“There is no such thing as an interesting character, only interesting character relationships.”

—HOWARD SUBER
PROFESSOR EMERITUS
UCLA SCHOOL OF THEATER, FILM AND TELEVISION

Chapter 9

The Wild Card Character

Power Dynamics and Motivations

The “wild card” is the element of our pilot, usually embodied in a character, who is an unexpected addition to the audience’s expectation of where the plot and story are going. The wild card throws everything off kilter. What’s significant is that this unpredictable character tends to destabilize and throw the protagonist off his or her game, more than anyone or anything else. In this chapter we’ll analyze wild card examples from several of the best comedy and drama series in this new TV era.

In a world of savvy TV audiences who can quickly spot a show that feels too familiar or a little stale within the genre, how do we shake it up? How do we invigorate it with something unexpected? In great stories, protagonist characters who are always in control or are experts at their jobs need other characters to knock them off balance. And the wild card is that character.

The Wild Card With a Twist: Mr. Robot

In the Mr. Robot pilot, we’re introduced to a mysterious character named Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek), a cyber hacker. He’s a young guy who always wears a black hoodie; his enormous eyes are always roving; he’s suspicious of everyone and doesn’t trust authority. He’s a modern, quasi-Robin Hood character, but the difference is he’s trying to bring down the 1% of the 1%, the wealthiest CEOs and corporate magnates in America. His plans may extend to other countries in the future. Elliot’s main target is E Corporation, which he refers to as “Evil Corp.” He has a long arc of trying to bring down E Corp, though at the same time, within each episode, he has smaller targets. In Season 1 he tries, for example, to protect his female therapist, Krista (Gloria Reuben) from loser guys she meets on Internet dating sites, so he hacks into these guys’ email accounts to see if they’re suitable for her—or if they’re scumbags who are going to hurt her in some way.

We also see in the teaser that Elliot’s pursuing a wealthy, entrepreneurial businessman who has a dark secret. Elliot’s onto him and confronts the guy. At the same time, while we see Elliot doing what he does best, we’re also learning about his own backstory, which has to do with his father. This exposition about Elliot’s backstory motivates all of his actions, certainly for the pilot, and for the rest of Season 1.

Later in the teaser, Elliot confronts Ron, real name Rohit, who he’s learned is the owner of a child pornography website, in his “Ron’s Coffee” shop.

Now, when we come out of that teaser scene, we’ve learned something that distinguishes Elliot from a Robin Hood character, which is that it’s not about the money. (Traditionally, Robin Hood characters care about money, though not for themselves.) Money doesn’t motivate him—neither do fame, sex and power. So he is a character who is beholden to no one. With his incredible tech skills (he must be among the 1% of the 1% of tech geniuses in the country), he can hack the hackers and is always one step ahead of everybody else. He can break into encryption and manipulate people based on information he’s discovered. He holds strong judgments about other people; he’s a little like Holden Caulfield from Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, in that he holds most people in contempt and thinks they’re phonies.

Elliot feels that most people are fakes, materialistic, greedy, selfish—and full of shit. He thinks that how we present ourselves to the world, through social media, our personas online and humble brags, is all superficial interactions and phoniness. What’s vital in new television content is authenticity. It’s the buzzword that everyone’s still talking about at all the networks, especially digital networks.

One of the reasons why the Elliot character works so beautifully is that despite his misanthropic judgments about everyone, he himself tries to lead a life that’s authentic. The show uses a voice-over in the teaser and, later, when he’s in a therapy session. His voice-over lets us connect with him by giving us direct access to his brain. His brain, incidentally, is brilliant, but he can’t turn it off. He’s constantly thinking, as if he’s a processor with a huge amount of gigahertz working overtime. We learn in the pilot there’s this itch in his brain that his cyber hacking activities only tend to scratch. He’s a loner, doesn’t fit in anywhere and he ends up numbing himself. We know in the pilot that he’s addicted to morphine, does drugs regularly, has sex with strangers, smokes cigarettes and suffers from chronic insomnia. As we see that he has all these vices, his voice-over gives us insight into how and why he needs them. We see his intense vulnerability when he’s in his apartment at the end of the day, sitting in a fetal position, sobbing.

