"-saving abilities (along with the power to travel through time). 200 comments in, Film Cricket made this observation:

Mostly, though, I'd use my time-traveling TV powers to end shows that dragged on beyond their Best Before date (I guess in the hope that newer, better things would be programmed?): "Friends," "Seinfeld," "The X-Files," "Heroes," "ER," etc.

And that leads to this week's question for you all: what one show would you end prematurely to preserve its genius, and when? More thoughts, including my own pick, coming right up...

There's something to be said for watching your favorite show as long as you can, regardless of how much the quality dips, but there's also something to be said for a show like "Freaks and Geeks," which did 18 episodes and then went away while our memories of it were still perfect. As George Costanza learned, sometimes you're better off saying, "That's it for me!" and walking out while your audience is still happy.

Once upon a time, I would have used a show-canceling power on "Friday Night Lights" after the first season finale, particularly after how the second season began, but then parts of the third season were so great that I'm glad the show continued, even if we had to suffer through The Unfortunate Incident of the Beer Bottle in the Nighttime.

So my pick would be "Homicide: Life on the Street," probably at the end of the third season, or at most midway through the fourth season (after the introduction of Kellerman, plus "Doll's Eyes," but before we met Dr. Julianna Cox). The longer "Homicide" ran, the less resemblance it had to the show I fell in love with. The cases became more hyperbolic (snipers! arson! eeeeeeeeevil drug lords!), the new characters were for the most part more attractive but vastly less interesting than the ones they replaced, Andre Braugher clearly started to get bored (and then left), etc., etc. I'd rather not have my memories of "Homicide" clouded by the likes of Falsone, Rene Sheppard and Luther Mahoney, you know?

What would be your choice, when and why? I don't want this to just be a Jump the Shark thread -- the show in question could have just become less good without putting the Fonz on waterskis, or without letting a Sherman-Palladino or Sorkin walk out the door.

We may now interrupt your regularly scheduled summer programming

So while I've been busy getting all excited about season 2 of "The Wire" and starting with "Sports Night," I've been taking advantage of the post-season lull to dive back into "Band of Brothers." History Channel did a Memorial Day marathon, and HBO has been featuring the episodes On Demand, plus I have the DVDs, so it's been easy (and a good motivational tool for when I need to ride the exer-cycle). I started out watching them for fun, but as I go through the episodes, I keep thinking to myself, "Boy, I wish I had a blog back when this aired." And I'm kinda thinking I want to add it to the summer rotation

But the episodes are only up On Demand until June 8, and since the DVDs are both less available and more expensive than the ones for "The Wire" or "Sports Night," we kind of have a week and a half to do this where the episodes are available to as wide a group as possible. And I don't have time to do 10 episodes in 10 days or so, even if I'm being briefer than I'd be on "The Wire." (And I would be briefer. Like I said, I'm riding the bike while watching these, so no notes are being taken, and I'd only do this for fun.)

So here's my question: how many people either have the DVDs available, or remember the miniseries well enough, or would be willing/able to watch 'em On Demand now and wait for the reviews when they come to discuss them, to make it worth whatever time I'd be spending on it?

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Okay, response has been overwhelming enough that I'm gonna do it. Not sure of the schedule, or format, but look for something early next week.

The Goode Family, "Pilot": It ain't easy being Goode

I offered up my thoughts on "The Goode Family" pilot in Monday's column. Critics who were able to see more than one episode (notably Fienberg) found it a bit more promising than I did, so maybe it'll get better as it goes.

Anybody watch? What did you think?

Better late than never review: 'The Guild' on DVD

There's so much TV on TV these days -- not to mention TV-esque shows that are available online-only(*) -- that there's only so much I can do to keep up with things that might be interesting. I missed "The Guild" when it ran online, and then Upfront Week got in the way of me doing a proper write-up of last week's DVD release. Fortunately, I had a little bit of spare time over the last couple of days to watch both discs, and I liked what I saw.

(*) Yesterday was the deadline for nominations for the Television Critics Association Awards, and there was quite a bit of discussion (sparked by James Poniewozik) on our e-mail list about whether a web-only series like "Dr. Horrible" -- conveniently co-starring Felicia Day of "The Guild" -- should be eligible for our awards. The group consensus wound up being that, if enough people voted for it, it'd be eligible. So we'll find out when the nominations are announced, I guess.

Anyway, "The Guild." In case you missed it the first (or second, or in the case of the DVDs, third) time around, it's a web comedy series about a group of online gamers who work as a team in a "World of Warcraft"-style game -- and who, with the possible exception of Codex (played by "Guild" creator Day), seem woefully ill-equipped to deal with the world outside their computer windows.

The press notes and other descriptions of the series boast that it "is written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer." Now, I'm not a gamer of any stripe(**), but I enjoyed the heck out of "The Guild."

