Bob Odenkirk as Saul Goodman in Better Call Saul
By
Ben Sherlock
Published 36 minutes ago
Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
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From True Detective to Better Call Saul, some of the best TV shows in recent memory have brought the tropes and conventions of the neo-noir to the small screen. In the early-to-mid-20th century, film noir was one of Hollywood’s favorite currencies. After World War II left everyone feeling jaded and angry, these morally ambiguous detective stories thrived in movie theaters.
But in the latter half of the 20th century, after the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War left American moviegoers more disillusioned than ever, films like Klute, Chinatown, and The French Connection pioneered the neo-noir. In these modern anti-establishment noirs, justice wasn’t always served and there was no such thing as heroes and villains.
The gloomy mysteries of the noir genre first came to television in the 1950s and 1960s with shows like Dragnet, Peter Gunn, and The Untouchables. But in more recent years, TV noirs like The Shield and The Killing have skewed a lot closer to the grisly neo-noirs of the 1970s.
The Killing
Mireille Enos and Joel Kinnaman looking in the truck of a car in The Killing
AMC’s American remake of the Danish TV series Forbrydelsen deftly translated its eerie atmosphere to a new setting. The Killing follows two different homicide detectives as they solve murders in Seattle, but it has the same foreboding ambience as the source material. This remake also borrows a lot from David Lynch’s classic spooky soap opera Twin Peaks.
Archer Dreamland
Someone pointing a gun at a woman in Archer Dreamland_ No Good Deed
In its later years, after the title character went into a coma, Archer started doing standalone seasons toying with the conventions of various different genres. There was a pulpy jungle adventure season and a retrofuturistic sci-fi season, but the best season to come out of this experiment was Archer Dreamland, paying homage to the classics of film noir.
It starts off with Archer floating in a pool with a gunshot wound, a la Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard, as he spends the first portion of his coma dream trapped in 1940s Los Angeles, where he imagines himself and his friends in the archetypal roles of a classic hard-boiled detective story. It’s a pitch-perfect postmodern take on old-school noir.
Veronica Mars
Kristen Bell holding a camera in Veronica Mars
Creator Rob Thomas mixed a detective noir into a typical teen drama with his cult classic Veronica Mars. Kristen Bell gives a star-making turn as the title character, a high school student who moonlights as a private investigator under the guidance of her detective dad. Veronica Mars is basically The Maltese Falcon meets 90210, and it’s exactly as delightful as that sounds.
Bored To Death
Ted Danson as George Christopher in Bored to Death
Jonathan Ames’ HBO sitcom Bored to Death is a meta deconstruction of a typical detective noir. Jason Schwartzman stars as a fictional version of Ames himself who, when he’s not busy writing books, works as an unlicensed private detective in New York City. Ted Danson and Zach Galifianakis provide strong support in this wonderfully whimsical mystery comedy.
Batman: The Animated Series
Batman The Animated Series intro image of Batman standing on a rooftop with lightning behind him
Batman is the ultimate neo-noir antihero; he’s a modern-day superhero version of the kind of grizzled detective you’d find in the pages of pulp fiction. Gotham City is the kind of crime-ridden cesspool you’d see Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart traversing in a post-war noir, but it’s full of supervillains, each with their own gimmick.
Out of all the many Batman TV shows, Batman: The Animated Series captured the neo-noir vibes best. The shadowy, expressionistic, high-contrast visuals evoke the classics of the genre, and Kevin Conroy’s iconic voice performance as Bruce Wayne nails that tortured Bogart gruffness — it’s the definitive portrayal of the Dark Knight, animated or otherwise.
The Lowdown
Ethan Hawke covered in blood and yelling in The Lowdown
Sterlin Harjo’s last show, Reservation Dogs, combined naturalistic comedy with devastating human drama. His follow-up series, The Lowdown, is much zanier and more overtly comedic (albeit very darkly so). Ethan Hawke plays an intrepid journalist who will stop at nothing to expose the truth, even when he’s threatened by powerful underworld figures and kidnapped by their hired goons.
The Lowdown takes its stylistic cues from The Big Lebowski and Inherent Vice. It’s a story about a man who knew too much, except this man happens to be a bumbling buffoon who can barely keep his own house in order, let alone his high-stakes investigation into local crime and corruption.
The Shield
Vic Mackey with backup in The Shield
From Chinatown to Blade Runner, the best neo-noirs challenge the black-and-white morality of standard cops-and-robbers stories. They present morally gray antiheroes who don’t always manage to serve justice to the bad guys. The best example of that on television is The Shield, a cop show about crooked cops.
Before The Shield came along, police procedurals were pretty straightforward case-of-the-week shows in which noble lawmen took down despicable criminals. But in The Shield, the police officers we’re following break the law just as much as the crooks they’re chasing. It’s a groundbreaking subversion of decades-old cop show traditions.
Cowboy Bebop
Spike with a gun in Cowboy Bebop episode 1
Cowboy Bebop, the gateway drug that got a lot of western viewers interested in anime, is an interesting cocktail of different genres. It’s got hard sci-fi, with the worldbuilding of a fully colonized Solar System; it’s got spaghetti western vibes with its ragtag band of bounty hunters chasing their targets across the cosmos; and it’s got elements of neo-noir.
The tragic heroes, each outrunning a dark past, the various showdowns in shady bars and alleyways, and the sumptuous jazz music on the soundtrack all come together to make Cowboy Bebop a perfect futuristic noir. It’s like Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, but with a lot more action and bloodshed.
True Detective
Rust at a crime scene in True Detective
Nic Pizzolatto pioneered a whole new way to tell a murder mystery in the game-changing first season of True Detective. It’s structured more like a novel than a TV show, chronicling a complicated case (and a complicated relationship between two very different but equally flawed men) across two separate timelines, years apart. Stylistically, True Detective brings a classic neo-noir story into a Southern Gothic epic.
The subsequent seasons of True Detective haven’t all been as great as that first one, but they have deftly recaptured its subversive take on the neo-noir. True Detective takes all the genre’s hallmarks to another level.
Better Call Saul
Jimmy and Kim in court in Better Call Saul
Vince Gilligan styled Breaking Bad as a contemporary western, with armed standoffs and train robberies and a villain dressed in a black hat. When he spun it off with a character study of Heisenberg’s *criminal* lawyer, Gilligan and his writers took more cues from the neo-noir genre than the western genre (although there are still some western elements, especially in the “Bagman” episode).
Better Call Saul is a darkly hilarious subversion of a typical courtroom noir. It’s a legal drama about a lawyer who will do whatever it takes, and bend whatever laws he has to, in order to stay out of a courtroom. If Jimmy McGill does his job right, then his clients will never have to set foot in a court of law.
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