We understand Elliot is in a great deal of existential pain. The only way to relieve it, because even the morphine isn’t helping, is for him to go out and do the things he does. The voice-over makes him a character we connect to, in much the same way the voice-over in Dexter allows us direct access into Dexter’s inner thoughts, pain and struggles that help us empathize with a serial killer! Similarly, direct address—breaking the fourth wall—helps us connect to the characters in Modern Family. The Modern Family protagonists are totally different to Dexter, who’s a flawed character with dark, manipulative desires, yet voice-over and direct address make us feel they’re all confiding in us. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the ahead-of-its time Fox series Profit used the same device.

Elliot Alderson always tells us the truth, or his version of the truth. Even if the truth is uncomfortable and takes him down dark, ruthless alleyways, he’s authentic and has idealism at the core of his beliefs. We connect to him because he’s an outsider who doesn’t really fit in anywhere. All of us somehow feel that way—it’s why we watch television and are on social media all the time. We want to connect. We want to participate in a storyline. But, ironically, television and binge viewing tend to be solitary activities. The more we engage in social media, play video games and binge-view TV, the more we find ourselves living on islands of technology and digital content. It tends to isolate us. Ironically, the feeling of isolation is universal, especially now. When it comes to the desire for connection and authenticity, we all feel like outsiders at times.

Part of what makes wild card and iconic characters such as Elliot interesting is paradox. He is always in control, the smartest person in the room and incredibly cunning, yet at the same time he is extremely fragile, broken, wounded and confused by this isolation and how the rest of the world functions. He himself is a wild card character in the world around him, because he’s the ultimate outsider. At the same time, what makes him different is:

1. He doesn’t try to be likable at all, but more significantly,
2. He doesn’t try to conform.

Elliot is one of the next iteration of characters who defy tropes. He’s an outsider who revels in being an outsider. He feels superior and it causes him pain; yet, he doesn’t want to change or try to fit in. The best TV shows right now have characters who know they don’t quite belong. If they’re comedies/dramedies (The Big Bang Theory, Baskets, Silicon Valley, Insecure, Atlanta), they may try to fit in to comedic effect but still fail. In darker dramas, they are so rooted in who they are that, even though they feel ostracized from various communities and have contempt in some ways for those social rituals and conformities, at the same time they choose to take their own path. They’re iconoclasts. It makes them interesting, because for years drama was about characters who don’t fit in, who struggle (or pretend) each week to adjust and belong. What we’re seeing now are characters who want to be true to themselves. From their point of view, it’s the other people in the world who tend to have the problems. Their desire is that the world will be a better, more authentic and genuine place than it is. Their activities tend to lean towards finding other people who are like them—but there are few people like them.

Elliot may be a wild card character for the world of Mr. Robot, but his own wild card in the show is Mr. Robot himself, played by Christian Slater. He is the character who throws Elliot totally off his game, because he’s somebody who can out-hack Elliot; he has more information and chooses to destabilize Elliot at every turn. In Episode 2 of Season 1, when he meets Elliot at the boardwalk, Elliot reveals he had broken a promise to his dad by telling his mother his dad had leukemia. Clearly, Elliot has never recovered from the fact that his dad felt betrayed and pushed him out of a window as punishment. Mr. Robot then pushes Elliot off the railing onto the ground below, as punishment for not trusting him … destabilizing Elliot in a literal way. Later we find out that Mr. Robot is a delusion and Elliot imagined this entire scene although, his wounds are real.

All this, of course, both challenges and perversely attracts Elliot, for Elliot never feels challenged, since everybody around him is a moron. (His least favorite person would be an arrogant moron.) Mr. Robot literally shocks him into feeling after all that numbness; he will simultaneously be his mentor, guide and antagonist. Elliot—and we as viewers—don’t completely understand what Mr. Robot is up to in the pilot, and this has us hooked. We’re not sure if what Mr. Robot is telling us is true. It’s much later in the season when we discover who he really is. Mr. Robot’s own character paradox is that, despite his disarming personality, he happens to be a version of Elliot’s late father and exists only in Elliot’s mind.

There are, then, several layers in the show. We have an unreliable narrator who tells us things in voice-over. Generally, we tend to take voice-over as truth, as we instinctively feel that, because the narrator’s confiding in us, it must be true. But, Elliot’s on morphine, and his grip on reality is tenuous; we also know from his therapy sessions that he hears voices and sees things that aren’t necessarily there. So we learn as the pilot progresses that it’s possible that Elliot’s point of view—which is the only POV in the pilot, as we see everything from Elliot’s perspective—may be unreliable and the things that he’s seeing and hearing might not actually be happening. Or, maybe some are and others aren’t? One example of this is E Corporation, whose logo has an “E” at an angle (and strongly resembles the Enron branding). As the pilot progresses, Elliot actually sees the word “evil” in the logo. He sees it everywhere: Is it just his imagination, something he’s projecting? He also goes to Mr. Robot’s headquarters in a defunct arcade on Coney Island, where he meets the other hackers on Mr. Robot’s team. Later in the pilot, he returns to get answers, but he doesn’t know where everybody is. The place is deserted. Did he just imagine that all of that happened?

