Anyway, that aside - although I enjoyed Tuco, myself, I can certainly appreciate your point about upping the surrealistic quality of the show during Season 3. (It's part of why I chose the 'Kafkaesque' promo when I posted those a while back. Most of the promos for Season 4 were overbaked melodrama, and that was the only promo that highlighted the subtle but increasingly comic surrealism of the overall picture being painted by the show. Leaving aside whether or not 'kafkaesque' fully applies, the characters are trapped in an increasingly bizarre micro-universe, but when an outside entity observes that strangeness -- "Sounds kind of Kafkaesque" -- the characters themselves don't understand what is meant by the observation -- "Yeah ... uh ... *totally* Kafka-esque.") It's easy to brush it off as Jesse's doofiness, but I loved that joke.

I feel like the first time I felt that tone creep in and begin to stir the pot a little was with the fake spanish music video about Heisenberg that opened one of the mid-Season 2 episodes. The show had occasionally veered into comic weirdness, but not to that degree. The music video wasn't a flash forward, or back, as was the usual for the show openers; it wasn't something that even actually existed. It was more like some kind of wild, self-referential dream-sequence. And an upbeat, musical one at that. I didn't like it when I first saw it, but appreciated it greatly in retrospect.

Around the same time (I think) there was an opening showing Gus's distribution system through Los Pollos Hermanos, with this weird, clucky sort of "chicken music" throughout (I think the guy who scores this show is brilliant, incidentally); and sometime thereafter, a flashback with Theo where Gus is referenced sneeringly as "this ... Chicken Man." To date, I think of Gus as "the Chicken Man." There is unquestionably something very intentionally absurd and comical about this in many ways truly fearsome character being surrounded and contextualized by cartoonish chicken imagery. When he poisoned everyone in 'Salud' and issued his battle cry to those remaining in the house, I thought to myself: "Damn -- don't fuck with the Chicken Man!" If you really think about it, it should be so stupid -- yet BB pulls it off perfectly. This bizarre quality of Gus's as a villain is heightened by the singularity of his existence. While most characters on the show are pitched in a very realistic, believable way, Gus is an isolated figure -- he has no existing family we know of, a very foggy international past, no evident sexuality or biases -- just a demand for Perfection and Professionalism in all things. He's a beautifully inscrutable, weird creation, who nevertheless does not -- unlike the twin Brothers -- upset the tonal realism that otherwise saturates most aspects of the show. ("The Wire" tried to do a character, albeit a minor one, a little bit like Gus, and failed miserably -- if you ever want to see what something like Gus would be like in less capable hands, turn there.)

Even the name is great, in long or short form. In short form it's almost like a thing unto itself. "What's a Gus?" And the longer, eloquent "Gustavo Fring" ... character names don't get any better than that. I couldn't care less about the Emmys, but I hope Giancarlo Esposito gets one for his work on this show.

All right, that's all -- sorry to carry on; like w/ McCarthy, BB is one of those things I could talk about all day.

K