Television is Dead. Long Live Television • Buttondown

September 15, 2024

By David Swanson

Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers.

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A few months ago, Variety ran a big feature package which eulogized the the golden age of television on its untimely demise: “One thing is clear,” stated the 119-year old industry bible, “peak TV, after a decade-long run, is dead.” It’s a proposition I wrote about last year, when we ran a sampling of the greatest oral histories in television history ahead of the Emmy Awards. “Peak TV coincided with the rise (some would say ubiquity) of the oral history as the format best suited to telling the behind-the-scenes stories of our favorites series,” I said at the time. “This list runs the gamut from classic sitcoms and critical sensations to cult favorites and one-season wonders.”

Since the 2024 Emmys are airing tonight, Talia and I decided to republish that column—which includes Peak TV classics such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men—as well as look back on some of our previous television coverage. In addition to an essay on last year’s WGA writer’s strike, Talia has written about a number of shows for the newsletter, including Hannibal, Taskmaster, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, True Detective, and a trio of crafty comfort watches. The two of us have also discussed a bunch of TV in our monthly culture chat, such as Shogun, Ripley, and The Bear, all of which are nominated for tonight’s awards. I’ll be rooting for Slow Horses, which gets my vote of best show on television.

As I’ve noted here before, the shaggy noir is my favorite genre, and Slow Horses—starring a titanically grubby Gary Oldman running roughshod over his team of hapless intelligence agents—is a close relative: the shaggy espionage thriller. Between the Emmy-nominated shows mentioned above and my other recent favorites—Industry, Bad Monkey, Fargo, House of the Dragon, The Gentlemen—this has actually been a pretty great year for television. Then again, as I wrote in January, “we had incredible television long before the dawn of ‘Peak TV’, and we’ll have incredible television for many years to come.” If the current crop of shows is what we’re left with now that Peak TV is dead, you won’t find me mourning.

It’s Saturday Night! An Oral History of “Saturday Night Live”
By James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales
Vanity Fair, September 2002

CHRIS ROCK: It was the best time of my life. The show, that’s one thing. But then there’s the hang. The hang was the best time of my life. I honestly tell you, I made friendships that will last for the rest of my life…
ADAM SANDLER: Backstage with Chris Rock, Farley, Spade was the best. Nothing was better than having a readthrough. You stayed up all Tuesday night—all of us did that—and then we’d do the readthrough and you wouldn’t know what was getting on the show, but you’d have an hour or so while those guys were figuring it out…
DAVID SPADE: We used to make fun of Chris (Farley) at table reads. We were like, “Are you ripping off Belushi in this one, or just Aykroyd?” He wore Belushi’s pants from Wardrobe if he could find any, and sometimes he wore two pairs of pants, which I don’t even know how to explain. Chris looked up to Belushi as the king…
LORNE MICHAELS: We often said Chris was the child John and Danny never had but would have had if they’d had a child. Chevy came to see Chris once, and Chris was doing his falls, and Chevy said, “Don’t you use anything to break your fall?” Chris said, “What do you mean? Did you?” Chris had welts all over his chest. He just assumed that that was the price you paid for doing it.
SANDLER: Farley was a whole other level. It was not even a question of who we all loved and thought was the funniest. When he walked into the room, that was it.

“Sex and the City”: An Oral History
By EW Staff
Entertainment Weekly, May 4, 2010

CYNTHIA NIXON (Miranda): Sarah always talks about Matthew (Broderick, Parker’s husband) and how they’ll walk down the street and he’ll see a woman dressed a certain way and he’ll say, “You did that.”
SARAH JESSICA PARKER (Carrie): I don’t know that I love being associated with the piece of underwear being above a pants waist, which my husband says I’m responsible for but I don’t think so. I think Britney Spears is responsible for that…
CHRIS NOTH (Mr. Big): I do think the fashion side of New York City was articulated by the show in a way it had never been. And I think people enjoyed seeing that. Now a lot of people who come from Europe think they’re going to see New York as Sex and the City. I kind of think that’s a shame. I’d rather have it as the New York of Midnight Cowboy. But what am I going to do? I sound like an old fart, I guess.
MICHAEL PATRICK KING (executive producer) Every time I see the tour bus, I go, “Wow, people are excited to come to New York.” I feel bad sometimes for the residents of Perry Street because there’s a lot of cupcake wrappers from Magnolia Bakery thrown on the street.
KRISTEN SCOTT DAVIS (Charlotte): I wish there was not a line around the block at Magnolia, personally, because I just want to get my cupcakes.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Couldn’t Lose: An Oral History of “Friday Night Lights”
By Robert Mays
Grantland, July 28, 2011

