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Over the last few years, we’ve gotten to know Andy Richter a little better than being known as the funny, talented, and affable comedy partner in crime to Conan O’Brien. At least in as much as you can get to know someone through social media posts. I don’t want to say Richter pulls no punches, because Richter does consider what he’s saying, but he’s also open — about his divorce, his anxieties, his opinions on politics, and his life. The Three Questions podcast is a continuation of that, whether officially or no. In each episode, Richter utilizes that same openness in long, rich interviews with comics, actors, and interesting people, seeking to find out why his guests are who they are without a block on reflecting on his own experiences.

A few weeks ago, just prior to the start of widespread social distancing, we spoke with Richter about that openness, getting to the core of who people are, being happy with his life, and his work partnering with Conan O’Brien. We also did our best to get a sense of who he is.

I really like the approach with the podcast. Everyone you have on, it seems like there’s an established relationship or that they’re people that you know. Is that a part of the mix here or am I misreading?

Well, it frequently is. But then I also talk to people that I don’t know that well. But I try to come from the perspective of treating everybody like I’m going to start and just do a little mini-biography. Not just with dates and resumes but also with a little bit of introspection, self-reflection, and with a kind of philosophical angle. And what’s nice is that I think most people have known what they’re getting into. And for the people that I know really well, it’s an excuse to talk to them in a way that I normally wouldn’t talk to them. I wouldn’t say “tell me about your childhood” to somebody that I’ve known for 20 years. I’ve learned things from people that I’ve known forever just because of the format of the thing. I want a certain level of familiarity with everybody that comes on and I try and gain that by not only just being polite and relaxing and having a pretty good sense of how deep I can go with people, but also by being willing to share stuff myself.

I’m uncomfortable with the sort of borderline between creating an interesting show in which people say honest, real, and interesting things and exploiting people and tricking them into saying more than they might want to share in a public forum by exposing too much of themselves. I don’t want to just have people spill their guts for content. But I do think it [the podcast] is kind of an interesting thing to listen to and I think that when you hear people talk it’s better to hear honesty than it is to hear dishonesty. My idea is just to kind of have the kind of conversations that I like to have with people, which aren’t necessarily about pop culture, but more about, “Why do you think you are the way you are?”

Like you say, you open yourself up on the show, also on social media, talking about things that are going on in your life. Is that sort of how you walk that line? You wouldn’t go someplace that you’re not prepared to go personally so it’s a kind of one for you, one for them kind of thing?

I don’t look at it just like some kind of very strictly formulated quid pro quo. I also think there’s good value in not being ashamed of your humanity. And it’s a touchy thing because, especially when you’re in the public eye, people can be really shitty. I went through a divorce and there are people online — shit posters — who basically use that as, “Oh, here’s a new thing to be mean to him about.” Which is just mind-boggling to me. This is the dissolution of my family. [Laughs] This is the worst thing I’ve ever been through and now you’re yelling at me about it because you don’t like who I’m voting for for president so you’re saying shit about the breakup of my home? So you have to be careful.

But then again, I also feel like this is all real stuff and I’m not ashamed of being a real person and I’m not ashamed of having emotions and having difficulty and having pain in my life. And in many ways, the reason I say it out loud is so it doesn’t seem like a dirty little secret. It’s cathartic for me to talk about. I’ve been in therapy for a million years. It’s cathartic to talk about things and the human experiences is usually more similar than it is dissimilar between any given two people. So why not talk about it?

I mean, I see that and I am inspired by that. But I’ve also had things going on in my life that I’ve written about or thought about writing about and there has been a fear aspect that I couldn’t shake. Specifically with your divorce, when you decided to really open up about that, how did you get past “am I going to get bullied” concerns? Is this going to affect me in a bad way mentally if I see all these assholes online going at this?” How do you get past that?

Well, there was a time early on in this particular process that I was such a raw nerve that I don’t even know that there was a lot of thought involved. I was just kind of screaming into the void and you just kind of play it by ear… Or, at least I should say, I just kind of play it by ear and I try not to say things that could possibly be interpreted as biased against anybody involved in the situation. I try not to divulge personal things about people other than myself. It’s fine for me to talk about how I feel but if talking about how I feel somehow insinuates something about the way someone else is or behaves or does I don’t talk about it. Because it’s not fair. I only can tell my story.