(**) The last game console of any kind I've owned was a ColecoVision, though I've played with more new-fangled gaming tech over the years, and the only thing keeping me from getting a Wii is that it would likely end my career and/or marriage.

While I'm sure I'm missing a ton of jokes about helms and gold and whatnot, I could very easily relate to the larger jokes about how all the characters (even Codex) have turned the virtual world into a substitute for the real one. Lord knows there are times when I've gotten too sucked into this blog, and other online communities I hang out in, and so I laughed/winced knowingly when wife and mom Clara (Robin Thorsen) tried to ignore her kids so she could focus on the game, or when Zaboo (Sandeep Parikh) or Vork (Jeff Lewis) tried to act as if the rules of the game applied to the world outside it, or at the awkwardness when Codex (trying to kick lovestruck stalker Zaboo to the curb) initiated the Guild's first in-person meeting.

"With just a few of us," she insists, "we can take down a 10-man dungeon. Real life can't be that much harder."

It's a funny show, and it works just fine on a bigger screen, with the episodes watched all together. I'm glad I finally got to watch it.

The DVD sets contain the 12 episodes of seasons one and two, and include DVD-only bonus features like audio commentaries, script files, and interviews with the cast and crew.

You can buy "The Guild" season one and season two at Amazon.com

Reaper, "The Devil and Sam Oliver": And it's 1, 2, 3, the kids love the monkey

Spoilers for the "Reaper" season/series finale coming up just as soon as somebody helps me get nuded...

When "Reaper" and "Chuck" debuted at the start of last season, the comparisons were as frequent as they were obvious. Many people (myself included) even preferred the "Reaper" pilot, thanks to Ray Wise, bigger laughs and what seemed to be a more assured sense of story and tone. But watching what's likely the final episode of "Reaper"(*) one month after what thankfully turned out not to be the final "Chuck," it's not hard to see how the two shows diverged creatively, and why there was such passionate outpouring from fans and media about the Save "Chuck" campaign, while the movement to save "Reaper," while there, has been a lot quieter.

(*) Yes, the rumor of the CW affiliates picking up the show to help fill their now-vacant Sunday lineup is still out there, but A)I know nothing about it that you don't, and B)It seems like such a Hail Mary, between the logistics of ordering it and the departures of Tyler Labine and "Reaper" creators Fazekas and Butters, that I'm going to assume, until there are confirmed reports of production beginning on new episodes, that it'll turn out like "Arrested Development" on Showtime or the "Deadwood" TV-movies.

The "Chuck" finale was a balls-to-the-wall, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, other-hyphenated-cliche-about-giving-your-best-effort affair, something that built on everything that came before. It ended in a place that had me very eager to see the next season, while at the same time (though I doubt this was the creators' intention) had the same air of the "Terminator" finale, where what seems like a cliffhanger also feels like a satisfying stopping point if need be.

The "Reaper" finale, on the other hand? Well, it was funny in parts (the Devil making Sam dance like a monkey, Sock speaking in tongues after putting his tongue on a toad, Andi getting drunk, Steve complaining about life as a guardian angel), but it also felt as lazy and aimless as the show so often was, and the ending just has me frustrated that we likely won't get to see where things are going. (Even if the show comes back, the creators likely wouldn't be back with it.)

"Reaper," like Sam himself, has never seemed to have much of a plan, and while that feels thematically appropriate, it also gets frustrating to watch whenever the series does a mythology-driven episode like this one. As Fienberg points out in his own "Reaper" finale review, Sam's ability to play Quarters was never established earlier, and most of this season has felt like Fazekas, Butters and company were just treading water, not sure what to do after the unexpected renewal. Last year's finale already established that Steve was an angel again, and that Heaven had some kind of grand plan for Sam, and 13 episodes later, we're basically at the same point. Andi having sold her soul in the bargain does add a new element for a hypothetical third season, but that's only after wasting her as the wet blanket for most of this year. (And I sure would have liked to see Andi's first meeting with the Devil, as opposed to finding out about it afterwards.)

If "Reaper" somehow comes back, even in a cheaper form with a smaller cast and a new creative team, I imagine I'll still watch for a while, if only for Ray Wise and Rick Gonzalez. But the series could have been so much better than it was. Maybe if it had been, its future wouldn't be so uncertain right now.

What did everybody else think?

Summer programming advisory

Okay, as promised last week, it's time to make more concrete plans for the two TV rewinds I'll be doing this summer: "Sports Night," and season two of "The Wire." "The Wire" reviews are going to start up on Friday morning (hopefully last week's post gave you fair warning to seek out the DVDs, and if not, you can always catch up quickly), with the first "Sports Night" post following a week from today. For the time being, that's the schedule I'll keep: "Sports Night" on Wednesday, "The Wire" on Friday, with disruptions at some point for my vacation, press tour, etc.