CONNIE BRITTON (Tami Taylor): When Pete got in touch with me and said, “We’re going to make a Friday Night Lights TV show. Why don’t you come play that part?” I was like, “No way!” The only thing worse than playing a nothing part in a movie is (playing it) for years and years on TV.
PETER BERG (creator, executive producer): She said, “Are you fucking kidding me? You think I’m going to spend 10 years sitting on a hard-wood bleacher getting splinters in my ass and cheering on Kyle Chandler? You’re out of your mind.” I said, “I promise. We’ll create a character. We’ll give you a job. We’ll give you dimension. We’ll give you a real voice.”…
BRITTON: It really was a leap of faith, initially, because I only had three scenes in the pilot script. So I remember even going into the pilot and saying, “OK, Pete, just so we’re clear: What’s here on the page in the pilot, that’s not what we’re talking about, right?”
KYLE CHANDLER (Coach Taylor): I’d never met Connie. I didn’t know her from her work either, and I don’t think she knew me from mine. But it didn’t take long — probably 25 steps on the way to go get brunch — that I had an idea that she was going to be a lot of fun to work with.
BERG: I was really worried. Connie and Kyle developed a very flirtatious, precocious relationship right off the bat. And Kyle, of course, is married.

The Family Hour: An Oral History of “The Sopranos”
By Sam Kashner
Vanity Fair, March 2012

JAMES GANDOLFINI (Tony Soprano): I read it. I liked it. I thought it was good. But I thought that they would hire some good-looking guy, not George Clooney but some Italian George Clooney, and that would be that. But they called me and they said can I meet David for breakfast at nine A.M. At the time I was younger and I stayed out late a lot, and I was like, Oh, for fuck’s sake. This guy wants to eat breakfast? This guy’s going to be a pain in the ass. So we met and we spent most of the time laughing about our mothers and our families.
MICHAEL IMPERIOLI (Christopher Moltisanti): Anything I could remotely be right for, I would get an audition for. They brought me in, and I met with David. I thought he hated my audition, because David’s a poker-faced guy. He kept giving me notes and giving me direction, and I walked out of there, and I was like, I blew that one.
EDIE FALCO (Carmela Soprano): I had friends telling me there was a script floating around called The Sopranos, and I thought it was about singers. Carmela was very easy to be. I immediately knew how she felt about things, the way she wanted to look. But an Italian-American Mob wife? I’m not the first person I would think of. I would have cast me as Dr. Melfi, but, luckily, I was not in charge.
LORRAINE BRACCO (Dr. Jennifer Melfi): After doing GoodFellas, I was offered every Mafia gal, girl, wife, mistress, daughter available. And I said to them, “No, I don’t want to do that. I did it. Can’t do it better.” I called up my agent the day before I’m going in to meet David, and I go, “I don’t want Carmela—I want Dr. Melfi.”

With “Friends” Like These
By Warren Littlefield
Vanity Fair, May 2012

MATT LEBLANC (Joey): It’s funny—nowadays people that are famous get chased by the paparazzi. They have this fame, but they don’t have the money to hide from it. We were really fortunate that we were compensated well enough to be able to turn the switch off, as much as one can. Kind of disappear. Barricade yourself in…

LISA KUDROW (Phoebe): Fame doesn’t cure whatever is going on inside of you, however you feel about yourself. The lucky thing was that the six of us had each other to go through it. All we would talk about is “What about people who have this and they don’t have you and you, and they are just on their own dealing with this?”
DAVID SCHWIMMER (Ross): As an actor, the training I received was that I walk through the world as an observer of life and of people. That’s my training. My job is to actually be looking out all the time and watching people. But the effect of celebrity on me was that I suddenly found myself with a baseball cap, with my head down, hiding everywhere I went.
KUDROW: I think before you are famous you think, Oh, if you’re famous, you’re loved and adored. Then when you really experience that attention and everyone cares what you’re doing and wants pictures of you, it doesn’t feel like a warm hug. It reallyfeels like an assault. Then, not long after, you start to realize, This has almost nothing to do with me, and I better do the work.