So I am very careful about that. I’m also very careful to not be… You know, I made a couple of jokes on Twitter… very sort of benign jokes about, “now I’m a divorced dad living alone.” And I realized that’s not funny. To me, it felt like catharsis and the way I deal with lots of stuff is to make jokes, but I thought, “My kids aren’t going to think this is funny.” So I deleted them. Because they don’t have an ironic distance from it that even I might have. It wasn’t a joke to my kid and still isn’t a joke to my kids and it shouldn’t be. You learn, you make mistakes and you learn

How have they handled the divorce and kind of the aftermath and where you are now?

Pretty good. Everybody’s doing pretty good. But there’s always been lots of communication. I mean, everybody loves their kids, but I mean my kids, they’re really fantastic, emotionally evolved people. They’re both really smart and really sensitive and very caring and loving people. So it helps. But the main thing is, we talk about it. We don’t let stuff fester. And they understand that. That doesn’t mean I force them. They’re encouraged to talk about it and I’ll tell them that. I think that they feel we can talk to each other. A good way to parent is based on learning by negative example. And so not being able to share certain things was a frustration to me when I was a kid and then there was oversharing too. [Laughs] But finding that balance to me — it’s been very important.

How do you think your parent’s divorce kind of impacted you? You were very young, right?

Yeah. I was very young.

How did that impact your career, what you wound up doing?

The main thing it did was it made me sad and invited this sadness into my life that was like a character that was… In the story of my life, sadness was like a next-door neighbor. I guess probably as far as impacting my career, I mean, I will say that from an early age, I liked how making people laugh in my family eased the tension. So, I ended up, as time went on, becoming kind of the keeper of morale. The peacekeeper, the morale keeper, the entertainer, and that probably led right into… Hey, it’s a nice thing to make people laugh because it cuts the tension in life, and for a little while everyone feels happy. That probably was a big motivator when I started getting on stage to try and make people laugh.

The show [Conan] has never been overly political, even at the moment we’re in right now where it just seems to be everywhere. Is that something you like about the show? That it has the ability to kind of transcend things and just keep the peace, bring people together and laugh about things as opposed to necessarily reflecting on the scariness and ugliness sometimes?

Yeah. I mean, when we started, that was just the way that we were built. When Jon Stewart really took off on The Daily Show, that was the beginning of taking what was going on and things being so so overtly topical to the point where it was also kind of pointed. To me, just to be reductive about it, that always felt a little bit like preaching to the choir. A lot of that kind of humor, you’re not getting laughs, you’re getting cheers and I don’t care about cheers. I like laughs. Conan actually said to me once, “There are all kinds of people doing topical stuff and making political points,” and he said, “It’s so much more interesting to me to just be silly and be absurd and explore the absurd, and ultimately I think it’s doing a greater service to humanity.” There’s no test to prove that, but I agree with him and it’s what we started out doing. It’s what I’m used to doing. And also, quite frankly, I don’t find it that funny. I don’t find Trump that funny. What’s going on in the world, I don’t want to make jokes about it. I don’t want to have to think about, “What’s a funny bit about how dire everything is?” or “What’s the funny bit about the planet dying?” I’m just glad that I’m not in a place where I have to think up jokes about immigration or jokes about the administration’s ineptitude of handling a possible pandemic. Like ugh! I mean, I could think up jokes about them, but holy shit is that a joyless task.

I mean, for me personally, it’s a favorite that hits the spot from time to time. I can’t deny that. Sometimes it feels good.

Yeah.

There’s a Harold Ramis quote that I saw a couple of days ago and I’ve been thinking about it. I’m gonna butcher it, but it was basically about the idea of political satire and how it kind of gives us a false sense of action. We’re laughing at this thing, we’re smart, we know what’s wrong with the world and we can poke fun at it. But it’s not actually doing much of anything, which I think is an interesting thought.

Yeah. Well, and I also do think that when you take something out in the real world and then you run it through the entertainment machine you sort of… In some ways, it makes it seem less scary, but in other ways, it also, in some ways, makes it more possible. There’s something in me that feels like the more we joke about Trump, the more possible Trump is. I mean, I remember hearing that Will Ferrell always felt a little ambivalent about doing George W. Bush because he made George W. Bush kind of likable. Because Will Ferrell is likable. And he always felt kind of weird about that because when you watch Will Ferrell do George W. Bush, you think like, “Oh, this loveable idiot.” I mean, he may in real life be a lovable idiot, but he was at the front of some really fucking horrible, horrible shit.