There are elements of the movie Fight Club and its Narrator character (played by Edward Norton). Elliot’s voice-over gives us a private, all-access pass to his hypersensitivity, perception, paranoia and judgment. Even in one of his mandated therapy sessions, as his therapist observes him and asks questions, his mind is someplace else. In the voice-over, he dissects her.

In recent years, we have seen TV series become much more cinematic. The Mr. Robot pilot plays with time quite a bit. The show is structured the way that Elliot’s thoughts are structured; the show itself has a meta, wild card element to it. No two episodes are structured exactly the same, and this too destabilizes us as viewers—which I think is an excellent approach. It’s different from the way most television used to be, where we would seek out the comfort of a formula. We knew, for instance, every Law & Order was going to start the same way: with a murder. There’s the iconic music; we knew the first part was crime, the second was justice and there was always going to be a resolution. TV has moved beyond that now, to mirror real life where there are murky gray areas and few clear answers. Certainly as new content creators, if we want to move beyond that and be leaders, rather than followers, we need to find ways to transcend formula that defy expectations.

One further point to bear in mind when we’re writing a pilot is that …

The end of our pilot is the beginning of our series.

So, we always want to make story choices that will give us more story as the show progresses. The wild card helps us get there.

The Wild Card’s Wild Card: Mozart in the Jungle

We’ve discussed how Mr. Robot is Elliot’s own wild card. Another instrument in our writer’s toolbox is to offer up the wild card’s wild card later in the series, as the show progresses and more story is needed, to disrupt everything and surprise our audience. An example of this is found in Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle. The character of Rodrigo, played by Gael García Bernal (and loosely based on real-life conductor Gustavo Dudamel), is the new conductor appointed to the New York Symphony in the pilot. He’s been hired to replace seasoned pro Thomas (Malcolm McDowell), with a mandate to reinvigorate the audience and increase ticket sales. He’s young, brash (mostly charmingly so) and eccentric and threatens the status quo. When a wild card character comes into a story, they often instigate change. They upset the balance of what was harmony and normalcy in the world. In some ways, the arrival of a wild card character shares elements of the inciting incident in a screenplay. Certainly, in the Mozart in the Jungle pilot, when Rodrigo enters the story, the stakes, tension and conflict increase dramatically. He is the original wild card in the dramedy.

In this scene, Gloria (Bernadette Peters), the grande dame/patron of the New York Symphony, introduces Rodrigo at a cocktail party welcoming him to the orchestra. Rodrigo, without intending to, fatally threatens the career of Thomas (Malcolm McDowell), the arrogant, older maestro. See what happens when an infuriated Thomas comes in with the new press release and how his contempt leaves the gentlemanly Rodrigo with no choice but to humiliate Thomas—not with guile, but with the truth.

Rodrigo is the classic wild card: He shakes everything up and unsettles everyone. He doesn’t want to do things the way they were done before and bucks tradition. Rodrigo has crazy ideas that get everybody riled up, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not. But he also tends to be right about his instincts. A lot of Rodrigo’s behavior, contrary to Elliot’s in Mr. Robot, comes not from a deep mistrust of establishment rules, but from his gut and instincts and above all from his desire to be true to the music. Like Elliot, however, Rodrigo is authentic. He is not driven by fame, sex, power or money. Rodrigo is driven purely by music and his passion to touch the souls of the audience. So, we respect him, in spite of the fact that he’s disruptive and a force that’s going to have a strong impact on everybody in the orchestra.

Rodrigo especially destabilizes Hailey (Lola Kirke), who comes into the story as our main point-of-view protagonist. Though Mozart in the Jungle is an ensemble, Hailey is initially our window onto this world, and Rodrigo proves to be a wild card for her and everyone else. In contrast, Mr. Robot is a singular point-of-view show. We’re almost always in Elliot’s head or seeing from his perspective. Mozart in the Jungle, which is a half-hour, single-camera dramedy, is a multiple point-of-view show. It’s about the musicians in the New York Symphony and its behind-the-scenes administration. Although the characters in the ensemble do have different weights, the points of view and stories are spread fairly evenly among four to five different characters. As I mentioned in Chapter 5, Mozart in the Jungle is based on a memoir by New York Philharmonic oboist, Blair Tindall. She talks about her experiences and what it was really like: the politics, performance-related injuries and confrontations with unions and other musicians, not to mention the sex, drugs and alcohol-fueled parties. I find it fascinating just as a setting because it’s a glimpse into a world that I didn’t know. That’s one way Mozart in the Jungle the series strays from the memoir; the memoir does not describe a power struggle between Rodrigo and Thomas (or even have a character named Rodrigo).

