I've come to decide that for all of its accolades (most of which date, appropriately, back to the first season), Friday Night Lights is a little too enamored of precipitous melodrama to be the messiah in naturalism that some of its more overzealous fans claimed or wanted it to be since it dips so frequently into the well of emotional confrontations. Personally, I'd love the series more if it just showed the Coach and Mrs. Taylor at home in real time for one tv-hour over them dealing with a new crisis each week.
That said, FNL often begins storylines with refreshingly temperate calm, even though they may quickly devolve into conflict-addled hysterics meant to stretch the drama into feasible season-filling lengths. So why stick through the predictable histrionics? The third season premiere answers: When Smash asks why Coach Taylor is driving him so hard to rehab his knee when the odds of Smash ever playing football again are becoming ever more remote, Coach responds, "'Cause I need something good to happen." Which is to say, the resolution to these stories so often features that rare, deft magic which captivated us in the first season, is captured once more -- maybe even rivaled -- by the send-off for Smash Williams in "Hello, Goodbye."
Smash's rehabilitation -- physical and mental -- constitutes the best arc that the show has had in a long time and hands down gives Gaius Charles the best material he has had to work with as Smash Williams, whose arrogance typically kept us from sympathizing with him as much as some of the other characters. But when his swag got knocked off in the season premiere, he's working fast-food full-time, we don't pleasure in his misfortune. Instead, just as we're seeing Smash's emotional valences uncovered by his circumstances, we realize the hidden depths of affect and sympathy are at work in places we never thought they'd appear, and in Smash's case, he's the character whom I most wanted to see recover because his irrepressible spirit did not belong in an Alamo Freeze uniform. (And you know that FNL loves all of its characters too much to stick them permanently in small-town hell.)
So after a handful of episodes with the expected (and, honestly, desultory) ups and down and "what's the point of all this" moaning, we get the payoff in "Hello, Goodbye" where Smash prevails, as we knew he would, but the unrestrained -- unrestrainable -- joy that bursts through is that something good that needed to happen to Coach Taylor, and FNL viewers too; in the midst of all of Dillon's mess of drama, Smash represented the restoration of idealism and hope.
Indie rating: Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. – "Buy The Moon Of Jupiter"
While I cram for my last final and my SYTYCD recap, occupy your time with Connie "Mrs. Coach" Britton's appearance on Charlie Rose. I've only seen very brief parts of it, but she was on to plug a documentary on Ethiopian orphans she produced and directed, in addition to general FNL stuff.
OK, the level of pandering on FNL has gotten out of hand. Jean, Landry's bounce-back girl, is blatant nerd-bait. A quick run through all of the engineered qualities of a nerd's wet dream.
Glasses Mandatory. Check.
An abiding love for MST3K Check.
Ironic taste in '70s movies Check. (Wrath of Khan all the way, besides.)
Computer savvy She knew where to watch MST3K on Youtube; Check.
Metal geek OK, so she miscategorized Mayhem, Napalm Death, the Keep, Cannibal Corpse, and Carcass as thrash -- they're really black or death metal (...with heavy thrash influences) -- but we'll let that slide because she's a girl. Check.
Vinyl? A girl metalhead is already a stretch, now you want me to believe she collects vinyl?
In a season of authorial heavy-handedness, Jean is unsubtle and unconcealed nerdbait and it totally works.
Landry, Tyra's plucky and has plenty of pa-dow, but bro, Jean was right, you totally made a mistake.
In case you ever need to determine if someone, fictional or not, is nerdbait, why, just consult this handy, very real, and very official NERDBAIT: A CHECKLIST checklist.
But seriously folx, this episode was probably the highlight of the season, mostly because of that final shot of Smash, alone in the locker room after exhorting his teammates to win without him. No less importantly, "Leave No One Behind" avoided the careening emotional apocalypses that have plagued this season: Julie and Mrs. Taylor's weekly faceoffs ran the gamut from shrill to caterwauling, and I was relieved when their showdown resolved into the low-key "lol, miscommunication (PS lol, parental negligence)."
