The Rundown: Is Gus Fring Lying About His Chicken?

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

I usually try to avoid spoiler-heavy discussions of recent episodes of television in the opening section of this column, but there’s no way around it this week. There is an important issue that needs to be discussed. It happened on Monday’s episode of Better Call Saul. I will attempt to explain it in a way that non-viewers will understand, but if you have yet to see the episode and plan to see it, go do that and then come back here.

Okay. For reasons relating to ongoing drug wars and subterfuge, Gus Fring — the ice-cold Chilean drug kingpin introduced in Breaking Bad who runs a chain of fried chicken restaurants as a cover — trashes and blows up one of his locations. The way he did it was wild and involved a kind of Rube Goldberg set-up with a frozen chicken on a sheet pan that was angled down toward a bubbling deep fryer in a kitchen that was filling up with gas rapidly. It was genius and kind of funny and until a few people reached out to me on Twitter about it, I did not see any issue.

But.

BUT.

Let’s jump back to the first episode of this season when Gus was discussing the construction of an industrial refrigerator for his restaurants as a cover for the actual construction of a drug-making superlab. Someone makes the mistake of referring to it as “a freezer.” This offends Gus Fring deeply, for reasons explained in this screencap, which I am including as evidence.

It will never not delight me that Gus takes such pride in the food at his restaurants even though their primary purpose is to give him cover to transport a massive amount of drugs through the American Southwest. He probably earns, what, five percent as much at these restaurants as he makes moving drugs for the cartel Less I am not joking when I tell you that I think about this as much as I think about, like, planning for my retirement.

Anyway, you see where this is going, right Gus says his chickens are never frozen. And yet, when it came time to blow up his restaurant, he marched right into his cooler and pulled out a frosty bird. More evidence.

There are, as far as I can tell, three possibilities at play here.

Right now, after almost a full week of thought, I’m leaning toward a combination of numbers two and three. Part of my reasoning is the thing about the chicken being alone on the individually wrapped sheet pan. If he was freezing all of his chickens, he could have just pulled one out of the pile. No, this was planned out very deliberately. I like to think he spent no less than 25 minutes selecting the chicken he would use for the arson. The man is nothing if not meticulous.

The other part of my reasoning is that, for some reason, I don’t believe that Gus — a notorious drug dealer and murderer who may or may not have committed a number of war crimes in his native country before fleeing to America — would lie about or take shortcuts with the preparation of the food at the restaurant he runs to hide his lucrative narcotics business. Is that weird Is it weird that I’m willing to accept him as a cold-blooded killer and criminal but not as a man who tries to pass off frozen chicken as fresh I don’t think it is, which is itself pretty weird. Gus Fring has respect for a quality product. It’s the same with his meth and his chicken. It’s why he eventually brings in Walter White. The man demands the best and there are consequences for failing him.

Still, though. The chickens are “never” frozen That’s been proven false. A more accurate statement would be “our product is never frozen unless I need to stage an explosion to blow up the restaurant as part of ruse involving my hated partner and nemesis in the drug cartel that employs me.” I guess that’s a bit of a mouthful, though. I’ll cut him a little slack, mostly because I’m terrified of him.

Look at this guy. Come on.

Freeze all the chickens you want, buddy. Just please do not hurt me.

Adam Schlesinger passed away this week from complications related to the coronavirus. I’ll leave the eulogies to the people who were more familiar with his entire body of work, but it is important to note here and everywhere that the Fountains of Wayne frontman wrote the titular song from That Thing You Do!, a perfect little song in a mostly perfect little movie. It’s not just that the song was relentlessly catchy on its own, in the way that timeless pop songs often are. It was that the entire movie hinged on the song being relentlessly catchy. No pressure or anything.