It kind of sands down the thorns a little bit.

Yeah. To what Ramis was saying, you’re laughing about it, which feels like doing something, but you’re not really doing something about it. You’re demystifying it. You think you’re really fucking giving a good one… “Man, we really skewered Trump.” No, you didn’t.

Yeah, definitely. I noticed that you’d shared a great old school clip recently revealing a raid and a sting operation on the old show. How often do you revisit things like that? Are you able to look back with fondness on that stuff or do you mostly just kind of focus on the here and now?

Mostly on the here and now. One of our old writers, Brian Stack, who writes for Colbert now, he’ll frequently post old Conan bits because he has an encyclopedic photographic memory of comedy and comedy bits. So he’s almost sort of a little archivist in and of himself. Some of them are great and they make me proud like the one where the whole thing was a sting operation. It basically ends on a really sad and weird, lonely, downbeat note which… I don’t know a lot of other shows [would go there]. I mean, we’re the old men now, but I still feel like this is the funniest talk show on television. We still do stuff that I don’t think other people really do much of. And by that I just mean just fucking weird shit that you don’t see anywhere else. Somebody who might not get it will ask, “What the hell was that about?” And if you do get it, you’re like, “It was about being hilarious.” It’s not supposed to have a lot of meaning outside of this. But that was a good bit. I still am very proud of the place that we carved out for ourselves in late-night television.

It seems like you’ve been doing less with the remotes and things like that. Is that a conscious choice?

It just sort of evolved that way.

In addition to the podcast and being on-camera as Conan’s co-host, you’re also a producer on the show. Is it all bittersweet that your schedule keeps you from pursuing other options? It sounds like from everything that I have read that that was part of the reason you left originally. Has that lessened over time?

It’s lessened over time. I mean, I’m older too. I was itchier when I was younger and I had done that show for seven years. I didn’t set out to be Andy Richter on television, I set out to be a comic actor, a character actor. So there was kind of this unanswered question to me like, “Could I be doing this? Could I be succeeding in this area?” And so I took that leap and I did that. I was the star of three network television shows, which is in and of itself was a pretty big success, but also, I was chewed up and spit out in many ways. And when Conan got The Tonight Show and came back and he basically said, “Do you want to come back, work for a bunch of people that you know and love?” You don’t have to think of a pilot idea and go around town and tell people about it and then three people decide, “Well, we want two different people” and then you have to pick one of them and then you write the script and they tell you what’s wrong and then… It just takes so fucking long. He was saying to me, “Think of something while you’re driving to work and it’s going to be on TV tonight.” And I was really ready to get back to that.

When I see trailers for comedies and I know virtually everyone in them, I’m like, “Why can’t I be in that?” I mean, one of the reasons is, well, I’ve got this steady gig and I have to tell myself, “For the last nine years, I was home for dinner and I have two kids.” I mean, the kids are 19 and 13 now. But for the last ten years or so I was home for dinner, and there’s not a lot of people making comedy for television that can say that, to the level that I am and with this sort of steady income that I’ve had. It afforded me a lot of luxury. In terms of a steady paycheck and a lot of time for my family and for my kids. And also, I got to make fun TV. It never felt like I wasn’t making funny TV.

‘Conan’ airs Monday-Thursday on TBS at 11pm EST and you can listen to ‘The Three Questions With Andy Richter’ podcast on Apple.

Defending Jacob, the new Apple TV+ star vehicle for Chris Evans, does more than alright for itself in some ways. It’s essentially a serviceable and extremely expensive-looking version of legal and psychological thrillers that we’ve seen permutations of many times already. Think We Need To Talk About Kevin (where a parent worries endlessly over whether they raised a killer) crossed with Primal Fear (where an attorney crosses ethical lines to get his client off the murder hook), but the key variation here is that Evans plays both the parent of an accused murderer and an attorney. As such, he’s torn between unconditional love and his drive for justice. This dilemma presents opportunities for endlessly interesting twists, but oh boy, does this show take its time to get there.