First a desultory top 10 8 albums of the year, though with a nota bene: I don't think I've been this disinterested in putting together a year-end list in recent memory. That doesn't have anything to do with the quality of the year's releases; rather, my media priorities and critical attention have shifted unequivocally towards teevee, and I haven't felt the urge to keep up my indie cred as years past. This list makes no claims as to comprehensiveness:
* The Electrelane ménage -- krautrock and gorgeous melodies -- hooks up with sweet, heartbroken lyrics. Much rejoicing. (Come back, Electrelane! -ed.)
≈ An ambient record you have to listen to, spacious and intimate. The key is to disappear into the waves...
† Never heard anything so loud.
℘ Nothing wrong with Peej doing pretty, especially as a Civil War ghost.
∞ Baltharian reveries on the Cylon baseships.
1234 Geddit?
∪ Cheating, sure (i.e. Pink live!), but I finally get Merzbow now, he just needs to play behind a hardcore punk-metal trio shredding out the best post-Motörhead long-player ever. (Nb. the linked video isn't with Merzbow -- you'll just have to imagine the track with more industrial noise.)
∫ The most pummeling quiet record -- ever?
Enough of the music bollocks, here's the TV
If you're a regular reader, you probably have picked up my contrarian views which, I'll admit, are sometimes (oftentimes?) blatant provocations, playing the devil's advocate just for its own sake. And one of the unstated assumptions that underlies this blog (and explains the amount of energy I put into it) is that tv land always has quality, it's not the underachieving wasteland that various cultural sentinels would have you believe it is. Critics who complain about any given year's quality are these dour sentinels, or else they're deluged by the sheer volume of mediocrity that's unavoidable in any medium, and I have little time for their opinions.
That said, I compiled the 10 Best Hours of 2007 with difficulty, though to avoid historical revisionism, I had a hard time doing it last year, too. Part of the reason is that the new shows mostly disappointed (though I swear to God, Reaper delivered on its promise), while the old favorites either stumbled along during Fall 2007 (which piled additional detritus onto the sublimity of Spring 2007 that I had to mentally sort through) (also, the strike didn't help, but we'll probably never know just what could have been if things had been business as usual), or skipped this year altogether, whether by HBO's strategized scheduling practices (you guessed it, The Wire) or because their runs simply ended (Teen Titans, Justice League Unlimited).
And sometimes I'm just behind the curve. Just this year, I've caught up (and I'm still catching up) on no fewer than 5 shows of which I'm now an entrenched fan, and no doubt I'll still be discovering new shows. But for the moment, if I could propose an amended 10 hours from 2006, they'd look something like this (new entrants bolded):
10. Justice League Unlimited, "The Great Brain Robbery" (5x08) 9. Friday Night Lights, "Pilot" (1x01) 8. Survivor: Cook Islands, "People That You Like Want To See You Suffer" (13x10) 7. Heroes, "Fallout" (1x11) 6. Teen Titans, "Things Change" (5x13) 5. Lost, "Live Together, Die Alone" (2x23) 4. Veronica Mars, "Not Pictured" (2x22) 3. Battlestar Galactica, "Resurrection Ship, Part 2" (2x11) 2. America's Next Top Model Cycle 6, "The Girl Who is Going to the Moon" (6x09) 1. The Wire, "Final Grades" (4x13)
Given that almost half of my top 10 of 2006 got turned over, anything I put together for 2007 is destined to be no less temporary. (And let's not forget that we're talking about tv here, that gloriously ephemeral and intangible medium -- at least it was before the DVD, which, like the edenic serpent, introduced to it the death of permanence and respectability, but that's another matter).
But the real reason a list of 10 was hard this year and probably will always be hard is that for all the tv I watch, I don't watch enough to compile awesome episodes from 10 different shows, which is sort of reflected in my year-end music list as well. I don't have enough time to watch that much tv, I don't have cable, I'm afraid of getting hooked on shameless trash (like, say, The OC), I don't believe in the concept of a canon -- whatever combination of these reasons is the case, I don't come close to comprehensiveness, and so if you ever read me saying "this year was a bad year in tv," feel free to launch a projectile of your choice (I suggest: a football) towards my groin.
