I figure I should fill you in on a couple of things that are going on with me right now, seeing as we’re friends (we’re friends, right?). The first thing is: I’ve been speeding through the first 30 interminable episodes of Better Call Saul, racing to the mythical bit where you all keep telling me it “gets really good”, and secondly, I’ve been reading a lot of short stories. As you can imagine, my perception of time is fairly glooped out by the tandem consumption of these two art forms: one, a 30-hour trudge through the desert that occasionally, as a treat, devolves into an undramatic and unfunny court procedural; and the other, the most succinct way of getting to the point possible beyond a news bulletin. Inside me are two wolves: one is convinced every great TV show requires more than a day’s worth of viewing to get its ideas across; and another thinks a good writer can do more with one page of a short story than most people can with an entire novel.
This has been exacerbated by watching American Gigolo (Paramount+), the Jon Bernthal-fronted remake of the Richard Gere name-maker from 1980, which – for 40 exhilarating minutes of the pilot – promises to be some of the most frenetic, fast-moving, sexy TV ever made. Then Act 3 happens. Then episode two, and then episode – oh no you’re not. You’re not going to believe this. There are seven more hours of this.