There’s something to be said for a nice, slow burn. However, this approach requires enough character development to keep viewers intrigued while they wait for stuff to go down. That’s where Defending Jacob‘s eight-episode structure does it no favors. The project holds itself out, according to the synopsis, as a “character-driven thriller,” but it actually gets wrapped up in holding necessary details back for so long that it squishes its own character development. There’s a cast full of fantastic actors here, all raring to go, but the series simply teases viewers for so long that it never reaches full potential.

Notably, the supporting cast is stellar. J.K. Simmons (always great) and Pablo Schreiber (often suitably smarmy) are well-suited to their antagonistic functions. Betty Gabriel shines as a detective in an unenviable position, while Cherry Jones crushes her defense attorney role. When it comes to the main trio, Jaeden Martell plays the accused, 14-year-old Jacob, in just disturbing enough of a way to make viewers wonder about him. Michelle Dockery is fine as the mom, and Evans continues to prove his range as an assistant DA who not only has his personal but professional life turned upside down, even though perhaps the production should have worked a little harder to cloak those muscles from inevitably popping out. Maybe some bulky sweaters would have helped, but I suppose that Chris Meloni had fairly sizeable guns on Law and Order: SVU, so I can look past that issue. And the muscles do help paint the picture of a perfect family, which must either withstand immense public scrutiny or begin to show cracks.

More about the story: Defending Jacob fashions itself from William Landay’s 2012 novel of the same name. The teenage suspect in this story does a lot of typically unwise teenage things, and the series does a decent enough job of making the audience waver between deciding whether he’s capable of killing. Likewise, his parents struggle through several phases of self-torture as walls close in around them, although the script doesn’t dive anywhere we haven’t seen before with a family in this position. Really, it’s the little things that add up to feeling like this show squanders chances for weaving complexity. For instance, mom jogging through the neighborhood (for a long time) or chopping vegetables (in a normal way, simply chopping them) only fuels story inertia while telling us nothing about her psyche. She’s somber, but we know this already without languid stretches that water down the story. This may disappoint audiences who gravitate toward dark thrillers, which worries me more than a bleak miniseries arriving during bleak times. People realize what they’re signing up for when they push the play button on a legal thriller, but Defending Jacob plays out too slowly to deliver as promised.

With this miniseries, the biggest issue is that the target audience will probably feel like they’ve watched an eight-hour version of a network TV procedural for final reveals that go nowhere novel and don’t yield much of an emotional payoff. The show’s overpadded (and diluted with an abundance of red herrings) to a fault for the mystery that the story hopes to support. By the time the last few episodes roll around, the wildly chaotic final turns feel unearned without an aforementioned slow burn to get to that point.

Overall, Defending Jacob is a puzzling project to behold, since there’s so much talent involved, including director Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), yet the final product feels uneven and bloated, which contrasts strangely with the miniseries’ visual design (full of sharp edges and minimalist decor at every turn). Add that to the inconsistency of schlocky subject matter and arguable junk science sprinkled into a project that genuinely can’t seem to decide whether it’s aiming for prestige TV or not. One could do much worse than watching Defending Jacob, but I can’t help but feel that the story would have been better suited as a lean-and-mean feature film. As it stands, there’s not enough of a fresh approach to this tale to justify an eight-hour time investment.

The first three episodes of Apple TV+’s ‘Defending Jacob’ will premiere on Friday, April 24. Subsequent episodes will drop each Friday.

The first round of the 2020 NFL Draft was a strange one given that it was done virtually, with all personnel and players at their homes due to COVID-19, but despite concerns over the possibility of technical difficulties, it went off without a hitch.

ESPN and the NFL Network’s co-broadcast was handled about as well as one could have hoped for, with Trey Wingo doing yeoman’s work from the studio, running point and keeping things on track and the broadcast from being too awkward as they dealt with feed delays between all the remote analysts at home. The most intriguing part of the home draft, aside from the actual picks being made, was seeing everyone’s home setup.

There were some, like Kliff Kingsbury, that showed off their palatial estate, while other coaches and GMs had much more modest setups. Many family members made appearances, both planned and otherwise, but there were no controversies or disasters, a major win for the league. The one moment that caused a stir was when the Titans were on the clock, ahead of taking gigantic Georgia tackle Isaiah Wilson to replace Jack Conklin, when Mike Vrabel and his nearly grown children were shown, with one dressed as Frozone from The Incredibles.