Which is all to say that the following list is a project of simple vanity. Just because I include certain shows on an arbitrary list doesn't make them more legitimate or better than anything anyone else watches (even if I make claims to the contrary -- remember, I'm an admitted hypocrite). In addition to the vanity, a top 10 lets me reflect on some shows, to work through why I enjoyed them, with perhaps a dash of evangelism for the more ratings-challenged ones.
Finally, I should state that despite the anti-canon equivocations of the preceding paragraphs, the top five includes episodes that sent me into ecstasy -- whether of the unadulterated variety or the kind that involves endorphin-releasing schadenfreude -- enough so that 2007 was a great tv year, however you slice it.
(Nb. I realize that one of the entrants below is actually two hours, but for the sake of symmetry, shut up.)
10. So You Think You Can Dance, Week 1, Top 20 Dancers Perform (3x06; FOX, 6/13/07) The overall talent level, if not the choreography, was exponentially better than years past, and all the promise offered by the dancers was nearly as exciting as anything they actually did. Also, this was kinda hot, and a certain host put the "cat" into "lolcat."
9. Project Runway Canada, "Opposites Attract" (1x06; Slice, 11/12/07) Just as you'd expect, the Canuck version of Runway doesn't have the same bite as its southern cousin since, as we all know, Canadians are scientifically more polite than Yankees, which, when it comes to reality tv, is to sadly blander effect. (I can make this un-PC generalization because I watched an episode -- one whole episode! -- of Canada's Next Top Model.) For instance, Evan Biddell, the show's self-styled heavy, slimmed down from his pre-Runway weight of 300 pounds, then bit off the catchphrase of an infinitely more colorful American Runway contestant. Some heavy!
Yet, the most notable trump card that Runway Maple Leaf holds over Runway Crying Eagle is its host, Iman. While Runway Canada kicked off with as much empty space and personality as the Northwest Territories, Mrs. David Bowie single-handedly raised her version above any stereotypical and expected Canadian blandness. Iman owns the whole show in a way that Heidi -- bless her always-smiling Teutonic femmebotness -- never has. Iman informed the designers of their upcoming challenges and all eyes were of course on her. Her hosting style was uncompromising as she takes her sweet time with her line readings. Where Heidi bids farewell to eliminated contestants with the impersonal "auf Wiedersehen," Iman tells them what's up, "You just didn't measure up." But it was in the sixth episode of the season that she at last decided to utterly dominate the show, letting loose with charisma, humor, and an effortless strength of opinion that is captivating.
In fact, she almost single-handedly raised the show's game at the opening of the show when she reminded everyone that she can still bring the woah:
I haven't seen someone work the shadows like this since Sydney Bristow. It's safe to say that she'll always be an elegant lady.
She also combines my two favorite things: glasses, and white girls.
8. Bones, "Mummy in the Maze" (3x05; FOX, 10/30/07) Even if I never remember the procedural bits, Temperance Brennan makes science and empiricism sexy.
7. John From Cincinnati, "His Visit: Day Five" (1x06; HBO, 7/15/07) The most thrillingly weird moment on TV since the first season finale of Twin Peaks. Prepare yourselves.
Sure, this scene is pure spectacle that pointed to mythological depths at the time but instead opened up a can of worms that ultimately turned out bottomless -- but sometimes payoff is unnecessary. Some things just can't be expressed yet remain beautiful all the same. If you can let yourself be enticed by the unanswerable mystery, the unfettered unknowable, and unbounded possibility, then you'll have stumbled onto the allure of the ineffable. It's a vastness which, if I were the grandiloquent type, I'd call God. (Also if I were a blasphemer.)
Oh, and who can forget this sparkling performance? Camp (albeit unintentional) and weirdness -- John From Cincinnati really is the Twin Peaks for the '00s.
6. Reaper, "The Cop" (1x08; The CW, 11/13/07) Remember how I'm never wrong? Still the best new show of the season. Yes, a lot of Reaper's own viewers have cited the show's uneven tone or its meandering master narrative, but I could barely care less and I'm still not wrong. Look, if I acknowledge every one of my mistakes, that'd make for exceedingly dull reading. Like our own beloved president, never admit to error! So here's how I reason my way out of this quandary: for me, nearly any narrative deficiency can be compensated for by hilarious wit, especially the sophomoric variety, which Reaper has no problem with. As a for instance, peep this. (Start at about 8:30.)