Rodrigo’s own wild card—the wild card’s wild card—then arrives in the form of his estranged wife, Anna Maria (Nora Arnezeder). She comes back into his life at a time when he’s starting to feel things are getting more stable for him. She is completely crazy: an unpredictable, highly strung violin player, who flies into rages at the slightest provocation—as well as being a red hot, sexy dynamo who can seduce Rodrigo and pull him away from his music. He doesn’t quite know how to please her and is still crazy about her in spite of himself; one minute she pulls him in, and the next she rejects him. The paradox is that the brilliantly damaging and dysfunctional Anna Maria still manages to disarm the disruptive Rodrigo, completely. We see how Rodrigo, the one who’s always rising above everything and living his life in an ethereal way that suits him (while destabilizing everybody else), reacts to somebody who deeply destabilizes him.

In this scene, Rodrigo goes into Anna Maria’s dressing room to “talk” to her after a performance. Hailey waits outside, but when he doesn’t come out, she decides to go in and rescue him. She enters and finds the two of them making out.

The wild card’s wild card is a fascinating dynamic. When working on our pilots, we need to ask ourselves: What are the destabilizing influences? As soon as things get too stable and there’s too much harmony, we need to shake things up. One thing that can help when devising a show is to start off with a plan to introduce this wild card character, considering when and how they will be most powerful (or most comedic, or both). Alessandra/“La Fiamma,” fiery opera singer played by Monica Bellucci, has a similarly disruptive effect on Rodrigo at the start of Season 3.

At times, part of the wild card’s nature doesn’t necessarily play into a character or plot but is about the style of the show. These characteristics can form an element of the show that is unique and unsettling, but in a good way. In Mozart in the Jungle, the first time Rodrigo is mentioned, we see the great, stylized shots of him, that were created by series executive producer Roman Coppola; there’s a heightened aspect to how Rodrigo is presented. Later in the season, there’s a wonderful scene where he’s in a taxi on a bridge, driving with Hailey, and he hears the clicks and bumps in the road. We start to hear the New York City sounds that Rodrigo hears—and the way he hears them as music. He shares that with Hailey and, delighted, she starts to hear it, too. A whole symphony grows out of the cab ride. There’s also a scene where Rodrigo leads the orchestra to a vacant lot in the middle of the urban jungle. Again, it’s surprising and unsettling, but their performance proves to be beautiful, magical and part of the style of the show.

The Roommate Soulmate: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

A comedic example of a wild card character is Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess) in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. He is Kimmy’s best friend and roommate. Titus is a unique creation who is, of course, linked to the actor who plays him in some ways. But at the same time, Titus is even more out there. He marches to the beat of his own drum and sees the world in his own way. He desires fame but is an unknown who never seems able to find mainstream success because he’s so unusual, and his behaviors tend to work against him. Titus is someone Kimmy looks at as a confidant and somewhat as a role model. And yet, because she doesn’t know what “normality” is, particularly in the first season, she thinks the people she meets are representative New Yorkers. That’s Titus’ wild card character paradox: He is someone who Kimmy learns from and looks up to, yet … there’s nobody quite like him. He’s a one-of-a-kind character, and we never know what he’s going to do next.

That’s what makes Titus’ character so fresh. I couldn’t compare him to any other character; there are no tropes in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. The tone is its own and has recreated the sitcom genre in a way, giving us a protagonist we simply haven’t seen before. Kimmy’s lived in a bunker for 15 years when she is rescued from captivity; she has an innocence, naïveté and idealism, almost like Pollyanna. She goes to New York to learn about life. In the city she’s a complete outsider who revels in being who she is, despite being surrounded by cynical, greedy, materialistic people. Kimmy becomes our view into that form of idealism. Part of her does want to conform because she wants to catch up, as she knows she’s out of step with everyone, yet she remains true to herself. There’s always truth to what she says, which is refreshing, because another aspect of that strata of New York is that people can be fake and caught up in materialism and status. Kimmy has depth and soul: She’s unbreakable. Titus has the same indomitable spirit—and that makes this wild card character her unexpected, kindred spirit.

