About half a decade ago, people kept telling me to watch BoJack Horseman. This did not fill me with anticipation. But because I am immaculately generous and open-minded and always willing to give even the worst of my enemies a chance, I sat down and watched BoJack Horseman. Each episode consisted of about twenty minutes of wacky animal-based comedy, and then five minutes of a giraffe recounting its sexual trauma or a sea otter weeping about the lost dreams of youth.
Apparently, this made people feel seen : here was a TV show that spoke to the real and complicated feelings that surround our everyday lives, that gave those feelings shape. As it happens, this was exactly how my last two relationships ended. It was all too raw. It pierced me deep to the heart of my being. I had to stop watching.
A few years later, people kept telling me to watch Better Call Saul. So I sat down and watched six seasons of Dark Lionel Hutz. I started imagining all the other characters whose important backstories needed to be fleshed out. We need to make them more human. We need to make them feel real. How about a lusciously filmed period drama called Basil? A fourteen year old kid, gangly and awkward, lost in a grey industrial English town. The other children mock him relentlessly for his height.
He lives with his father, a brooding, brutal man who never mentions what he did in the warβbut the pallor of it seeps into every corner of their house, the corpses in the tank tracks and Dresden in flames. Young Basil has the opportunity to break the cycle of trauma, but over sixty hours of TV we watch the good in him slowly die. He turns to mockery. He turns to violence. This is all he deserves.
In the final scene, with his soul in tatters, he buys a hotel in Torquay. Danny Cho is a loser who keeps trying to manipulate his little brother into working for his failing contracting company. Amy Lau is a successful but highly strung girlboss in octagonal glasses. Our two heroes start trying to sabotage each other in more and more extreme ways.