“The Wire”: Tap into the Oral History of the Greatest Show Ever Made
By Marc Spitz
Maxim, June 4, 2012

WENDELL PIERCE (“Bunk” Moreland): The great thing about shooting in Baltimore was we were each other’s best company. We worked hard, long hours, but we partied hard, too, man. One bar made the mistake of having celebrity-bartender night. It happened one time, and one time only! That’s all I need to say!
IDRIS ELBA (“Stringer” Bell): We smoked a lot of good weed, did a lot of strip clubs. A lot of that.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (Wallace): I kind of grew up around Idris and Wendell and Clarke and everybody. I would just tag along, going to strip clubs. I became a man in Baltimore with those guys
JOHN DOMAN (Rawls): At one point Clarke Peters bought a house and a bunch of us used to stay there. It was like a college fraternity.
SETH GILLAM (Carver): I got Dominic into Madden football, so we used to hold tournaments. It always seemed to work out that the cops were playing against the crooks. We’d play five, six hours in a row. It was intense.
DOMINIC WEST (McNulty): Socially, it did sort of polarize around cops and gangsters. The police tended to go out with police, and the gangsters tended to go out with the gangsters…
MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (Omar): It’s a love affair that I have with those brothers and sisters. Dominic West? That’s by brother from another mother. We took care of each other down there. We partied, we ate together, we got mad together, we laughed and we cried together.

An Oral History of “Cheers”: The Best TV Show That’s Ever Been
By Brian Raftery
GQ, September 2012

TED DANSON (Sam Malone): I’ll tell you about the worst day of my life. Shelley and Rhea were carrying that week’s episode, and the guys were just, “Let’s play hooky.” We’d never done anything wrong before. John had a boat, so we met at Marina del Rey at 8 a.m. We all called in sick, and Jimmy caught on and was so pissed. Woody and I were already stoned, and Woody said, “You want to try some mushrooms?” I’d never had them, so I’m handed this bag and I took a fistful. On our way to Catalina, we hit the tail end of a hurricane, and even people who were sober were getting sick. Woody and I thought we were going to die for three hours. I sat next to George, and every sixty seconds or so he’d poke me and go, “Breathe.” (gasp) And I’d come back to life.
WOODY HARRELSON (Woody): I was a little worried about him. It looked like his face was melting. I think I may have been freaking a little myself, but I had to be cool about it.
GEORGE WENDT (Norm): We got into serious trouble for that. I think we thought Jimmy and Les and Glen would have more of a sense of humor about it. We did it because Ted was doing it. He’s sort of a reluctant leader. He didn’t try to flex his influence. He’s just eminently followable.
DANSON: My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life. I mean, we’re so different (in the cast), some of us. Miles apart. (But) when I see anyone from those days, I tap into that instant love for them. I don’t care what they do, what they say, how different we are: I love them, because it was eight hours a day, eleven years, making each other giggle and laugh and being a team. There was no weak link.

2 Good 2 Be 4Gotten: An Oral History of “Freaks and Geeks”
By Robert Lloyd
Vanity Fair, January 2013

SETH ROGEN (Ken Miller): I dropped out of high school when I started doing the show. I told them I was doing correspondence school from Canada and just wrote Superbad all day.
JAMES FRANCO (Daniel Desario): I was interested in the writing, so after hounding Judd and Paul they said, “You want to see how it’s written?” They took me into Judd’s office, and they wrote a scene right in front of me, just improvising as the characters out loud. That was really important for me.
JUDD APATOW (executive producer): There’s that moment early in your career when you will work harder than any other point afterward. And you can see that in Freaks and Geeks. Just total commitment in every frame of the entire series.
LINDA CARDELLINI (Lindsay Weir): Everybody was so talented and nobody knew it yet. People would hang out with each other and practice and play and think of things.
JASON SEGEL (Nick Andopolis): We would get the script on a Friday, and Seth and James and I would get together at my house every Sunday, without fail, and do the scenes over and over and improve them and really think about them. We loved the show. And we took the opportunity really, really seriously.
ROGEN: We felt if we made the scenes better on the weekend, if we came in with better jokes, they would film it. And they would! And we didn’t know it at the time, but that was completely un-indicative of probably every other show that was on television.

