TV Watch preview: Larry David on apologies, plus (finally!) the final episodes of "Breaking Bad" begin

A trailer for HBO's Clear History

WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: I'm really sorry.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: It doesn't matter if you apologize if it's not sincere.
WIDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER [exasperated]: Apologies don't have to be sincere.
JON HAMM CHARACTER: That is literally the only thing an apology has to be. I'm sorry it had to be like this.
WILDLY ENHAIRIFIED LARRY DAVID CHARACTER: You see? You apologized, but you didn't mean it!

by Ken

I don't know much about this HBO film Clear History (written by David Mandel, Alec Berg, and Jeff Schaffer and directed by Greg Mottola, with a cast including -- in addition to Larry David and Jon Hamm -- Bill Hader, Philip Baker Hall, Kate Hudson, Michael Keaton, Danny McBride, Eva Mendes, Amy Ryan, and J. B. Smoove), which has its premiere tonight, but on the basis of the exchange I've transcribed above, I will absolutely give it a shot.

UPDATE: The movie turns out to be harmless enough, and as I feared, the "apology" exchange is the best thing in it. In fact, the trailer version is seriously truncated. Since I wasn't recording the 9pm airing, I can't transcribe the full version, but I'm recording the 12:45am rebroadcast, and by tomorrow I should have the complete version to post.

We're living, after all, in the Age of Apologies, where putatively sentient humans devote an ever larger portion of their waking hours to demanding an apology from so-and-so, without any clear indication that so-and-so is the least bit sorry, even if his/her handlers decided that he/she really should issue the demanded apology, which in any case is likely to take some form of the weaselly "I'm sorry if anyone is offended," which of course makes it pretty clear that the alleged apologizer isn't sorry about what he/she did, but only about the possibility that some beclouded soul might have been somehow offended by the words or deed.

In this clip the Wildly Enhairified Larry David Character merely takes the reality one step further, to the entirely reasonable destination where sincerity doesn't even come into the matter of an apology. If this sounds like pure Larry David, bear in mind that all three writers and the director were ranking collaborators of his on Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. (It still sounds like Larry to me. Do you suppose the NSA has surveillance video of the Clear History writers' room?)

Anyway, the premiere showing of Clear History is at 9pm tonight at 9pm, at least here in the Eastern time zone. (Please don't ask me about other time zones. If you got to this post, you presumably have computer skills. HBO has a website, hbo.com.) Which means that if you're in this time zone, and you're reading this post close to its posting time, which is 9pm ET, the thing may still be playing on your cable box, so if your cable system has the "START OVER" feature and if it works better than mine, you can still catch the premiere. Otherwise you'll be reduced to catching one of the million repeat airings.


TOMORROW NIGHT AT 9pm ET, OF COURSE< IT'S THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR AMC'S BREAKING BAD

"I could not be more excited about these final eight episodes. An awful lot happens, probably enough to fill 20 episodes."

-- Breaking Bad creator and exec producer Vince Gilligan

"These episodes take on a trajectory that we haven't experienced before."

-- Bryan Cranston (Walter White)

"It's a violent, brutal sprint to the finish line. We only have eight hours left to tell the story, and so there's no episode that allows the audience to kind of take a breather."

-- Aaron Paul (Jesse Pinkman)

That's right, the final sequence of eight episodes, the "second half of Season 5" (even though it's actually launching a bit more than a year after the start of the "first half os Season 5") begins tomorrow night.

Sorry, I once again had to put this clip at the end in order to avoid losing all my line breaks. So now -- once you get past the commercial -- you can see and hear these worthies say the above, along with assorted other contributors, all of whom are pretty good (I'm happy to say) at not giving away actual plot information.