5. Survivor: Fiji, "It's a Turtle!" (14x10; CBS, 4/19/07) In Fiji, the lines drawn in the sand split the would-be survivors into two principle camps: the players I adored -- Yau-Man and Earl -- and the players I hated -- Alex and Mookie, who liked to figuratively flex their muscles and kick sand in the face of slight professor Yau-Man. (There was a third camp, the people I couldn't care less about, but that describes exactly how much energy I want to spend on them.) Alex was a piece of work inside and outside the game, but I loathed Mookie, whose defining moment came two episodes earlier, during a projectiles-throwing challenge, when he ridiculed Yau-Man's unorthodox technique which, of course, had the weight of science behind it as he pwned Mookie (start at about 2:30 for the goods -- don't miss his shock and dismay that a skinny old dude could manage to outperform him). That instant crystallized the jockish presumption that typified Alex and Mookie, and when they thuggishly tried to strategize against Yau-Man and Earl and dubbed themselves (along with Dreamz and Edgardo) something as junior-high pimply as "the Four Horsemen" (of what? Delusionally Inflated Ego and Pathetic Macho Dick-Swinging?), their plans obviously and completely unraveled with the frothiest layer of schadenfreude ever on Survivor. The bad guys don't always get their comeuppance in reality tv -- much less reality qua reality -- but when it does, there's nothing sweeter.
Also, Boo's FLOZ hat is destined to be the enduring mystery of our times.
4. Friday Night Lights, "Mud Bowl" (1x20; NBC, 3/28/07) Season two has made me reconsider the fabled first season's naturalism, which is more accurately Naturalism since the situations so often were larger than life and their consequent outcomes concluded neatly by preternatural maturity (which season two tried to complicate by rolling back and/or conveniently forgetting a lot of character growth). But scratch the substance and you reach the show's real meat, its style. Don't let the vérité influences and flourishes fool you, because they're precisely the point, and did "Mud Bowl" ever bring the ruckus: Of course Dillon was going to win its regular season finale to go on to the State Championship, which would've been predictable and lifeless if the moment was anything less than heart-stopping and epic. A neutral site built days before the game. A torrential storm torn straight from YHWH's Old Testament wrath. Motherfucking Isis. Boys entering the crucible of flooded ash and the annihilation of all ego, and emerging men of character. And a television show transcending the shackles of substance and into the realm of pure aesthetics.
3. Heroes, ".07%" (1x19; NBC, 4/23/07) Wherein Nate loses out on Linderman's pot pie, and the show's nerd quotient goes through the roof. I never plotzed so much.
2. 30 Rock, "Greenzo"/"Somebody to Love" (2x05, 2x06; NBC, 11/8/07, 11/15/07) See what I did there? Together, not only were these two episodes the most riotous consecutive weeks in sitcom history (not even God, if She were a divine comedy Supercomputer with all eternity to write half-hour laff-fests, could come close to the hilarity), but they also add up to one hour! I'm smart, like Al Gore.
1. Veronica Mars, "The Bitch is Back" (3x20; The CW, 5/22/07) Loathe as I am to admit it, the fans were partly right, the third season was the least of the three. Yet for all the foul cries and spurned oaths, Veronica Mars was never a categorically bad show. Season three shifted its method; instead of one grand mystery, the season was split into three abbreviated mystery arcs (though in the end, that last arc got chopped even further into mostly standalone episodes so the CW could look for Pussycat Dolls), and as a result, the show's scope and focus consequently suffered. Not much, mind, but enough to throw fan nation into a frothy spaz.
