Vince Gilligan, 2019
no votes for Best Picture but rated #94,
2019 Skandies
El Camino was promoted as “A Breaking Bad Movie”. But Breaking Bad was one of those shows that was hailed for blurring the boundary between television and cinema. As such, I found no discernible difference between “A Breaking Bad Movie” and “A Breaking Bad Episode”. This is not like turning a Saturday Night Live sketch into a movie, so that for the first time it has ninety minutes of plot and escapes from the single set to which it has been heretofore confined. It’s not even a matter of “Wow, here’s that TV show I like up on the big screen!”, because El Camino only had a token theatrical release and wound up getting nominated for Emmys, not Oscars. Basically, if you finished Breaking Bad and wondered what happened to Jesse, here’s episode 63, just like any other episode except for its length, to answer your questions. If after watching this you want to know what happened to Badger and Skinny Pete, I guess wait for episode 64.
Julian Fellowes and Michael Engler, 2019
no votes for Best Picture but rated #79,
2019 Skandies
Same deal. I guess the biggest difference is that El Camino focused on one character, since most of the other principals had already been killed off, while Downton Abbey was a less bloodthirsty show and thus its follow-up movie has about forty characters to juggle. That means we see a lot of the “three-beat arc”, where we establish forty little subplots and check in with each one for a few seconds at a time—enough to give each one a beginning, a middle, and an end, and even though none of them as a three-minute short would amount to much, weaving them together into a two-hour movie makes them feel more substantial. The distribution of screen time isn’t entirely egalitarian, so, e.g., Mr. Bates surrenders any plot points of his own and just stands around in the background so that Mr. Branson can get a couple of three-beat arcs instead of just one. The main plot involves a visit to Downton Abbey by the king and queen, a big enough deal within the world of the story to serve as the premise of a film… but this still feels so familiar that it’s more like the Very Special Episodes of Friends that NBC used to put on after the Super Bowl—or, for that matter, like the Very Special Episodes of Downton Abbey that ITV used to air at Christmas. And of course a royal visit only magnifies the dubious politics of the show. The main “downstairs” plot involves the servants getting miffed over the fact that they are to be supplanted during the visit by members of the royal staff—the snooty French chef cooking the meal instead of Mrs. Patmore, the haughty “page of the backstairs” ordering around the footmen instead of Carson or Barrow, etc. Our working-class heroes decide to fight the power and launch a caper to sideline the royal staff. Their schemes succeed! And their reward is that… they get to obsequiously tend to some inbred aristocrats who are inherently no better than they are—for, as Orwell put it, a member of the upper class is just a dishwasher dressed in a better suit. But if the filmmakers are aware that waiting on George and Mary Windsor is not actually more of a privilege than waiting on any given batch of customers at Zachary’s Pizza, their film shows no evidence of it.
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