It’s a delightful dynamic to see them functioning within their own bubble together, even though she’s left the bunker, which was another bubble. So Kimmy recreates, in some ways, what she’s comfortable with by limiting herself to a certain perspective. Titus, the wild card, becomes the person who unexpectedly invites her in. He’s the host of the new “bubble” in which she lives.

The Pushy Roommate/Friend/Business Partner/Mentor: Silicon Valley

In HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley (created by Mike Judge), Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) is the wild card to protagonist Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch). Erlich is not only an antagonizing force for Richard, but also a kind of tech industry id. Silicon Valley exists in a world full of nouveau-bro billionaires who drive Teslas or even have a full-time “spiritual guide” on staff. It’s a superficial intellectualism that runs diametrically opposed to both Richard and Erlich. Richard, the real-deal genius who creates beautiful code, cannot fake the veneer the tech industry loves. On the other hand, Erlich relishes the role of “tech tycoon” to the grotesque limit. He quite literally leeches off the genius of people in his Palo Alto house/“incubator,” drives a car emblazoned with his failed company’s logo and has even placed his testicles on a conference room desk as a negotiation tactic (off-screen). If Richard is the embodiment of innovation in the tech industry, Erlich is a commentary on the role presentation and bravado play. As a result, the two characters find they need each other and are inextricably tied to one another. Not quite good cop/bad cop, more like nerdy introvert/blowhard extrovert.

In Season 1, Episode 4, “Fiduciary Duties,” after Richard drunkenly puts Erlich on the board of directors at Pied Piper, only to recant the deal the next morning, Erlich realizes Richard doesn’t see what Erlich brings to the company. At the end of the episode, when Richard realizes he can’t spew the type of “big picture” BS that Peter Gregory (Christopher Evan Welch) expects in this industry, Richard leans on Erlich for his expertise and their symbiotic relationship is born.

Early in the episode, the two fight over Richard rescinding his offer:

In spite of their altercation earlier, Erlich’s got Richard’s back. And we get the feeling that, despite their clashes, he always will.

Disrupting an Institution: The Young Pope

In HBO’s opulent and surreal mini-series The Young Pope, set in present-day Rome, the wild card character makes quite an entrance. But even before she arrives, writer/creator Paolo Sorrentino uses a subtle trick to give weight to our impending guest. In Episode 1, we see her in flashback, with Pope Pius XIII (Jude Law) talking about her, awaiting her arrival. Pope Pius has been nothing but serious and standoffish until his maternal figure, Sister Mary (Diane Keaton) steps off a helicopter on the Vatican helipad. She wears a habit and John Lennon-style sunglasses. (Pope Pius drinks Cherry Coke Zero, chain smokes and wears Ray Bans in sunlight, along with his traditional Pope regalia.) Her entrance alludes to an emergency, since she’s whisked to the Vatican as soon as Pope Pius is shockingly elected in the papal conclave. Immediately Sister Mary separates herself from the other characters by referring to the new Pope as “Lenny” instead of his new papal name. It signifies a power she possesses over the Holy Father that no one else has: She knows him.

With all of the chatter over Pope Pius as a young and mysterious pick for the position, Sister Mary possesses the knowledge the other characters are constantly searching for—which makes her both useful and dangerous to our protagonist. Sister Mary took Lenny in when he was orphaned as a young boy. She raised him and nurtured him. She and Lenny share a long-standing, unconditional love. They also share a devotion to their vows of piety and chastity. As a nun, Mary is, in essence, married to God. And Lenny will never marry or father a child; in this way, as it’s pointed out later in the season, Lenny/Pope Pius will never grow up. By design, he’ll forever remain God’s son.

After she arrives, Pope Pius appoints Sister Mary as his personal secretary. This gives her even more power than in their shared past, unheard of for a woman in the Catholic Church. This highly unconventional decision (and many others he makes throughout the season) mortifies and threatens every man at the Vatican, especially Cardinal Angelo Voiello (Silvio Orlando), who’s both a faithful man of God and a cunning political animal. Voiello had a strong hand in Lenny’s election, expecting him to be a puppet to his elders, while simultaneously making the stodgy church relevant to the younger masses. Alas, Cardinal Voiello cannot control Pope Pius and thus seeks to reason with Sister Mary and be her ally. But neither Voiello nor Sister Mary ever fully trusts one another. And she proves to be a wild card for him too: There’s an allure, a spark, an attraction between them that builds.