Yet all that was erased when Veronica Mars and her father Keith became mired in a sex tape and election scandal in the Veronica Mars episode ever. Their fates were never so much in doubt, and the show was never so uncompromisingly urgent, its status quo never so ruthlessly overturned -- all of which would have still applied even if the season finale hadn't officially become the de facto series finale. Leaving the Marses -- heretofore the most self-sufficient and self-composed father-daughter duo ever to grace network tv, I'd gather -- dangling over this network show's most dangerous and uncompromising knife-edge (a show which, on a regular basis, dealt frankly with teen sex, teen drug use, and teen angst) to no resolution was as cruel of a kick in the teeth as the agony that Keith and Veronica suffered.
Just a warning: Next year, if you're still reading and I'm still blogging, expect to see an all-Wire top 10.
I've been thinking about this idea for a while, but that last episode kind of cemented it: Friday Night Lights has become what Studio 60 could've been, a show whose characters are elevated to a mediated with only a token resemblance to the quotidian. The first season was full of "accidental" hyper-naturalism, where its characters, both teen-aged and adult and cut from recognizable archetypes, were forged into preternaturally mature individuals, heroic in their noble ordinariness.
However, this season, the hyper-naturalism has been phased out in favor of a high school melodrama filled with brats confronting one emotional crisis after another (Julie vs. Mrs. Coach, Part IX; Saracen's attempts to get his Tom Brady impression right but in reverse, AKA The Latina Nurse is Hot and All but How Could He Dump Supermodel Kim Smith for Her?), all of which have been transparently engineered and planted by a producer-god. This sort of emotional apocalypticism subsumes even FNL's cast -- I can take only so much shrill keening before my expectations shift, which explains why I was hoping Mrs. Coach would slap Julie again regardless of Aimee Teegarden's *hem hem* development as an actress.
Anyway, I at least hope (and so should you) for Jason Street to regain mobility so he can lead the Patriots to the first undefeated season since the '72 Dolphins.
But look, a picture of Jason Street! From THE FUTURE!
Indie rating: Can - "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone"
In a season that began with a questionable storyline, this episode is the most frustrating installment yet even though four-fifths of it was solid. "Are You Ready for Friday Night?" featured what made Friday Night Lights so captivating last season, but to borrow football terminology, it was too busy running laterally or even backwards -- a desperate gambit without faith in the discipline that led to its prior success (well, a qualified success) -- and virtually gave up on the idea of forward progress. Any number of characters experienced sublime epiphanies by the end of last season, but all that growth was ignored or (worse yet) reinvented in this episode. On another separate but related problem that can be summarized with a second football cliche, the second season has also stacked the box with the commonplaces of melodrama so that the good -- namely, the unpretentious domestic naturalism -- is overwhelmed with trite dramatic conventions that stuff the talent well behind the line of scrimmage. So in the end, the quiet domesticity, the engrossing small-town, dead-end ennui now has to contend with the sensational; the fundamental rules, the underlying physics of Friday Night Lights have been rewritten, and far from being a premature anxiety, what we've got is nothing short of a moral failing that can only be resolved through means that are equally sensationalistic as the problems themselves. (In short, I'm never going to tell someone to chill.)
Which is to say, since we've got 8 defenders in the box lined up against the show's running game, if the show's going to keep its current drive alive, it will have to go to the, um, air. Which I guess means it has to trust in Saracen to...
Uh, right.
Which brings us to how the season has mischaracterized its principal characters -- Riggins back on the wagon, Street chasing miracle cures, Smash hosting his 24/7 Smash Show, all of whom have moderately good reasons, but after the finale, it all feels unfairly redundant, with Saracen being the most egregious example. He had never before bought into the fascistic mythologizing of the sacramental collective at the expense of individual expression, nor into the macho posturing that plays into such a culture, so why did he tackle Smash during a game when Smash decided to drink in the adulation he earned? (And after Smash succinctly and elegantly explained to him why he was brashing it up again, Saracen's reaction becomes doubly inexplicable and is shot through with the contradictory, self-aggrandizing "I'm standing up for team values if no one else will" notion.) It's the sort of reductive "There's no 'I' in 'team'" ideology -- and more than a hint of the entailing right way/white way theology -- that FNL rarely if ever stooped to last season. (OK Voodoo whatever.)