If it turns out that my schedule is looser than anticipated (say, if I get bored with every new summer series), I may start doubling up on one or both, but we're going to play it by ear. So go get acquainted (or re-acquainted) with Dan Rydell, Casey McCall, Brother Mouzone and Frank Sobotka, and we'll start talking about them all very soon.

Rescue Me, "Iceman": Guy walks into a bar...

Spoilers for the latest episode of "Rescue Me" coming up just as soon as I cancel my trip to Cleveland...

"You never told us what to do after." -Tommy

One of the more frustrating parts of the two seasons of "Rescue Me" before this resurgent one was the sense that the show was making choices less for dramatic reasons than to feed Denis Leary's ego: more women throwing themselves at Tommy, more scenes of Tommy single-handedly saving the day, Leary solo in most of the advertising, etc., etc.

So an episode like "Iceman" -- which included that long (I clocked it at 15 minutes, which is an eternity in modern TV drama time) sequence of Tommy at the bar, arguing ghosts and getting into a shoot-out with what turned out to be the adult ghost of his dead son; and which climaxed with Tommy literally running through a wall of fire to save Damien -- should have made me worried that the series is starting to backslide into its bad habits.

But it didn't worry me.

I didn't love the bar sequence, even with the returns of Dean Winters and Charles Durning, but that's because I've never really been a big fan of Tommy's alcoholic nightmares, and those have been a part of the show since the pilot. And the scene in the aftermath, with Lou suggesting that a drunk Tommy is a more interesting Tommy, was terrific, and continued to prove that making those two roommates was a great idea (as well as an excuse for Leary to share a lot of scenes with his strongest co-star).

And the episode's second half made good use of the supporting cast, primarily, but not entirely, in comic relief. Mike's reaction to the Cleveland Steamer definition may be the funniest line of the season so far, but that scene also continued to show him not being a complete imbecile. (It also showcased Mike Lombardi's singing voice.) Franco's boxing subplot was amusing enough (albeit not as amusing as Franco explaining that, of the two times he had gonorrhea, once was as a carrier), and all in all the show feels like more of an ensemble this year, even in an episode where the first half was 90% Tommy.

What did everybody else think?

Jon & Kate Plus 8: All over but the crying

Some thoughts on last night's horrific "Jon & Kate Plus 8" season premiere coming up just as soon as I make a Uniqua pinata...

Once upon a time, "Jon & Kate Plus 8" was a "take one for the team" show in our household, because my wife liked seeing how Kate dealt with the logistics of 8 kids, and because I had subjected her to more than enough "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Dexter" and their ilk over the years.

We hadn't watched in a while, though, and last night I was the one pushing to watch it -- not out of morbid curiosity about all the tabloid stuff, but out of professional curiosity about how the show was going to handle it.

And the answer to that was "not well." But at this point, I'm not sure how the show can handle it, short of shutting down.

For all of Kate's complaining about the paparazzi, and Jon's about their notoriety -- "I did not sign up for public scrutiny of everything," he said, apparently forgetting that he was the star of a television show watched by millions of people a week. "Neither did Kate." -- it's clear that these two made a deal with the devil, and now the bill is coming due. Between the TV show and the side projects Kate does as a result of the TV show, they have more than enough money to handle raising eight kids, but the pressure of being famous, and of Kate's fame taking her away from the family so much, and of whatever resentment Jon might have about that (or about the way she constantly belittles him on camera), is killing their marriage(*). He as much as said he wished he didn't have to do the show anymore in their interview with EW, calling it a necessary evil that allowed them to get "material things."

(*) While I don't feel very sorry for them in their complaints about the pitfalls of stardom -- even as I'm disgusted with the tabloid culture they're complaining about -- I do think they were in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you don't situation. As Kate notes, the divorce rate for parents of multiples is higher than the national average, and who's to say that the financial and logistical pressure of taking care of the kids without the TV money (and free stuff that comes with their celebrity) wouldn't have led them down a similarly ugly path?

Now, if "Jon & Kate Plus 8"had no agenda, it might be equipped to handle this uncomfortable turn of events. "An American Family," the pioneering PBS docu-series from the '70s, wound up chronicling the separation and eventual divorce of its central couple, but that was a genuine documentary -- "Jon & Kate Plus 8" is a brand. TLC needs people to believe in the Gosselins as a functional, albeit bickering, couple for the show's cute, aspirational schtick to work.

