| | Yesterday, I suffered through Sisters of the Traveling Pants. One of the downsides to having a weekly movie night and a female roommate is more often than not the female roommate picks the movie we're going to watch. One of the things I've realized after we got through it is I am seriously tired of that talky Gilmore Girls/Sex and the City-like banter females seem to be so fond of these days. I mean, seriously, do you really think those writers are as clever as they think they are? To me they're just fucking annoying.
Thank God for Friday Night Lights. I'm finally caught up on Season 3. Man, what a show. If you're not watching it, you should be b/c it's the best damn show on television and unless more people tune in, I'm pretty sure it's going to get canceled. Everything about it is not just great but extraordinary. The actors, the cinematography, the music, and, most of all, the writing--it's all top notch. I mean take season 1 for example. Jason Street, the star quarterback is paralyzed during the first episode. You think it's just to make way for Matt Saracen's coming of age story but Street doesn't disappear. They focus on his life as an invalid. That in itself is unique but then you realize life as a parapelgic is pretty fucking depressing and you wonder, two episodes in, why you're still watching something that makes you want to kill yourself. Well, you do keep watching b/c you're sucked in by a combination of how Scott Porter's uncanny charisma and the brutally honest, cogent dialogue that, not for one instance, comes across as contrived. There are less ambitious writing forays like Coach Taylor's relationship with his wife, Tammy. I enjoy that relationship--a lot. Neither of them gets cancer. Coach Taylor doesn't bang some hot underage girl. The most life changing thing they did in season 3 was talk about buying a house--but that duo is so much more interesting than the couples in tjpse other shows whose relationship is founded purely on the plot cliches whose only purpose is to heighten romantic tension. I've said before but there is beauty in the ordinary and writer Jason Katims captures it perfectly on paper. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, with their phenomenonal chemistry, release it from the page to you and me.
All in all, there's this freshness to the show, this novelty about it that I really enjoy. I'm not banging my head, bitching about cliched dialogue, cliched characters, cliched plot threads (unlike, say, Sisters of the Traveling Pants). There's a depth to each of those elements that I've not seen anywhere else on TV today and I love it. It feels so much like life--dizzyingly beautiful at times and terrifyingly, depressingly, empty at others. It is just a great show.
Last thing thing I'll say though it probably should have been the first thing--the show is about football but it's not really about football. What I mean by that is the football elements are definitely important (and well done) but they are only important insofar as how affect they affect this community that has made the sport its religion. I'd be wrong to claim the show wasn't about texan, high school football but it's EVEN MORE about the people who invest so much of their lives, derive so much of their worth from it. It's truly interesting watching these kids grow up in a town where their life is supposed to peak senior year of high school. It's interesting watching adults who've bought into that idea that their best lives are behind them. Last of all, it's interesting watching this coach who's under a lot of pressure to win games but also inevitably finds himself being a surrogate father to his players. That fine line b/t watching out for yourself and doing what you ought to do, doing the right thing--aren't those the choices we're faced with every day? Aren't those the small battlegrounds where the war for our own souls take place? Isn't it time we got a show that not only talks about those things but inspires us to do the right thing? That's what Friday Night Lights is.
And btw Minka Kelly is hot. 8.9/10 |
| | Posted 3/14/2009 3:34 AM - 65 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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