Yet, Saracen is still partly the shambling kid we loved from last year, though what makes his character disappointing comes down to "partly." While the some of the scenes in Chez Saracen were right in the domestic bread basket of the show -- namely Matt asking live-in not-quite-a-nurse Carlotta to do his laundry as well -- they're not being used as the slice-of-life Instead, the domestic scenes are merely the means to build up to the transparent "sexual" "tension" subtext between the Saracen and Carlotta, which is fine for QB1...
... but not so great for the rest of us who can see the producers pulling their strings on behalf of a soapy story arc that will make the Riggins/Jackie look like kitchen sink realism.
Meanwhile, Julie! She's already traded in solid, dependable, and newly emasculated Saracen for Douche Baggins, shows that she's also a global warming skeptic who can't get her topical "facts" straight -- if anything, the current EPA administration is little more than an adjunct of the Bush White House and its environmental policy! Like, omigod! She really should stop now before she really embarrasses herself.
Normally, I don't like acting, which is odd since I usually privilege style so much; on the other hand, I also demand narrative as the most fundamental basis of drama. Good narrative absorbs the viewer into the action; what most people think of as good acting draws attention to the performer, which distracts from the narrative. But then, I loved Connie Britton's performance last year, mostly because it wasn't the typically superfluous and showy awards-bait acting that passes as good acting. That was last season though; this season, I'm left with one thought: Acting is more than crying. Asking Connie Britton to play Broken-Down Mom is pointless and arguably unearned flash; no doubt she can do it, but the essence of her performance last year was the emotionally subterranean qualities that defy the surface limitations of visual media. This season, we've only seen obvious emoting with all the good acting signifiers on prominent display.
More things that won't make my PopMatters article!
Besides the fact that Jackie is twice the age of Riggins, one reason that their affair was bound to fail was because the quasi-family that they had going bordered on the incestuous. Jackie broke things off because she said that Bo saw Riggins as a father figure, but when Bo stops Riggins afterwards, the tyke asks if they can still hang because they're "bros." This is Texas, not Arkansas.
After Coach excitedly comes home to take Julie and Tami out to dinner, Julie storms away, and Coach says, "I know what's gonna happen next, the door's gonna slam." *Slam* "Why is that?" Well, he certainly knows why because after Tami suggests that she and Julie stay in Dillon, and Coach rejects that plan, he leaves the house, yes, slamming the door.
This episode gets a lot of thematic mileage out of the idea of cutting people down with words. First, Street and Coach cut Saracen down to size when QB1 says he feels good going into State: "You don't have any laurels, Saracen," says Street. "Not a damn laurel," says Coach. Meanwhile, his buddy Landry also gets cut down, this time by Tyra who calls him a "pathetic smelly geek." (I feel for you, bro.) His self-image is shaken enough that he has to reassert himself by elliptically proclaiming his love to Tyra (and after Saracen made fun of him about that before!)
Tami uses words as a tool of self-hood as well, but in a constructive way. As she's going up to the mic at the roast, Coach reminds her that "this a roast, not a skewering" -- i.e. not a destructive thing. At this point, Tami and Coach were still fighting over the TMU decision, so Coach's warning is understandable. However, Tami, being the coolest person ever, instead dedicates a jocular paean to him about how he'd enhanced her life beyond football, what with going for two, the I-Back formation, and so on and so forth, and closed by saying how wonderful Coach is, how great the town is, and how great the students and players are. So, in contrast to the merely good-natured ribbing of the roast, she figuratively embraces everybody in Dillon, and literally embraces Tyra. As guidance counselor, she holds people together.
Best show on TV. (Heroes gets an asterisk -- it's far and away the funnest show on TV.)
I'm quite crushing on Tami Taylor -- I hadn't realized that for the longest time, I thought her first name was "Mrs." or "Honey" or "Mom" -- and more accurately, Connie Britton. I'm glad that Peter Berg (director of the film and producer on the show) persuaded her to reprise her Mrs. Coach role from the film even though she had something like three lines of dialogue in the film, because her character on the show is one of the most endearing and fully fleshed characters on all of TV. Sure, she's a variation on the über-mom type -- she handles all the familial crises, plus she's the de facto parent to a lot of the kids at school (see: Tyra) -- but she never resorts to sentimental or saccharine GROUP HUG cliches.