And so it felt like the season premiere was intended to be a traditional episode, with Kate handling party-planning headaches while complaining about Jon's absence, only for the tabloid stories to become so overwhelming and pervasive that they had no choice but to address those issues head-on within the show. And while I admire the (seemingly reluctant) candor -- both about the marriage and about the increasing burden of the family's fame -- that stuff overwhelms the show's bread and butter and fundamentally changes what the series is about. Nobody's going to care how Kate gets the kids through a trip to the grocery store when the specter of divorce is hanging over everything, and the idea that they're a relatively normal, albeit oversized, family is gone. We make fun of "The Hills" for refusing to include any material about the cast's celebrity lives -- say, if a feud between LC and Heidi was started by something one of them said at a red carpet event -- but watching last night's "Jon & Kate," I could understand why they do it.

While I checked back in once to see how the show addressed the big issues, I think that's it for me and this show. To bring it back to "An American Family," it's one thing to watch a TV show about a couple whose marriage is falling apart. It's something else entirely to watch a TV show that is likely causing the couple's marriage to fall apart.

Did anybody else watch? What did you think?

'Mental' can't stack up to 'In Treatment' - Sepinwall on TV

In today's column, I review Fox's "Mental," which has the unfortunate timing to be debuting the night after the finale to the brilliant second season of "In Treatment":

There are times when it's hard to watch a lot of HBO without turning into a snob about traditional network TV. Watch enough of "The Wire," and the "CSI"s and "Law & Order"s feel terribly flimsy in comparison. "The Sopranos" has created an uphill battle for other shows about organized crime that's nearly impossible to climb. And having just finished watching the second season of HBO's incredible therapy drama "In Treatment," I had a hard time doing anything but laughing at Fox's new "Mental."

Hope you all had a good Memorial Day weekend. Will get into the summer groove within a day or so, hopefully.

In Treatment: Season two post-mortem with Warren Leight

We've come to the end of season two of "In Treatment," and I'm going to do something a little different at the end. Rather than do my brief sketches of each patient, I spoke at length with showrunner Warren Leight about how each story ended, the season as a whole, deviations from the Israeli series, and the possibility of getting more amazing adventures of Dr. Paul Weston, with or without this specific group of patients.

It's long, so if you just want to get to discussing how the five storylines ended, I understand if you just jump to the comments. But Warren offers a lot of insight, as you might expect the head deity of this particular fictional universe to do.

I want to start with the ending, with Paul ending his therapy with Gina, and Gina making it clear she won't take him back yet again. Given how integral Gina is to the show, and that there have been all these rumblings about how exhausted Gabriel (Byrne) finds doing it, should we take that to mean that this was written as a series finale?

No. When we were shooting, and even now, we have no idea if the show's coming back, and/or if Gina's character comes back. I've received no input from anyone on that. It's always fair to an audience (to provide an ending), but you never know. It has the potential to be closure if that's how it goes. I wouldn't think this is the first time these two have said "Never darken my door again." Clearly, something is wrong in their therapy process. I think therapists call it dual role. They need to unclot their lives a little bit. I think it's fine for Paul to leave the nest. I don't even know if the show's coming back, let alone who'll be with it.

Well, the first season was so exhausting that Rodrigo (Garcia, who adapted the show from the Israeli "Be'Tipul" and ran season one) passed the reins to you. If it comes back for a third season, would you be up for it?

That's the big debate within my family at the moment. The last four five weeks of this thing, I never put in less than 100 hours a week -- and I've been sick about 3 times since the shoot stopped. Creatively, it's great to get to work with those actors and those writers. There was a degree of autonomy because of the pace. But it's extremely difficult, if I didn't publish three episodes, we fell behind. The notion that you're burning through an episode every two days, it's just horrifying. When I tell other showrunners, they're like, "You're f---ing kidding me."

I would love to see a slightly elongated shooting schedule, where you could shoot four days and have done day to rehearse, tone and edit, but there's obviously a price point at which this show doesn't work at HBO. Part of its appeal to HBO is each episode does not cost a lot to shoot. But that's basically because Gabriel and me and a few other people are grinding ourselves. I shouldn't speak for Gabriel, but I'd imagine Gabriel and I have the same sense of pride about the season and utter exhaustion. It doesn't really matter what I want. If Gabriel wants a different schedule, it might have another influence. If I died on the shoot, they might put my name at the end of the credits, "In Memoriam," and move on. Physically, doing it was disastrous.

HBO, it must be a difficult decision for them. It hasn't been a breakout hit. I don't know the numbers, nobody seems to understand the numbers, but it is a show that people are catching up with. This is never going to have the mass appeal of the breakout hits that made them HBO, and yet it's getting very nice reception. It's a little like AMC with "Mad Men," I suppose, except HBO has other shows. There is a possibility of a season three, and artistically, the least of the issues is,"'Could you pull it off?" I don't think the challenge is can you come up with four more patients for Paul. I don't think we've exhausted the people who could come to see him or where he is. I just think we've exhausted ourselves.