In the background on the left, next to the costumed son, is a reflection that some thought was one of his other kids sitting on the toilet. Vrabel was sure to clarify that it was not an accidental live shot of his son going to the bathroom, but instead his son was just sitting on a stool.

We’ll take Vrabel’s word for it, but it is a good reminder to everyone with the remote camera that they need to make sure that their background is not only TV friendly, but isn’t going to reflect towards something that might not be.

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One of 2019’s stronger efforts, James Blake impressed many with his Assume Form album. Since then Blake has shared a deluxe version of the album, multiple videos for songs from Assume Form, including “Barefoot In The Park” and “Can’t Believe The Way We Flow,” and performances on both daytime and nighttime TV. Quite possibly closing the book on Assume Form officially, James Blake returns with a new single.

Following recent at-home performances, which that of which included a cover of Billie Eilish’s “When The Party’s Over,” James Blake shares his new single “You’re Too Precious.” The single, produced by Blake and Dominic Maker, serves as his first release since sharing the deluxe version of Assume Form and according to Pitchfork, the song was originally teased during an Instagram Live session Blake held during April.

These Instagram Live session Blake has held have been quite entertaining for his fans and a way for Blake to fulfill his goal of playing more piano. In a quarantine livestream late last month, Blake covered Radiohead’s “No Surprises,” Feist’s “The Limit To Your Love,” and Frank Ocean’s “Godspeed,” while also diving into his own catalog to play “Retrograde” and other hits.

Press play on the video above to hear “You’re Too Precious.”

The makers of Bad Education went into last year’s Toronto Film Festival hoping their film would be acquired by a major distributor who’d push an Oscars-qualifying theatrical run — based on strong dramatic turns from Hugh Jackman, Alison Janney, and Ray Romano. In a mildly disappointing twist at the time, HBO bought it for $20 million. It hits streaming this week, when closed theaters and quarantine-decimated release schedules all but ensure it being the most high-profile new release around. Silver lining?

The cast, outfitted in the finest Long Island aughts kitsch couture, faces pulled and bunched in an approximation of normie, practically ooze prestige, turning in committed performances from the headliners on down to the younger bit players (like Annaleigh Ashford from Masters of Sex, a favorite of mine). Performances aside, it’s hard at times to separate Bad Education‘s pretensions of nuance and moral ambiguity from your basic muddled storytelling.

With sumptuous direction from Cory Finley (previously of the 2018 arthouse darling Thoroughbreds), Bad Education tells the story of Roslyn Long Island school superintendent Frank Tassone (a tight-kinned Hugh Jackman with his Dracula wig set to “Italian”) and how Tassone came to be involved in “the single largest public school embezzlement scandal in history.”

That this all took place in the pressure cooker of the hyper-competitive college placement industry would seem to give Bad Education a timely hook — what with Laurie Loughlin et. al still fighting to stay out of prison — and the fact that it was all uncovered by an article in Roslyn’s own school newspaper makes it feel a bit like a real-life noir twist on Election (in my opinion the best high school movie of all time).

Yet where Election finds comedy in pathos, Bad Education only occasionally seems interested in laughs. It feels more like a patient, minute-by-minute exposé in which the characters only gradually reveal themselves. Finley’s direction feels incisive at times, using subtle shifts in POV to convey what each character is learning and what they’re attempting to obfuscate, but the script, by Mike Makowsky, a graduate of Roslyn himself, leaves somewhat ambiguous the question of what, exactly, is being exposed.

With such a detailed retelling of a 15-year-old corruption case that probably wouldn’t even make the resume of your average Trump cabinet appointee, there are the natural questions of why this story and why now. Truly great movies succeed by finding the humanity in all their characters (see: The Death Of Dick Long) but Bad Education seems uniquely twisted up between sympathy and scorn. It could be that the culprits themselves were the wrong lens for the story.

On the one hand, Tassone and his deputy, Pam Gluckin (Janney), seem like compassionate school administrators — taking the time to study up on all their students and parents in order to provide that personal touch. Tassone even encourages the budding journalist who eventually brings them down (played by promising newcomer Geraldine Viswanathan). On the other, Tassone and Gluckin are clearly political and opportunistic, spending school money on fast cars, second homes, and facelifts (Jackman’s makeup is particularly outstanding).