We see Sister Mary as an outlier to the rest of the Vatican, with her “I’m a Virgin. But this is an old shirt” t-shirt, and her penchant for playing basketball in Episode 2. And although no one comments on this, when she removes her habit, she has a perfectly dyed and styled mane—movie star hair—with not a gray hair in sight. She chain smokes, too. Sorrentino has created a rebellious, yet devoted nun, making her surprising and unpredictable. She throws the whole Vatican into disarray and is one of the most outrageous nuns ever depicted on series television, with the possible exceptions of the sinister Sister Jude Martin (Jessica Lange) in American Horror Story: Asylum or Sally Field as the lovely Sister Bertrille on the ABC series The Flying Nun (1967–1970). But that was then, and this is now. And hey, it’s not TV; it’s HBO.

The Role of Destabilizing Characters: Better Call Saul, The Crown and Goliath

Jimmy/Saul and Chuck

The AMC series Better Call Saul (the spinoff/prequel to Breaking Bad, created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould), gives us a fascinating peek into the backstory of sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) of Breaking Bad fame. Saul’s real name, we learn, had been Jimmy McGill—“Slippin’ Jimmy” to those who knew him well as a two-bit hustler in Chicago. Jimmy has moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in an attempt to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a highly successful and respected attorney. Jimmy, on the other hand, gets his law degree from the online “University of American Samoa,” which is just one of the things that Chuck despises about his little brother.

In the Better Call Saul episode in Season 2 of Breaking Bad, Saul was originally introduced as something of a wild card himself. Not long after meeting Walt and Jesse, he throws them off their game by announcing that he is now their partner in crime. When he demands a share of their meth business, they can’t say no, since he threatens to out them. But in Better Call Saul the series, Jimmy McGill hasn’t yet developed the future Saul Goodman’s chutzpah. He works out of a storage closet in a nail salon and masquerades as his own secretary. When we meet Chuck, he has retired from his law practice due to a debilitating phobia of electricity. Jimmy adores Chuck and takes care of him, in spite of the fact that Chuck can barely tolerate Jimmy. Soon, it’s revealed that Chuck resents Jimmy for being their mother’s favorite and for generally being the life of the party. Any time Chuck is called upon to give Jimmy a vote of confidence, he refuses. At the end of Season 2, he secretly records Jimmy confessing to a felony, and it’s clear that he’s going to do his best to use this against Jimmy in Season 3. (Chuck’s sad fate at the end of Season 3 is withheld.)

Chuck is not the typical trickster in that he’s a stodgy, mean kind of guy. He functions as both a wild card and a vulnerable, needy antagonist with a chip on his shoulder. He has exploited Jimmy’s sense of loyalty—brotherly love—as long as Jimmy remained a non-threatening underdog. But as Jimmy develops a backbone and greater self-confidence, bolstered by his on-again-off-again romance with Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), Chuck goes into passive-aggressive retaliatory mode. He turns into the proverbial snake in the grass, undermining Jimmy from the shadows, when Jimmy least expects it. Up until Chuck betrays Jimmy, we’d presumed that senior partner Howard Hamlin (Patrick Fabian) at the firm Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill was Jimmy’s nemesis. But then we learn the truth about Chuck—and it’s not pretty. A long-festering sibling rivalry blows up into an emotional confrontation, upending the balance of power and laying the foundation for the wronged, still-semi-righteous Jimmy to grow into uber-shyster Saul Goodman.

In this scene from Season 1’s “Pimento,” Jimmy confronts Chuck about double-crossing him at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill:

Chuck has officially become Jimmy’s full-blown enemy—and he’s not done yet. (Incredibly, Jimmy will refuse to have Chuck committed to a mental institution when he has the opportunity.) There will be other Breaking Bad antagonists in Better Call Saul, such as Nacho (Michael Mando) and Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), the mild-mannered drug lord who’d just as soon kill you as spit on you. Still, there isn’t much worse than a brother who’s determined to take you down.

Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret

Netflix’s The Crown makes use of a real-life princess as a destabilizing character. When Britain’s beloved King George VI dies of lung cancer, his eldest daughter Elizabeth (Claire Foy) becomes Queen of England at the age of 27. Elizabeth struggles to rise to the occasion of being queen while also trying to be a normal wife, daughter and sister. Her mother—the Queen Mother (Victoria Hamilton)—and younger sister Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) must now literally bow to Elizabeth. However, Margaret is full of life and spunk and seems to delight in throwing her big sister off balance at times. She falls in love with Peter Townsend (Ben Miles), an unhappily married man who proceeds to get a divorce for the beautiful young princess. Elizabeth wants her younger sister to be happy but talks her into waiting to marry Townsend until she turns 25 (as permitted by the somewhat outdated Royal Marriages Act of 1772). The British people closely follow the romance between Margaret and Peter and are distraught when Townsend is transferred to Belgium to prevent him from seeing Margaret for two long years.

Elizabeth and her husband Philip embark on a months-long tour of the Commonwealth, and Margaret is left to take over the queen’s appearances at home. She’s much less concerned with propriety than Elizabeth is, and the upper class and “commoners” alike love her seemingly spontaneous irreverence. At a state dinner, Margaret fills in for Elizabeth by giving “a little of her own personality” to a speech that’s been written for her. (She also insists on wearing Elizabeth’s own diadem to the occasion.) Margaret wows the crowd, going off book and telling the crowd that they look “wonderful, and shimmering, and positively exotic.” Later she visits a coal mine and even gets laughs there. A reporter asks her if she’s missing Group Captain Townsend, and she replies, “Yes, very much.” The reporter then asks if she’s also missing her sister, Her Majesty the Queen? Margaret answers, “Not quite as much, no.” The crowd laughs uproariously.

Since The Crown is based on historical fact, it may not be too much of a spoiler to reveal that Elizabeth refuses to allow Margaret to marry Townsend, even after she turns 25. Prime Minister Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam) explains to Elizabeth that the only way she can allow Margaret to marry Townsend is to have her sign a “Bill of Renunciation,” which means that she will be stripped of her title and income and will have to live outside of England for several years. Naturally, Margaret is devastated and begs her sister to reconsider.

Later, Margaret and Peter finally get away for a weekend in the country together. It’s implied that they sleep together. The next day, the news reports are all about Princess Margaret—will she be allowed to marry Townsend, or not? Elizabeth watches TV and sees how the nation is gripped by the suspense. Is she jealous? Elizabeth is still conflicted about what to do and goes so far as to call all the archbishops of the church to Buckingham Palace to discuss the problem. They insist that there is no circumstance under which a member of the church may marry a divorced person while the spouse of that individual is still living—even if the person remarrying is “innocent” of causing the divorce. Surprisingly, it is her Uncle Edward, the Duke of Windsor (Alex Jennings), who abdicated the throne to marry the love of his life—the divorced Wallis Simpson—who talks Elizabeth into “protecting the Crown.” Ultimately, Elizabeth must deliver her final decision to Margaret:

Elizabeth has begun her lifelong journey of choosing royal tradition over loyalty to her own family. She refuses to let the destabilizing influence of her sister (or anyone else, possibly with the exception of Princess Diana many years later) get the upper hand.

Billy McBride and Patty Solis-Papagian

The Amazon series Goliath, created by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal, Big Little Lies) and Jonathan Shapiro (The Practice, The Blacklist, Life), casts Billy Bob Thornton as barely functioning, alcoholic, washed-up attorney Billy McBride. McBride used to be a senior partner at the prominent Los Angeles law firm Cooperman/McBride, but he walked away from the money and power after a murder suspect he got acquitted due to a legal technicality went on to kill a family. McBride now lays low, avoids the spotlight, conflict and commitment, lives in an extended-stay motel by the Santa Monica Pier and drinks his days and nights away at a local dive bar, Chez Jay. His only real companion is a stray dog, with occasional visits from his estranged ex-wife Michelle (Maria Bello), who’s still a partner at Cooperman/McBride, and their rebellious teenaged daughter, who both disapprove of everything Billy does and don’t mind sharing their judgment. But Billy is too numb and apathetic to listen.

The only person who gets under his skin is Patty Solis-Papagian (Nina Arianda, who’s guilty of stealing every scene she’s in). Patty is an ambulance-chasing DUI lawyer and part-time real estate agent in the (San Fernando) Valley. It’s Patty who brings plaintiff Rachel Kennedy’s case to Billy’s attention, but at first, he’s not at all interested. Patty readily admits, “I suck in court,” so she needs his legal prowess and connections. But at first, her plea falls on deaf ears; Billy’s not ready to face his past legal partner Donald Cooperman (William Hurt), who’s as cunning and paranoid as he is reclusive. Cooperman, whose face was disfigured in a mysterious accident, spends his days in his always-darkened, cave-like office, monitoring depositions and cases via listening devices and surveillance cameras. Billy steers clear of him, avoiding any new entanglements with the mega-law-firm, and with anyone.