Just in case, though, you brought everyone's story to a kind of an ending. Even Mia and Walter, who are staying in therapy, are at a point where the therapy might not be that interesting from a TV perspective.

Remember the last line of "Portnoy's Complaint": "Now vee may perhaps to begin?" I think you sense that, in a weird way, Walter in week 7 is his first therapy session, where he finally allows himself to be there, and Mia in week 7 starts with "I'm leaving," but allows herself to realize she needs to be there. Who knows if they're going to be all right, but they're going to keep trying.

Oliver, when we started talking about Oliver early on, one therapist said one of the toughest things about doing therapy with kids is an adult can keep having some control over his environment, but a kid keeps going back into a toxic environment and can't do anything about it. That stayed with me. You know where Oliver is going, but the kid still has a tough road.

It became clear after a while with Oliver that his only real problem was his parents -- that if Paul could somehow fix those two, Oliver would be just fine.

I like that episode 6 where the kid says, "They'd both better off without me," and on some level, he's picked up on his parents worst secret. The kid's childhood is, I think, about to be over, but at least there was a connection to Paul, and a healthy one at that. It's a strange thing trying to wrap these things. It's like trying to land a jetliner. In the Israeli version, almost everyone ended with a hug. I thought, "We can't do that," so we ended up with a mix.

Last week was obviously designed to be the darkness before the dawn, and there was a lot of discussion on the blog about how many of the patients Paul was actually helping.

I'd like to think that Paul helped all of them. It was designed for Mia to hit bottom. It's week 6. A number of therapists have said it's not unusual. It does take a while, if you hit bottom in week 2, you have nowhere to go. Hitting bottom is sometimes how the process begins to turn around. Week 7 is, for some of them, a legitimate beginning, and for some of them, it could be a dead cat bounce. If they are not better, this season, it's nothing where Paul's impairments screwed up the therapy. That was another goal I was hoping to achieve. Oliver, I think he did a pretty professional job, and the kid's parents are just not able to see past their needs right now. There's a hint in week 7 that now that the couple's done, at least they won't be at it. You can hope for a better day for the kid. I hate to be "Blame the parents, not the therapist," but it doesn't feel to me like Paul really blew it, like he got so attracted to Bess that he did this. There's a reality to it: you can do your job well -- there's a meta, you can do your job well and the show can still not get picked up -- and people's circumstances can change.

April is on the road to a physical recovery, which is probably the most important thing for her. Emotionally, I don't think she's ready to do what she needs in therapy.

You didn't write the first season, where Alex died, but since his death hangs over so much of this season, let me ask you what you think: was his suicide Paul's fault?

There's moments in this season where he says, "I misunderstood Alex's anger." The larger question is what does Paul think? I think Paul's anger at Alex, I think the affair interfered with his judgment, with Laura, Paul's feelings for Laura interfered with the treatment. I don't think you can say the suicide was his fault, but that wasn't his proudest moment as a therapist. I think that's going to haunt Paul for a long time. You can only let yourself off the hook. Paul has a couple of moments in the season where he flat-out says to Gina, he spells out his reasons for guilt. When Walter says "You've got blood on your hands," I know you can't save everybody, but that's hardly a good treatment. There was too much going on between them, and Paul was unable to handle his own transference there. If he had lost Walter, that would have been tough for him. If you lose a patient a season, that's just not good. He will have a degree of guilt, or sense of guilt about Alex for the rest of his life.

You told me last week that Walter didn't attempt suicide in the Israeli show. Where did that story go instead?

The Israeli show stopped tracking Walter after week 4 and switched over to the daughter. I asked Hagai (Levi, creator of "Be'Tipul") about that. It seemed like he was heading for suicide. I guess week 5 it was just one on one, Paul and Walter's daughter, and week 6 was Paul and the daughter and Walter trying to reconcile. I talked to Hagai and said, 'What happened there?" He said he thought it'd be interesting, I said, 'You can't introduce a new character here! That's cheating.' My psychoanalysis of what the Israeli writers were thinking is, the next episode would have been his suicide attempt, and none of them wanted to go there. Because they were all writing about their dad in some way... It was getting to a very dark place with Walter, so they brought in the daughter and talked about lesbianism and India. Mike Leigh films can sometimes get away with that, but we couldn't.