The vague title is a tell. There’s the general tone of uncovering something shocking and nefarious, but Bad Education is far more interesting when it’s sympathetic toward its stated villains. If Frank Tassone and Pam Gluckin personally profited from turning their affluent school district into exactly the kind of Ivy League feeder program the parents and local community all wanted, what, exactly, is the harm? Even Makowsky, who said he “received the best education of [his] life at Roslyn” seems to struggle with this question.

Bad Education seems aware that Tassone and Gluckin did something wrong, but, aside from two very brief shots of leaky roof tiles, it’s unclear on who actually suffered by it. The administrators themselves take occasional, brief stabs at justifying themselves — noting that good public schools are the foundation of the town’s rising property values — with Tassone belatedly pointing out how the townspeople treat them like faceless, interchangeable cogs in the admissions machine, but it never quite finds its crescendo.

It would’ve benefited Bad Education to see some of these thoughts through. Why are the local parents willing to pay for these grand, superficial improvements to the school’s facade when the educators actually mentoring their children are still expected to work for public servants’ salaries? If they game a broken system and no one notices the missing money, what is the harm? This is slightly more than self-justification.

Ultimately it’s hard to believe that Tassone and Gluckin were the good guys here — they were, after all, administrators, essentially politicians, and they seem to have diverted that excess money into their own pockets, not their school’s teachers — the people still working for 40 or 50 grand or so per year in a place where the average home prices were in the seven figures. Bad Education gives brief lip service to these factors but a few shots of leaky roof tiles are a weak substitute for the real victim’s actual perspectives. Were we supposed to empathize with the ceiling foam?

Bad Education plumbs the psyches of its two leads — the closed gay repressed philanderer Tassone and the oft-married, entertaining-obsessed Gluckin. This produces some great performances from Jackman and Janney (surely among the best of her generation) but ultimately I’m not sure their motivations were actually that complicated. They were greedy, vain, and consumed by maintaining their position, like politicians and CEOs everywhere. When Gluckin, exposed first, pointedly tells Tassone “I’m not the sociopath here” the film seems to suggest that perhaps the sociopath is Tassone.

But avoiding that kind of pat, unsatisfying takeaway is the entire reason to tell a story like Bad Education in the first place. Otherwise we could just read the news stories about a bad man who went to prison. During the second half of the movie I found myself waiting for that inevitable epilogue text at the end to just tell me what happened. That’s generally a clear indication that a storyteller hasn’t found the compelling insights they were seeking.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

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There’s a difference between a bad guy and a villain. A bad guy just needs to do bad stuff: rob banks, murder some people, kidnap the protagonist’s love interest or child or dog. Gus Fring, the drug-slinging chicken man from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, is a great bad guy. He’s brilliant and ruthless and meticulous, he plans things out carefully and gives speeches about it all and his stare can lower the temperature of the room he’s in by 15-20 degrees. I love Gus Fring. He is not, however, a great villain.

A villain needs something more, a joy in doing bad, an infectious charisma, the sense that they really like being as evil as they can be. Justified was a show with a lot of good villains: Boyd Crowder, Mags Bennett, Wynn Duffy, etc. Even its secondary villains were great, your Limehouses and Quarlses and Dickie Bennetts. They all had great one-liners and personality for days and that intangible magnetism a good villain has. The Breaking Bad universe, an almost-perfect television empire, has not had great villains, historically. Bad guys galore, all of them conflicted and menacing, but missing that charm: Tuco (meth-addled maniac), Gus Fring (see above), the Nazis (uh… Nazis). Heck, even Walter White, destroyer of worlds and families, wasn’t really what I would consider a full-on villain. It was the one glaring flaw in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

Until the fifth season of Better Call Saul. Enter Lalo Salamanca.

If we want to be technical about all of this, Lalo made his debut in the fourth season. After Hector was poisoned and Tuco went to jail, he came in to fill the void in the spot above Nacho in the cartel. He was fun even then, cooking in the kitchen and smiling a lot and carrying around this sense of impending doom wherever he went, like that grin could disappear at any moment and be replaced with the narrowed eyes of a killer. A good character, sure, and someone to keep Nacho in constant fear and be a much-needed worthy adversary for Gus Fring until a certain bald chemistry teacher shows up. A chaos agent to introduce conflict on that side of the show. Fine, great, wonderful.