Billy’s already made a name for himself as a successful attorney and can drink away his sorrows and sulk all he wants. But Patty Papagian can’t afford to be so choosy. This woman is a survivor, a force of nature and a kindred spirit to Jimmy McGill (a/k/a Saul Goodman on Better Call Saul). Her motto may as well be: No case too small. Or: Anything for a buck. The woman hustles from low-rent real estate showings to the courthouse to defend her mostly guilty clients and make ends meet. She’s a dog living on scraps, and she’s grateful for the work.

In Episode 2, “Pride and Prejudice,” Billy gets arrested by a crooked cop on a trumped-up drunk driving/resisting arrest charge, causing him to miss an important court date. Believing that he’s a selfish, inconsiderate, careless prick, Patty confronts him the next day in his motel room for blowing the case:

If Billy is a total flameout, Patty is the spark that reignites the fighter in him. She calls him out on all his bullshit, with no filter. She’s brash and a thorn in his side. But she’s exactly what Billy needs to come back to life. He comes to realize that Patty has stumbled upon a multi-million-dollar civil case, and this is a prize bone that neither of these scrappy dogs is willing to give up.

Later in the first season, when things turn dangerous and Patty wants to cash out, it’s Billy who cajoles her into staying in the ring. Despite his initial disdain for her, Billy respects her audacity and drive. He also admires her close ties to her large Armenian family. Patty’s bark is worse than her bite; deep down, Billy knows she has a kind heart. In spite of his cynicism, he helps Patty because she still believes in working within the system and taking what you can get. He can see the idealism in her hungry eyes, her need to believe in something—winning a case, closing escrow on a real estate transaction—her successes are measured in settlement and commission checks. Billy wishes he could be content with such simple rewards. Patty doesn’t expect much from life and she’s rarely disappointed. But she doesn’t avoid confrontation like Billy does, nor does she numb herself to deny the existential pain. Billy comes to admire Patty because she feels everything.

Interestingly, I read the original pilot script for Goliath—formerly entitled The Trial—and significant changes were made to the produced pilot (a common practice). Nevertheless, it’s hard to imagine, but Patty Solis-Papagian was not even in the third draft of the pilot script. The addition of her character must have been David E. Kelley and Jonathan Shapiro’s adjustment, going from network TV to streaming Amazon. Fortunately, they decided to slow down the plotting, choosing a more character-driven approach instead. On The Practice and Boston Legal, we had a case-of-the-week legal procedural. With its season-long case, Goliath doesn’t need to rush to summary judgment.

The creators’ decision to bring in Patty and ramp up to the trial more gradually is a smart move. It not only infuses the show with added humor and dimension; it also provides Billy McBride with a sparring partner, an equal opportunity offender/banterer. Donald Cooperman and Michelle McBride try to destabilize Billy by appealing to his ambition and what they believe is his need to redeem himself. But only Patty truly gets him; he’s not after redemption. She’s a positive destabilizing force. He just needs to believe in something. Ironically, that something is justice.

Bonus Content

More analysis on the wild card, including Luther, Big Little Lies, Stranger Things and Bloodline as well as more searing exchanges between Elliot and his therapist Krista in Mr. Robot, between Elizabeth and Margaret in The Crown and between Patty and Billy in Goliath can be found at www.routledge.com/cw/landau.

See also: Dennis and Agathe in Patriot (on Amazon), Luke in Jessica Jones (on Netflix) and Joe in The Man in the High Castle (on Amazon).

Episodes Cited

“eps1.0_hellofriend.mov,” Mr. Robot, written by Sam Esmail; Universal Cable Productions/Anonymous Content/NBC Universal Television Distribution/USA Network.

“Pilot,” Mozart in the Jungle, written by Alex Timbers, Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman; Picrow/Amazon Studios.

“I’m with the Maestro,” Mozart in the Jungle, written by Alex Timbers and Nikki Schiefelbein; Picrow/Amazon Studios.

“Pimento,” Better Call Saul, written by Thomas Schnauz; Sony Pictures Television/AMC.

“Gloriana,” The Crown, written by Peter Morgan; Left Bank Pictures/Sony Pictures Television/Netflix.

“Pride and Prejudice,” Goliath, written by Jonathan Shapiro and David E. Kelley; David E. Kelley Productions/Jonathan Shapiro Productions/Amazon Studios.