In a weird way, the show is writing the stuff you don't want to write, and going to places you would rather avoid. On top of that, it was fascinating to do the hospital scene. And we built a set, which we've never done, and there was Mahoney, staring out the window, that shot was gorgeous, that was the director, Jean de Segonzac's choice. Walter really was tough in that episode, and I thought, 'Okay.' It was kind of great. Obviously, you could play that whole episode weepy or tough. I had written it where he'd get tough again and say "Get out, get out," but I had assumed there'd be a larger loss of dignity before that, and I thought, 'This is probably correct.' This wasn't about Mahoney's chops; he can do anything. I messed myself up with the week 6 episode, I got very sad writing it, and I thought, 'Okay, this will work.' It was interesting, because it's about missing your life, and that sense of the loss of your true self early on. Boy, did it resonate on the set with a lot of the older guys. Men, you're not supposed to acknowledge that. But seeing Mahoney weep there, and looking around, and there was a DP all screwed up, he'd just lost his dad. It was worth the wait. Who am I to tell Mahoney? You bring John Mahoney in, you listen to him. And he's, in a way, the most people pleasing actor I've worked with.

Were there any similar situations where the other guest actors were taking the characters in directions you didn't anticipate?

With Alison (Pill) and Hope (Davis), you don't get rehearsal time on this, but they would come in for a read-through, and I would always take their notes. I trust the collaborative process a lot. If there's one good thing I get from theater. I had Edie Falco in "Side Man" (Leight's Tony-winning play), and if something couldn't work for her, it usually meant that her instincts were right and my writing was wrong. Gabriel, too, in the morning, if something wasn't working, if you do 35 of these, you better be able to figure out when he's not happy. It's one of the more collaborative shows. The downside is you're shooting in two days and trying to do it like a play where you rehearsed for four weeks.

With Hope, the original conception of Mia was a much more overtly ethnic character, and then Hope was available, and she was too good an actress not to take. Then it becomes somebody like Martha Stewart, who was ethnic once, and has become something else, at some cost to herself. Alison, by the time you get to week 4, 5 and 6, everyone's in sync. I just watched and waited for something not to work and tried to figure out what the problem is.

Dianne Wiest did not want to judge Paul, and that became tricky for me. There were also times when people had certain reactions, and you don't let go of the reins. Dianne didn't want to judge, criticize, and if I had taken every one of Dianne's notes, there would have been no conflict at all. I started to write about the Buddha-like place she was coming from. The big mistake I made from week 1 was they both sat on the couch together, and there's such a huge difference in the energy. She wanted to do that again, and I couldn't let that happen again. It's a give and take, and then at the end of the day, I've gotta figure it out on the set.

One of the things you did more often this year than last was to give us glimpses of Paul's other, less interesting patients, and to show how much less engaged he was with them.

One of the things I liked was that these are the four who are getting to him. Therapists will do 30-50 hours a week of this stuff. I thought it was interesting to have therapists talk about, "You have your narcissists, and they come back every week, and they don't get better, but it's stable income." I thought it would be interesting to get a larger picture of Paul's life, every now and then have a little bit of humor. And also the notion of Oliver seeing a happy couple. It's such a claustrophobic world, those little extra glimpses. I enjoyed them, I think everybody enjoyed them. The lesbian couple in the last Walter episode, the Caucasian lesiban was played by Jackie Reingold, who had written all the Mia episodes.

And whenever you did an episode, or a scene, that wasn't in therapy, it was still structured like a therapy scene.

I don't know why I made that a rule, but I felt it's less of a cheat, if it's only two people in a room together. Walter in the hospital room, Mia in her office. It should always be a one-on-one, Paul at his dad's bedside, Paul with Tammy, a relationship that was obviously doomed. He's not ready emotionally. For some reason, that was important to me. Otherwise, I worried it was too jarring. You can imagine an hour-long series of this on network, there'd be a session, and a scene at the bar where they're all hanging out. It'd be a different kind of show.

Well, I was just watching this new Fox show, "Mental," that's about a psychiatric hospital, and you get a little bit with the patient, and then you cut away to banter between the supporting cast, then to another case -- there's a lot of respite there.

I had actually written a (network) pilot a few years ago about a family therapist whose personal life was in a shambles. I know what that rhythm would be, and you would never be allowed the intensity of these 20-minute one-act plays. That's a lot of time for two characters to be talking.

It's a lot more intense than the network version would be.

I was on "Criminal Intent" for six years. We did some very good stuff there, but it's the third one of a tired genre. There are 11 million viewers at times, or even 5 million, which is a number we'll never get, and I get more response to this than I ever did from "Criminal Intent." The people who plug into this show are in trouble, I think. It's a much more visceral experience.

I imagine it'd be tough to go back to writing something like "Criminal Intent" after doing this.