“West Wing” Uncensored: An Oral History
By Lacey Rose, Michael O’Connell, and Marc Bernardin
The Hollywood Reporter, May 2014

AARON SORKIN (creator): It would get rowdy in the Oval Office, especially at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning trying to shoot a nine-page scene with 11 actors, one of whom blows his one line on page eight. But I wrote them anyway because I loved them. The worst offenders were Richard and Allison. If they had a scene together they’d be serious geniuses for three takes and then they’d lose it. It got to the point that where we were doing single coverage, we’d have to move one of them out of the room. Many of the best moments of Toby talking to C.J. are Toby talking to the Script Supervisor.
RICHARD SCHIFF (Toby Ziegler): When I am on that borderline of emotional intensity, I can trip over into hysterical laughter at a moment’s notice. Somebody says something the wrong way and I’m off on a 45-minute laughing binge that the crew starts hating me for. This was a pattern of behavior that went on for many years on The West Wing because there was a lot of very emotionally intense stuff.
ALLISON JANNEY (C.J. Cregg): Richard Schiff and I would constantly think of terrible ways to spend our time waiting to work. We started doing just ridiculously silly things in my trailer like playing air guitar and lip-syncing to crazy songs. We made Aaron come in to see us do “The Jackal,” and then he put it in the show.
BRADLEY WHITFORD (Josh Lyman): Josh was the perverse one on set. He’d set everybody’s iPod to Mandarin, or you’d be reading a book on set and the last four pages are torn out. And he had no sense of proportion. One day I am doing a scene and there’s a big crowd of people and Jimmy Smits comes over and he hugs me and goes, “I love you too, man. And those flowers were amazing and the letter means so much to me.” Josh had snuck into my trailer, gotten my stationary and written a vaguely homoerotic thing to Jimmy about working together.

The Uncensored, Epic, Never-Told Story Behind “Mad Men”
By Lacey Rose and Michael O’Connell
The Hollywood Reporter, March 11, 2015

MATTHEW WEINER (creator): There were famous people who came in to read. The guys from That ’70s Showcame in — not Ashton, but the other guys. I’m still impressed by Danny Masterson. But at a certain point, it was working against them. My theory was that The Sopranos casting was great because you didn’t know who any of those people were.
JON HAMM (Don Draper) Some people went in once and got cast; there was a little more reticence with me. I was on the bottom of everyone’s list. The one person who was an early champion of mine was Matthew…
ELISABETH MOSS (Peggy Olson) I was the first person to audition for Peggy. Matt showed us all our audition tapes at a gathering, and it’s hilarious because I don’t look anything like Peggy (in the tape). I’m 23, blond, tan. I look like I just walked off of the beach.
JOHN SLATTERY (Roger Sterling) I went in to read for Don; they wanted me to play Roger. Matt Weiner claims I was in a bad mood the whole (pilot). I had a couple of scenes, but I wasn’t as emotionally invested as some of the people because there wasn’t that much of Roger in evidence yet. Being a selfish actor, I didn’t necessarily see the full potential in the beginning.
CHRISTINA HENDRICKS (Joan Holloway) I was up for another pilot, and I chose Mad Men. The (agency I was with) was like, “It’s on AMC, it’s a period piece, it’s never going to go. Are you crazy? You’re not going to make money for us …” I thought it was a little impatient of them. So I moved on.
JANUARY JONES (Betty Draper) I came in for Peggy twice. Matt said, “Well, there’s another role, but I don’t really know what’s going to happen with her.” He didn’t have any scenes for me, so he quickly wrote a couple.
WEINER: It had been years since I wrote anything in the pilot. And all of sudden, I need a scene by tomorrow for a character who only has three lines.

When “The X-Files” Became A-List: An Oral History
By Mikey O’Connell
The Hollywood Reporter, January 7, 2016

GILLIAN ANDERSON (Dana Scully): I had left New York to go visit my boyfriend and decided to stay in Los Angeles. I was out of work, and we were living in (seedy Hollywood apartment) Villa Carlotta. I went in just like any normal audition.
DAVID DUCHOVNY (Fox Mulder): In 1993, there was an elitist division between movie actors and TV actors. And because I was an elitist and thought myself an artist, I was going to do movies. But my manager (Melanie Greene), bless her, said she had a feeling about The X-Files—and that I needed to pay rent…
CHRIS CARTER (creator): Dave and Gillian weren’t necessarily shoo-ins for the parts due most prominently to one loud voice that wanted someone other than them.
ANDERSON: Once they decided on David, they brought in a few actresses to read with him—women I had been used to auditioning with for musical theater in New York, like Cynthia Nixon and Jill Hennessy.
DUCHOVNY: I met Gillian in the anteroom. I asked her if she wanted to run lines beforehand.
CARTER: The chemistry was there from the very first moment that they were put in front of the camera together.
ANDERSON: I was secretly told that I got the job that day by Randy. He had been holding out for me and naughtily told me before I left. Female characters like that didn’t exist back then on television.