I also have a PopMatters article in the works. I did have one observation that didn't fit into the article though, an observation which I will present here inna DVD special features stylee:
Friday Night Lights is about the Christian family.
After the Panthers kneel down for their usual post-game prayer, the coaches who comment with wariness on an unfolding reality: their opponent at the state final will be quarterbacked by Ray “Voodoo” Tatum, a displaced New Orleanite who played for Dillon for two games before the combination of a recruiting controversy and a clash with Coach Taylor sent him to a new school. Even though his nickname characterizes him as a non-Christian Other, inscrutable behind a surly, impenetrable, but pristinely manicured mask, Voodoo is more the interloper who doesn't buy into the Family, the all-for-one attitude of unselfish and egoless play that the Panthers, by necessity, have embraced on their way to the state championship.
Addendum: If I were Jason Street's steady, I'd give him a lifetime of passes purely because, when Saracen balked at the chance to eat lunch with THE STREET because he usually lunched with Julie, THE STREET replied, "I'll take care of Julie for you, don't worry about it. I'll give her a nice call, tell her there's a new girl in town, and that girl is me."
Indie Rating: Tarantel - "Hello! We Move Through Weather!"
I'm a bit surprised that I've taken so long coming up with a Top 10 TV shows, especially because 2006 was a fairly strong year in terms of reality TV plus Veronica Mars (haters can shut it), and that I'm as obsessed with TV as ever. Compare TV to my music geekness, which has abated considerably, though nonetheless I've decided on a moderately stable list of 10 albums:
Special mention goes out to Electrelane's Singles, B-Sides & Live collection.
Anyway, back on the TV front. To cut some suspense, stuff that is totally up my alley -- Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, and Battlestar Galactica -- aren't on the list because like a failed nerd, I only started watching their first seasons this year -- I have a feeling that once I get completely caught up, a lot of reality tv would get bumped off this list.
So, without thematizing the entire year (which, if you ask me, is an exercise in futility and arrogance), an ascending list of my favorite hours from 2006 with brief-to-briefish commentary:
10. So You Think You Can Dance, Top 10 Dancers (2x16) The judges were witless annoyances, the reality wasn't narrative-based, and I still don't know a quickstep from a jive, but SYTYCD is the younger, snottier, snappier, and sometimes "edgier" (i.e. including krumping as a style) version of Dancing with the Stars. Clearly, all of the hip-hop styles are on the show to appeal to younger viewers, who would be more familiar with popping-and-locking than fan kicks, but amazingly, the most impressive, sublime moments of the second season of SYTYCD were lyrical, paso doble, and the Cuban rumba, and this episode featured two of these styles. As shallow eye-candy goes, SYTYCD is fluffier (even if the final prize is actual employment for the winner), but as camp as a high-energy disco number, fluffy goes a long way.
9. The Amazing Race, "5 Continents...10 Countries...And More than 59 Thousand Miles!" (9x12) Wherein smelly hippies flex their brains to beat almost heterosexual fratties!
8. Scrubs, "My Transition" (5x18) OK, so Scrubs makes the list 9.5 hours. Add "My Urologist" (5x17) if you're into Dr. Acula. Vampires and absurdist high-comedy -- how could I not love this?
7. Friday Night Lights, "Pilot" (1x01) Friday Night Light perfectly blends the football action with searing melodrama in its first episode. Also: QB1 vs. QB1.
6. Survivor: Cook Islands, "People That You Like Want To See You Suffer" (13x10) Many reviews point to the preceding "Mutiny" episode (where Candice, and then Jonathan, abandoned the Aitu (Survivorese for "hero") Tribe) as the turning point of Cook Islands, since it turned the most likeable contestants Ozzy and Yul, who to that point were among the likeliest contenders to win the game, into underdogs. At the same time, the other tribe, composed of young white kids (& Nate), dared to treat the solemnity of the Survivor as no more than The Real World: Cook Islands, thus earning the contempt of most viewers. (Insert boring tangent about how the white kids, AKA the face of homogenous America, rejected the Protestant Work Ethic, which the two Koreans, a Mexican, a black woman, and a middle-aged Jew were left to pick up.) In other words, "Mutiny" completely deserves its place in Cook Islands lore, but in all of 2006, I don't think that my schadenfreude got as much of a work out as it did when I saw Candice blub because she was surprised that the tribe she betrayed to make out with her show-boyfriend was angry at her.