My colleague Josh Kurp wrote a lovely tribute to the song this week that said all of this better than I have or can. Let’s blockquote him:

The drums! The harmonies! The hook! The bridge! Every time I hear it, I turn into Liv Tyler running down the street, losing her mind when she hears the song on the radio. “That Thing You Do!” sounds effortless, but it’s not like “I Want to Hold Your Hand”-level bops come out of nowhere; Schlesinger had to write a song from another era that you hear multiple times in its near-entirety, and if it wasn’t instantly irresistible and you didn’t believe it was the biggest song in the world, the entire movie would fall apart. (It’s one of the reasons, among many, that Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip failed: the in-show sketches were supposed to be funny; they weren’t. Unlike 30 Rock, where “Fart Doctor” is intentionally awful, and therefore, hilarious.) “That Thing You Do!” was a 1960s song written for a 1990s movie that still sounds great in the 2020s. It’s timeless.

This is all correct. Let’s play this song all weekend. And a bunch of Schlesinger’s other songs. And let’s also try to remember to be better about honoring people while they’re alive, too. While they’re around to hear it. Tributes are great. Celebrations are better. I know it’s hard to think about that now, but try letting someone you admire know how important their work has been to you. Do it this weekend. Do it today. You never know, you know

Ina Garten is the greatest. This much we knew already, although the video embedded above is a nice little refresher. Just the Barefoot Contessa quarantined at home in the Hamptons and mixing up a cocktail as big as her entire head. It’s perfect and beautiful. She’s one part Queen of America and one part everyone’s fun aunt, which I believe makes all of us second-tier princes and princesses, the kind that have money and jewels and castles but no actual responsibilities. The best kind. Queen Aunt Ina rules the land with her giant cocktails. The people love her and she loves the people.

This also gives us a great excuse to go back and read Choire Sicha’s wonderful profile of her from 2015. Does it give you some background on her rise to fame It does. Does it feature hilariously alpha quotes from Martha Stewart Yes, plenty of them. Does it include a number of paragraphs about her husband Jeffrey, a fascinating man who may or may not have secrets I am pleased to report that it does. Here, look:

Jeffrey appears in the show as comic relief, a bumbling Jew doing big shtick. Ina likes to use the hashtag #drunkhubby to describe him on Instagram. In the season eight premiere, they’ve rented a house in Napa, so that, ostensibly, Ina can get away and Jeffrey can write a book. There is a whole subplot in one episode that amounts to absolutely nothing, in which Jeffrey, having flown in for Friday night chicken dinner, is filmed driving through the Napa roads. “I hope I can find the rental house,” he says, in an example of how people say everyday, totally acceptable things which then come off on the show — or, to be fair, on all such shows — as flat and deranged and even a little Lynchian. He really hopes he can find that rental house!

Haha, what a silly man. Who is also an extremely successful financial wizard. And again, may or may not have secrets.

Jeffrey Garten is not a bumbling idiot. He finds the house in Napa without difficulty. After all, any reasonably close reading of his resume suggests that he certainly either was, or equally likely was not, working for the CIA in Asia and Latin America for decades.

What a fascinating couple. I want to live in their guest house and observe them for weeks on end. Months, perhaps. Not even for a profile or a documentary. Just for my own curiosity. Especially when you consider this…

“Personally, I’m a big vegetable fan and I have to be very cautious of what I eat and how much I eat of it. And yes, have they had to come up to me and say ‘Chef, you’ve got two more locations today. You cannot have all the enchiladas’ And have they taken them out of my hands Yes, they have.”

Ahhh, whoops. It appears I have accidentally included a quote from another Food Network icon, Guy Fieri, from a piece in Variety this week. I wonder how that happened I guess we’ll never know. Or we will know because I will tell you: It happened because the visual of a producer yoinking an enchilada out of Guy Fieri’s hands has been cracking me up for days. Picture his face. He must have been so sad. Let Guy have his enchiladas!

I would pay top-tier boxing title fight PPV prices for a three-hour special where Guy and Ina criss-cross America in a Winnebago.

Two things that are true:

That wish was granted during the Big Mouth quarantine live-read that took place last weekend. Behold, a champion.