Blog
Autumn Horizon
Autumn isn't really autumn in L.A. Sure, temperatures may drift downward into the 70s and (if we're lucky) 60s rather than the 80s and 90s. And sure, the evenings cool off quicker and some types of deciduous trees (if you can find them) shed their leaves. Sure, Starbucks has their pumpkin spice lattes and caramel apple ciders. One can even find a local pumpkin patch after enough Googling.But for a Midwestern boy like me, it will never feel quite right.
Lights Out
I'm going to be writing more about the show this summer as it finishes its run on NBC, but for now I'll just say this: I'm so thankful for Friday Night Lights--for so many reasons. It was a rare show that took beauty, truth and goodness seriously, and which favored earnestness and simplicity in a medium that increasingly seems to prefer gimmicky, trite, cynical and overblown. I appreciated Lights because of how complicated it was, how hard it was to classify. I appreciated it because it featured the best portrait of a marriage I've ever seen on television.
Portrayals of the Good
We live in a time when "authenticity" is equated with those things or those people who are forthright in their brokenness and messiness, while stable, happy people are sometimes looked upon with skepticism, as if their lack of apparent problems makes them phony or untrustworthy. Our jadedness leads us to a sort of self-reinforcing stasis of raw brokenness, because this is what we believe. This is what we know. But what we really need are models of goodness & virtue in our lives... figures of hope who can motivate us out of the cycle of dreary cynicism.
Turn on the Lights
Lights is a show about contemporary life. Small town, Texas life. Drenched in nostalgia, adolescent angst, and Midwestern truisms (Dairy Queen, sports radio, Applebees), the show bursts forth with quotidian drama. The Emmy-nominated, Peabody Award-winning show is elegant, mature American art, at once a soft spoken tone poem—recalling the literary Frontier of Willa Cather, Horton Foote or The Last Picture Show—and a tumultuous tableaux of soap opera with the kinetic Americana of Thomas Hart Benton or Aaron Copland.
Best TV of the 2000s
In 2020, will there be TV anymore? Who knows. But on the off chance that the death of television hasn’t been greatly exaggerated and is indeed imminent, we can at least celebrate the good twilight years that were the 2000s. In case TV fades into oblivion or merges with the Internet or something, this wasn’t such a bad decade to have ended on. Here are my picks for the best TV shows of the decade.
Friday Night Lights Season Four Kicks Off
The fourth season of Friday Night Lights premiers tomorrow night on the 101 channel of DirecTV (for those of us fortunate to have DirecTV... I bought mine solely for FNL). I urge you to watch it if you can! Find someone with DirecTV! Or search for it online. Or wait until 2011 and watch it on NBC. Just don't miss it!
Why You Should Watch Friday Night Lights
I was born and raised on the banks of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a sandy and humid spot to grow up—full of pecan trees and azaleas and armadillos. People were nice, and most everyone seemed to be working hard to support their families and maybe earn enough to put in a below-ground pool. And football was huge. From elementary school on up, it was the thing to do.
Friday Night Lights is Back!
It’s true (at least for those of us who have DirecTV!). Television’s most undervalued show began its third season last night on the 101 channel on DirecTV. Fear not, it will be on NBC as well… just not until sometime in early 2009. I admit it: I pretty much bought DirecTV so I could watch the first run of FNL’s new season. That’s how much I like this show.