4. Heroes, "Fallout" (1x11) Lost-lite, but a very candy-coated version that, thus far, doesn't take itself quite as seriously as its progenitor, as summed up by Matt and FBI Girlfriend's telepathic flirting (better known as the awesomest exchange between shippy characters ever).
3. Lost, "Live Together, Die Alone" (2x23) Even though Lost consistently disappoints and frustrates me, the finale to season 2 rates this high almost because it stands out so much from the rest of that tease of a season, much of which was satisfied with maintaining its insular little world as the series became preoccupied with drawing out its status quo. Without answering existing questions, the show introduced new mysteries that were entirely within the parameters of the status quo, and as a result, many viewers felt like they were strung along. But by the finale, Lindelof, Cuse, et al seized the chance to blow up the insular little world they'd created and show us that, yes, another world existed beyond the Island, a world much larger with a whole different vocabulary to describe its own questions. (Unsurprisingly, this outside world has been a non-factor in season 3.)
2. Veronica Mars, "Not Pictured" (2x22) Maybe my taste is questionable (obviously it is with all these reality tv shows), but Veronica Mars was no less enjoyable in its second season than it was in its first. (Caveat: I only saw the mythological episodes that UPN reran during the summer hiatus.) The season finale typified everything I love about the show and even added a cherry on top: snappy and "epic" dialogue that culminated with Logan's impassioned and equally epic speech to V, a reveal that was unexpected but not out of leftfield, and a serious and genuine sense of danger during the climax (which is the cherry, if you're still keeping track).
1. America's Next Top Model Cycle 6, "The Girl Who is Going to the Moon" (6x09) Before this year, I wouldn't have listed a recap episode at all, much less rank it this high, mostly because it's simply a summary of what's happened so far in a show's season. However, I picked a recap episode is because if it would stand in for the whole season, and I otherwise would've listed multiple episodes of Cycle 6. But "The Girl Who is Going to the Moon" also helped me realize two benefits of recap episodes. The first: "deleted" scenes that offered hilarity -- Joanie doing her Furonda impression, Danielle and Joanie rapping in the kitchen, etc. The second: it allows viewers like me, who originally couldn't stand Jade's mentalism, to revisit such classics as, "This is not America's Next Top Best Friend." The difference between the first time I heard her inanity and the second time were was Joanie and Danielle had both been built up into protagonists who could face (or play) off against Jade. As long as Jade was a credible threat to win, and without any frontrunning girls to keep her winning, I couldn't enjoy her Sister Soldier antics; but when Joanie and Danielle became the prohibitive favorites to reach the top two, I could safely dwelve into Jade's analystic mind.
Yes, it's a football (melo)drama set in smalltown Texas where high-school football is king, but instead of docilely protraying jocks as heroes, apparently the series (and the film and the non-fiction book that both are based on) is a class-based critique of the "failures of Republican politics and the oil industry." What's also interesting is that the show formalistically plays with the ongoing structure of a serial drama -- in the first episode, the team tries to support and pump up the backup QB when he enters the game for the injured starter, and the backup ends up leading the team to a come-from-behind victory. Backup is hero! But wait, that's only the first game/show of the season (oh, the pun!), and he has to play the next game too, and the week leading up to the next game shows that the rest of his teammates aren't as confident in his abilities anymore. No neat happy endings here.
Stylistically, the series buys into a serious indie aesthetic of deliberately shaky camerawork and fast, snappy editing (oftentimes the show forgoes establishing shots when a scene transitions into another scene), and Explosions in the Sky for you post-rock nerds.
Also, Minka Kelly has a serious case of hott.
So, yeah, watch this show.
Indie rating: Explosions in the Sky - "Remember Me as a Time of Day"