“It Had Never Been Done on Television Before”: The Oral History of “Breaking Bad”
By Emma Dibdin
Esquire, January 16, 2018

VINCE GILLIGAN (creator): I’d heard through the grapevine that AMC were doing a show about the advertising business in New York in the early ’60s. I thought . . . and they also want this? The folks running AMC must be either really really visionary, or really really crazy. I didn’t know which, and I didn’t much care at that point. I was so happy to talk to someone who was into my project.
BRYAN CRANSTON (Walter White): You think about the first page of that pilot script. Open skies. Vast plains. A pair of trousers are falling down and hit the ground, and they’re run over by an RV. Inside it, the driver is wearing nothing but underwear and a respirator, another man is passed out in the passenger seat, two bodies in the back are sliding around in a sea of chemicals and glass—that’s page one! It certainly captures your attention.
AARON PAUL (Jesse Pinkman): It was easily the best hour of television that I’d ever read. I knew I had to fight for it, but I also thought, How the hell is AMC going to pick this up to series? I really thought it was going to be a stretch…
CRANSTON: I asked my agents to move up the interview, which was originally scheduled for a week’s time. I knew once actors started reading this, they were going to be all over it, and I wanted to get in there early and try to convince Vince that I was the guy. My twenty-minute scheduled meeting with Vince turned into an hour and a half, and that conversation gave me the impetus to start imagining what Walter White would be.

“Taxi” Turns 40: A Wild Ride Down Memory Lane With the Cast and Creators
By Marc Freeman
The Hollywood Reporter, September 1, 2018

MARILU HENNER (Elaine Nardo): Our small parties seemed like everyone else’s big party. We were the cool kids on the lot because of those parties. All the Paramount shows hung out with us: Happy Days, Mork & Mindy, Laverne & Shirley, Bosom Buddiesand Working Stiffs. John Travolta and Frances Ford Coppola came around. John Belushi stopped by often to hang out with Danny. He was there the Thursday of our show’s last week in 1982. He died the next day.
JUDD HIRSCH (Alex Reiger): We all wanted to have something to do after the show because we didn’t want to go home. We wanted to be together more than anything else.
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD (Rev. Jim Ignatowsk)i: It was great to leave your dressing room and hang up your costume and go up there with everyone and have a feast.
HENNER: We’d have four or five huge parties a year in the commissary or at Ed’s house. They’d go to 2 or 3 in the morning and then some of us would go out to breakfast.
DANNY DEVITO (Louie De Palma): We knew we’d look back on this as a seminal experience in our lives and careers. Speak to anyone in the cast and crew and they’ll say they were aware of and savoring it.

“Veep” Stars and Creatives Talk Trump, Chaos and the Series Finale in Dishy Oral History
By Bryn Sandberg and Lacey Rose
The Hollywood Reporter, March 29, 2019

JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS (Vice President Selina Meyers): I met with Gore, Barbara Boxer’s chief of staff, Joe Lieberman’s people. We met with lobbyists, attorneys, agents for politicians, pundits. Senators Amy Klobuchar and John McCain. Mitt Romney was super helpful—he was very forthcoming about mistakes he might’ve made in the process. And, of course, I’ve spent a lot of time with Joe Biden.
REID SCOTT (Dan): At first, everyone was very professional. “This is the Senate floor, this is the cloakroom.” Then you’d break for lunch, and the real shit happened. They were like, “You don’t really want to know what it’s like here.” Everyone was dishing out (their business) cards.
ARMANDO IANNUCCI (creator): We were shown around the West Wing by Reggie Love, who was Obama’s Gary at one point, and he kept referencing The West Wing, saying, “This would be where C.J. and Josh would sit down. I’m thinking, “But you’re real. Why don’t you say, ‘This is where President Obama would sit down with Angela Merkel?’ ”
MATT WALSH (Mike): People loved our show. It was more accurate than anything they’d seen.
LOUIS-DREYFUS: Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan told me that she and Antonin Scalia used to get together every week and they would discuss Veep.