But this most recent season, as it progressed and the show’s two worlds started merging, with Jimmy becoming “a friend of the cartel” through his relationship with Nacho and Mike, both of whom are now firmly in Gus Fring’s orbit… hoo boy. Lalo became a star. He’s a back-slapping, charismatic terror, a thorn in the side of every main character on the show. He’s waging war against Gus and Mike, he’s now suspicious that Nacho conspired to assassinate him, he showed up at Jimmy and Kim’s door looking for answers. He has his giddy little fingers in everything and he is having the time of his life.

It’s not just that he’s a blast, although it is very much that, as the GIF above indicates. Tony Dalton and the writers of the show seem to be having a ball playing around with this lunatic, to a degree that is almost obscene. I’m still flabbergasted that they could just go out and create a top ten — top five? — character in the whole Breaking Bad universe almost 12 full seasons into their run. It’s witchcraft is what it is. We should consider burning them at the stake. Once they’re done making this show. And maybe a Lalo prequel. We can just have the stake ready. Put it in the basement for now.

But again, there’s more there than charisma. Lalo would be a good character even if he was mostly just comic relief. What makes Lalo great, though, is how staggeringly competent he is. His suspicions about both Nacho and Jimmy? Totally justified. Nacho very much did have a part in the assassination attempt; Jimmy lied through his teeth about his desert debacle. Lalo sniffed out both of these betrayals almost immediately, like he has a superpower for it. I made the argument a few weeks ago that he was basically Spider-man, between this hyper-sensitive sense for danger and his shocking athleticism. This last part cannot be overstated. Look at him burst through the ceiling in season four to kill the poor innocent travel agent who saw too much.

Look at him leap into a dang ravine to get a closer look at Jimmy’s bullet-riddled abandoned car.

And that was before the season five finale, when he pulled a Kevin McCallister by defending his home from intruders by using bubbling oil as a booby trap and secret passages as routes for both escape and ambush. It was a strange spot to be in as a viewer. We know he’s a bad guy. We know any success he has will come at a cost to characters we care about, like Nacho and Kim and Mike. And yet, there I was, nervous about sweet evil mustachioed prince getting hurt. I will be inconsolable when he dies. It’s fine. I’m doing fine.

And let’s be clear here: Lalo will not make it out of this alive, in all likelihood. It’s one of the tricky parts of a prequel. We know the fates of a set of characters who make it to Breaking Bad. Gus and Mike are both there for a while, thriving, and the look on Lalo’s face at the end of this season after he killed their assassins… well, it was not the face of a man who is prepared to consider it water under the bridge. It was the face of a man who wants to blow up the bridge and then leap like a jungle cat into the river bed to hunt the survivors.

It’s creating an awkward situation for me, personally, to have this future knowledge. I love Lalo now. I get excited every time I see him show up on the screen. I caught myself saying “Yesssss,” out loud, when he rolled up to Don Eladio’s pool party in the season finale. It’s gotten to the point that I have kind of started rooting for Lalo. Like, really rooting for him — to defeat Gus, to continue his bromance with Don Eladio, to survive this show and become the Big Bad that Walter White has to deal with in Breaking Bad. I know it won’t happen. It can’t. But still, that’s a fun show to play around with in your head for a while, one where Lalo replaces Gus. Those two are total opposites, fire and ice, improv and organization. Lalo is the kind of guy who shows up at a wedding reception and schmoozes and dances all night and has someone’s grandma doing tequila shots at one point. Gus has one drink (champagne) and leaves after dinner is served, tie still tied and top button still buttoned. It’s what makes them such fun adversaries right now. They would hate each other even if they didn’t have business disagreements.

I’m not joking about this, for the record. I mean, I am, but I’m not. I would pay good money to see an alternate future Breaking Bad where Walter has to face down Lalo. I want to see how he counters someone so unpredictable and captivating. It kills me that I will never know. I’m not ready to let him go. I don’t think I’ll ever be. Lalo is a murderous goon and he might be the reason Kim doesn’t make it to Breaking Bad either and yet, here I am, gushing about him and comparing him to both Kevin McCallister and Spider-man. If that’s not the sign of a good villain, I’m not entirely sure what is.

Long live Lalo Salamanca. As long as possible, at least.