The premiere of Better Call Saul got me thinking about how the shows I enjoy now, post Breaking Bad folding, tend to fit more easily into the mold of romance rather than realism, and that this probably has a lot to do with how the ruse has now been rumbled on the supposedly ‘bold’ grittiness of the shows that have been lauded with both praise and generous ratings over the past few years.

“Have you grounded yourself?” Better Call Saul is off to a strong start

You know, shows like The Wire and, indeed, Breaking Bad itself, with the latter admittedly conceding to a few Tarantinoesque stylistic flourishes every now and then.

This article illustrates the point better than I ever could, but the point remains this: there’s very little actual innovation or subversion happening in these shows, and this kind of storytelling is always better when its embraces its ‘genre’ roots. Because straining to do otherwise often results in nothing but kitsch. I enjoyed Breaking Bad and The Wire as much as anyone, but shows like Boardwalk Empire felt like brittle attempts at the same: spread thin by the half-assed attempt at historically accurate drama, it felt neither here nor there.

Ben McKenzie as James Gordon and Robin Lord Taylor as Oswald ‘Penguin’ Cobblepot in Gotham

These days I’m quaffing shows like Black Sails, The Musketeers and Gotham – they don’t bother to hide their roots in firmly trodden narrative ground, and any ‘grit’ is by-the-by, acknowledged as just another stylistic detail rather than a willful attempt at – ultimately hollow – innovation. Hell, they simply can’t hide their derivative nature: all three shows are explicitly sourced from clear antecedents. Black Sails is a very loose prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with a liberal sprinkling of ‘historical’ pirates thrown into the mix, The Musketeers is yet another adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ enduring piece of swashbuckling proto-pulp fiction, and Gotham is a shamelessly opportunistic but also refreshingly goofy series about Gotham City 20-odd years before Batman arrived on the scene.

Santiago Cabrera as Aramis in The Musketeers

It’s particularly telling that the first two shows in are sourced from Stevenson and Dumas, writers historically associated with the aesthetic of ‘romance’. The BBC’s own Musketeers may not be the best iteration of that story – and it’s certainly the weakest show of this particular triad – but it’s telling that it reared its head just now, as if in direct opposition to the prevailing trend. Black Sails may have the same levels of sex and violence you’d expect from the likes of Game of Thrones*, but its main MO is adventure and intrigue, not some half-baked exploration of moral ambiguity. And while Gotham, being a prequel to an established comic book property, appears to play in the same sandbox as most of the reboot-and-remake happy mainstream, it resists the urge to ‘grimdark’, giving us a Gotham Cityscape that is less Nolan, more Burton.

Jon Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men

This is of course not to say that I won’t be tuning into Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul – the pilot of which I found terrific – nor that television can’t be anything except pulp. But I’m finding more pleasure in taking in this kind of genre fare at the moment. Mostly because the likes of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Mad Men et al have proven themselves to ultimately be all about dissatisfied and/or stifled macho men eager to live out their machismo, and largely succeeding in doing so. There’s very little about that I find profound, and the fact that we’re treating it as something novel and worthy of our time all on its own is a bit disconcerting.

I would rather have my macho men as flat archetypes, to be taken with a pinch of salt. Better than than being lured into contemplating their aggressive contours as something to take in fully and even – the implication being – to be emulated.

*Game of Thrones is an interesting exception that proves the rule: by presenting us with a fantasy world that is directly informed by episodes from ‘real life’ medieval history, it blends both realism and romance.

READ RELATED: We Need to Talk About Genre