The Making Of “Lost”: An Oral History
By Nick De Semlyen
Empire Online, September 22, 2020

JJ ABRAMS (co-writer/director): We were writing it while we were casting it.
APRIL WEBSTER (casting director): God only knows how it all worked out, because it was chaos. They were adding in characters and changing others all the time. Hurley was originally a 50 year-old redneck NRA guy. He ended up being played by Jorge because JJ had seen him the night before on Curb Your Enthusiasm, playing a drug dealer.
JOSH HOLLOWAY (Sawyer): Early on I was supposed to drop Hurley off a cliff in the pilot, because he was too heavy to hold.
JORGE GARCIA (Hurley): I remember reading some Hurley breakdown and it said “redshirt” in it. I didn’t realise it was a Star Trek reference and he was going to die. I thought it was just that he wore a red shirt.
DAMON LINDELOF (co-writer): The idea was: “It’s pure survival. Darwin. Dog eat dog.” Fortunately, once we cast Jorge, we got pretty married to the idea of not killing Hurley.
ALYSSA WEISBERG (casting director): Jon Hamm came in to read for Jack. Obviously, this was before Mad Men.
MATTHEW FOX (Jack): I got cast ten days before we started shooting, Usually I read things before I go into meetings. But there was no script. When I did finally get to look at something, JJ put me in a room and proceeded to open the door every 20 minutes, saying, “What do you think? What do you think?” I said, “You gotta let me finish!” But I was blown away, from the first page.

“Game of Thrones”: An Oral History of the Best TV Show of Our Time
By Laurence Mozafari
Digital Spy, December 29, 2020

NIKOLAJ COSTER-WALDAU (Jaime Lannister): You start out in the extreme, after episode one where (Jaime) has sex with his twin sister and he tries to kill this innocent, sweet-looking boy. It questions your moral beliefs, that’s for sure.
EMILIA CLARKE (Daenerys Targaryen): I didn’t watch the first couple of episodes with my parents, my dad in particular.
COSTER-WALDAU: A friend of mine sent me a link to this website, about concerned parents, it was more or less a hate letter to me. ‘He will always be known as that actor. Incestuous’. It was very hateful. So that was a great thing to click on…There are so many people that get really passionate about this. ‘There’s too much sex! There’s too much violence! They killed a dog! Ahh!’ It’s just amazing, because it’s just fiction and we’re very serious about it.
ALFIE ALLEN (Theon Greyjoy): There was one time where I was with my mum and accidentally watched it. Ros (Esmé Bianco) was involved in a really graphic lesbian sex scene and my mum was just so shocked. That was pretty funny. We don’t watch it together anymore though, that’s for sure.
MICHELLE FAIRLEY (Catelyn Stark): I got a no-nudity clause so I always get to keep my clothes on… The producers put it in, not me!
COSTER-WALDAU: Do we really need to see that Hodor has a huge dick? I don’t know. But that’s the choice.

The Goodman Experiment: The Oral History of “Better Call Saul”
By Alan Siegel
The Ringer, April 14, 2022

BOB ODENKIRK (Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman/Gene Takavic): I would still rehearse by doing the (Robert) Evans voice in my trailer, doing Saul runs. Once I knew the lines, I would do it as Evans…
BRIAN CRANSTON (Walter White, Breaking Bad): There were things, little hooks, little connector lines that he was able to add to trapeze himself from one line to the next line to the next. That’s always really good for an actor to feel confident in being able to connect thoughts. The gift of gab, he was able to bring that…
ODENKIRK: The first thing I shot was the commercial, which was a lot like a Mr. Show moment. I mean, it was a loud commercial. Saul is being outrageous, and he’s playing a part of a loud lawyer, and he’s doing it purposefully and consciously. So that’s allowed to be an almost comic-level performance because it’s self-aware in its bigness.
PETER GOULD (show co-creator): We just loved writing for this character. And, he was very useful in the Walter White universe. He could explain to Walt anything we needed explained to Walt. He could introduce ideas like the disappearer. He could act as kind of a connector with Mike, and ultimately with Gus Fring. He was super handy. He was a skeleton key.
ODENKIRK: I hadn’t seen much of Breaking Bad before I acted in it, only a few minutes on the plane. And Bryan anchored me. I mean, he really dialed me in.
CRANSTON: I think the first thing he said to me was, “I’ve never seen the show.”