Good For Bob Odenkirk, Man

ALSO THIS WEEK: Salma Hayek seduces a beetle and baseball remains hilarious

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: What a career

It’s cool that Bob Odenkirk is an action star now. He kind of was one already, I guess, thanks to his performance in Nobody, the 2021 movie where he whomped on a series of goons after someone made the mistake of stealing his daughter’s kitty cat bracelet. But now, now that we can see him do his thing again in the trailer for the sequel to that movie, now that Bob Odenkirk is officially carrying an action franchise, there’s no way to get around it: Bob Odenkirk, at age 62, is a full-on actor star.

Which, again, is cool, especially when you go back and trace his path through Hollywood. The man has been at it for almost 40 years. He started in sketch comedy, first as a writer on SNL and Late Night With Conan O’Brien and then as a co-creator of Mr. Show. Yes, this seems like a good place to post my favorite sketch from Mr. Show, which I am always on the verge of doing anyway, and which is only on YouTube cut up into three sections for some reason.

And that would’ve been enough, right, if that's all he ever did? He would’ve gone down as a cult comedy icon, one of the titans of the field, a guy whose influence can be seen all the way straight through the weirdo sketch comedy that exists today. I Think You Should Leave probably does not exist without something like Mr. Show. Think about that one for a while.

And when you’re done thinking about that, think about this: he played a major role in two of the best television dramas of the century, first as Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad and then as Saul Goodman and Jimmy McGill in Better Call Saul. My position on these shows is that the second was better than the first, which would have been an insane thing to imagine before we saw him roll out those Cinnabons and go on that ride. A lot of that was the supporting cast, especially Rhea Seehorn as Kim Wexler, but also a lot of it was Bob Odenkirk carrying a damn prestige drama in a lead role.

You know all this. I know you know this. I’m not breaking any news here. All I’m asking you to do is think about what a career arc that was already, before this, before he started whomping on goons in major motion pictures with Christopher Lloyd and RZA. Think about it while you watch that trailer up there. Think about how the only other person who has had a comparable career crisscrossing these genres with this level of success is… maybe Sandler? Think about how wild it would be if Tim Robinson shows up as a main character in the next season of Severance and then gets a prequel spinoff of his own that exceeds the original and then, a few years from being eligible for Medicare, basically decides to become Jason Statham. That’s what Bob Odenkirk has done.

So, yeah. I think “pretty cool” is a fair description.

FOUR: lol this is so stupid