Among the things I didn't have to worry about were act-outs. "You're pregnant," cut to commercial. I still tried to have a structure but didn't have to worry about that. I didn't ever want one of those actors to get a bad script. I'm not saying I didn't disappoint them, but I didn't want to disappoint them. It's an intense process, and I just never wanted to hand Mahoney or Hope a bad script. It's like having master musicians come in: you want to have a score for them. I've had the other grind. It would be a tricky transition. Maybe it's a challenge. I think "Mad Men" pulls it off -- I think that's why people say ("In Treatment") is the best show on the air, because ("Mad Men" is) not on right now. You can do it, but it's not easy. This was really good writers, really good actors, really good crew killing themselves -- and a lot of corporate anxiety.

How do you mean?

We made a lot of changes. The relocation, a little opening things up, more exteriors. HBO, I'm sure, and (producer) Stephen Levinson, they were nervous, because season one had the Laura/Paul "Is he or isn't he?" and that has an obvious appeal to an audience, and they were very worried that you can't compete with "Is he going to f--k her or not?" Also, I had wanted him to be functioning better, last year there were more outbursts in a way. The way he would push Alex. We didn't do as much overt malfunctioning of Paul, and that made them nervous. There was a fear, at times, you were smoothing out too much. And because we were shooting out of sequence, they didn't know it was going somewhere. It was somewhat less histrionic. The Mia character was sexualized, but it wasn't as overtly titilating. That has to be scary if you're a network that has a show that people praise but a lot of people don't watch, and you're taking some sex out of it. We changed the location, moved him away from his family, gave Gina a waiting room set, set some boundaries -- there were a lot of e-mails and phone calls for a long time. I don't blame 'em.

I hope they were happy with the result of all those changes.

I'm sure they are. I think, I don't mean this disrespectfully, but it'll help if it garners more nominations and awards. People don't always trust their impulses. My life got easier when the reviews started to come out. There was fear, and anxiety, that's all. Richard Plepler has always been very proud of this season. But Steve Levinson, who does "Entourage" and is the Dick Wolf of this show, there are things he wishes were different, where we respectfully disagree. I think there was a worry that he was becoming too much the therapist this year. And as the show went on, you got to know more and more about him, and the conflicts were clearer. It's more dramatic to have a guy fighting one of his patients and trying to sleep with another. But, boy, do that two years in a row...

He wasn't fighting the patients, but he seemed even more combative with Gina this year -- especially since he seemed so calm the other four days of the week.

Unfortunately, we shot out of sequence, so we didn't do Gina week 3 until we'd done Mia week 6. He was functioning better at the job and was purging out of him in those sessions. And that's a choice (Gabriel) made, that I was fascinated. The way Gabriel played those scenes, there'd be another example -- I didn't know they were going to play that hot. And there was never any rehearsal, the day of, the two of them arrive, and usually you shoot the guest actor first and then turn around and get to Gabriel and he's talking about his father and his mother, and you go, 'Oh, that's not what I heard, but that's very good.' That went with the lonely life he's leading this year, and in terms of the transference. A lot of reasons for it, and it was sort of fascinating to watch. Maybe Gabriel knows more than I do about what Paul would do in this situation. I used to love when directors would try to give him a big acting note about Paul.

What would happen?

On a good day, he would just nod. On another day, I was standing next to him when he got an incredibly complicated note -- "Now, you're playing this 20 percent understanding that this really means he misses his father, and 10 percent..." -- just this unplayable note, the director walked away, I smiled at Gabriel, said, "Are you good to go?" he said, "I'll just give a blank look. It'll work." And he gave a blank look, and the director liked it, because he thought the note had been taken.

I liked that, near the end of the final April episode, we get to hear more about Sophie.

That came from a writer's assistant, this guy John Haller. You want to have a smart support staff. The piano music Mia played in one episode, that was our script supervisor. But John read that script, tossed that idea out, and (Sarah) Treem and I went, "That's a very good idea, young John." He said there was an overlap between the two characters, and it would be sweet, and it just went right in. And in a way, it provides a little closure on season one, and there's an echo of Sophie in April, for a variety of reasons. And I'm glad when Paul gets a little bone every once in a while. We beat the crap out of him this year. That was not in the Israeli show, the original draft or my rewrite, but it came from the writer's assistant.

One of my readers suggested that if Paul had been the idiot April assumed he would be when she entered therapy, she would have gotten bored with him and gone to chemo on her own. But instead, she got caught up with him, and needed him to make her go.

I don't know that she would have gone for herself. I like to think Paul had that effect on her. There's a suicidal side to that character: "It's better for me to wake up dead than upset my family." I don't agree with that (interpretation). That's a possible interpretation, I don't know that she would have gone on her own. She got lucky with Paul. And even with Paul, it took her four weeks. I don't see it. But I do love there are different ways of viewing these characters.

And by taking her to chemo, he effectively destroys any chance of continuing as her therapist.

The therapy is ruined at that moment. I imagine he would do that again. That was also interesting for us. That's why April ends where it does. The relationship, if it wasn't dead then, was dead when he called her mother. And he must have known it would be.

There's a similar thing with Oliver, where he asks to live with Paul. And Paul can't say yes because it'd cross a line, but also, I think, because he knows he wouldn't do right by Oliver once he stopped being his therapist and started being his dad.

There's a line where Paul says, "I can't do it," and he says it really quickly. That was an interesting moment. The more professional answer there. Part of him must have wanted to say, "Okay," as insane as that would be. But he's got that flaw, I guess. Some of what Gina says to him in week 7 is true. Maybe that's the lesson he needed to learn this year: you don't save them.

I imagine that's a choice he made with April. That was another acting moment: Gabriel on the set in week 4, it had been written more therapeutically, the moment where he takes her, and he started playing it father/daughter. It was a little tricky on the set, but we stripped away all the jargon, and he was a father saving a daughter. "I'm telling you you're going now." He immediately played it that way, and then I, as quickly as possible, rewrote it to support that. I thought it was a really brilliant instinctive choice on his part. This isn't about therapy -- "For f--k's sake, I can't sit there and let her die." And I thought, "Oh, yes, our mistake." But therefore he's lost his therapeutic neutrality and become a surrogate parent. Once you've lost that therapeutic neutrality, it's like once you've slept with somebody, you can't go back to the way it was.

Before the season, we talked about whether Walter, at his age, is better off for having to examine an unexamined life, and you have that line in the week 6 episode where the other therapist suggests Paul shouldn't have opened Pandora's Box.

I don't think Paul opened it. He has that line: "This is the last thing I would have wanted for you." I thought about this a lot. My dad played trumpet his whole life, and he developed the first signs of Parkinson's, it affected his playing, we didn't even know it was Parkinson's. And suddenly he was depressed, but the truth was, he was depressed his whole life, but he had his horn. Here was this 70 year old trumpet player who couldn't play his trumpet going to therapy for the first time. It was glacial, but in the end, the last years of his life were better for it. It was nothing you would have wished on him. That's why that line was written. If the guy had come in and (Paul) could have just knocked it with sleeping pills, he would have. I don't think Paul opened it up -- from week 1, he saw it. If you go back, you see Gabriel observing a lot early on. Maybe there were surprises along the way. But what you get are this guy whose defenses are about to collapse. So now, what do you do? There was no point. You couldn't shore them up anymore. I talked to shrinks. Some shrinks like (the flood), which tells you something, but it's like, you can never get the guy to this point, but if that's where he is when he comes in, it's about managing the crash when it's inevitable, and having enough of an alliance for when they hit bottom, so they have a person who can help them get back together. It would have better for this not to happen to Walter, I suppose. But it's a flood. It's 65 years of denial, or whatever. When those structures break, there's no holding it back. The dam broke, and there was nothing to be done.

But would Walter have gone to Africa to find Natalie if he hadn't been seeing Paul?

I think he was going to Africa also to run away from the crisis. I think that was, in part, a self-destructive act on his part. He has this enormous burden of guilt. I suspect he would have, in some way, precipitated his firing. his firing was inevitable, but going to Africa made it easier. It's Darwinian, when you're weakened in that world. I thought a lot about safari politics. He's the one who was going to take that hit. My belief is, he is better off because Paul was with him during this time. That would be my hope for people viewing it.

You had a lot of shrinks offering you opinions on this show?

You ask 10 shrinks, you get 10 different opinions, all of which disapprove the other 9. It's very strange, the number of shrinks come up to me. The number of people whose spouses turn out to have been therapists. There was something on HBO where they interviewed me and Paris (Barclay), so they know me. I've actually had people come up to me on the street and go, 'You're that guy. You know something? it's unrealistic. There'd be many more silences in a session.' And I go, 'I appreciate it, but it's a drama. We have silences, but if we just do silences, people wouldn't watch.' They get upset about Gina and Paul, there are too many boundaries that have been crossed in the past. But I think, 'Okay, it is Dianne Wiest.' They're not taking into account my issues. But also, would Paul have gone to someone else last year?

Do you have any idea when HBO might make a decision on a third season?

No, and it's an anxiety. Right now, for me and a lot of the writers, the next two weeks is musical chairs in terms of hiring for next season, and if the music stops...? I'm as anxious as any of the fans are to know. If you could find out, that'd be great. I've heard wildly differing rumors. It will come down to budget more than anything. There is no season 3 in Israel, so it means this season would be somewhat costlier, because the writers would have to be paid respectfully. And every season goes up (in cost). I think it will come down to things beyond my control. I don't know what else we could have done, and I don't mean that in an a--hole way. If I was a network, I would be jerking me around, too.

At the very least, it feels like that's a good season. I feel okay about it. But it'd be tricky to go back to doing something else.