TiVo Lady

Best Show (Not) On Television

I am, for once, thankful that I have DirecTV, because otherwise, I would not be able to see Friday Night Lights, the former NBC show that is now airing on an obscure channel (101, I think) owned by DirecTV.

The third season, which began this week on DirecTV (and won't air on NBC until 2009), is just as sharp and original and moving as the first two seasons.  I was a bit worried by the HBO-ish promo for the show, with the weird glowy colors and retouched skin and flowy hair, but that was just DirecTV's ad.  The show itself was just as gritty and funny and realistic as ever.  Smash has graduated (amazing reality check, since most television shows that feature high school kids have them enrolled for many years past their actual graduation date), and is working at an ice cream shop, having had his scholarship revoked and a devastating injury to his knee.  Lila, the Born-Again former girlfried of Jason Street, who was paralyzed early in season one by a football injury, has now hooked up with football hero and budding alcoholic (and total heart-throb) Tim Riggins.  (Here he is, in case you doubt me.)

Tami Taylor, the Coach's wife and mother of a newborn, has somehow become high school principal, and a lot more concerned about academics than about football.  She dares to re-allocate the funding for a new Jumbo-tron for the football stadium into re-hiring teachers and buying textbooks and chalk.

My favorite lines in this episode are these.  First, Tim's brother is scolding him about sleeping with Lila, again, even after she broke up with Jason, saw the light, and became a total church fanatic.

"There's Jesus, and there's you," he says, showing Tim one hand raised high and the other down low.  "You're a rebound from Jesus," he concludes.

Second, an assistant principal tells Tyra, the feisty daughter with a slutty mom and a stripper sister, that her grades are too low to get into college.  She gives up, but then watches as Tim's brother proposes to her sister, in a bar, and she has a glimpse of her own future.  She visits Tami Tyler, at home, announcing that in a few years, her sister will be divorced and running after Tim's brother for child support.  And she doesn't want that to happen to her.

It wasn't until I watched this first, sterling episode of FNL that I realized how bad just about everything else I TiVo really is.  And no, FNL has almost no Boomer-relevance, unless I really stretch the point.  Like this:  it's based on a book, written by Boomer Buzz Bissinger, who was born in 1954.

Viva FNL!!

Pontificating/Hypocrisy

I couldn't write yesterday, because I was in too deep a funk.  Fifty feet down.  Maybe a hundred.

See, while I'm pontificating on Radio and Television about how great it is for moms when the children leave home, I'm actually really missing my daughter.  She's living in Rio for a year--that's the one in Brazil--and I haven't seen her since June, and won't catch an in-person glimpse of her until the very end of February.  I just really miss her.  And I find myself resenting friends who see their nearly-grown daughters whenever they want.  And I get teary if I see a mother arguing with a teenage daughter:  that used to be us!!  I'm feeling as gloomy as this view from my office.  And as weird as that odd reflection of the camera, smack dab in the middle of the image.

This is why I'm a hypocrite:  I can't seem to practice what I preach. . . .

I even got teary while watching the wonderful Friday Night Lights this week.  I raved about this show from the start, long before the actual, accredited critics did so.  But this scene, from "How Did I Get Here?" really put me over the tears-in-the-eyes limit.  Tami Taylor, wife of football coach Kyle Chandler, and mother of the lovely and ever-more-troublesome Julie Taylor, is complaining to her sister about the new baby girl she's just had.  (She's been dancing around the edges of postpartum depression ever since she gave birth, but seems to have been cured, now that her husband is living at home again.)

Tami:  "I've got a whole 16 years plus ahead of me of child rearing, and then she's gonna turn into Julie and be mean to me and I'm gonna be in a walker.."  (starting to laugh and sob, simultaneously)

Exactly.  But I still miss it anyway.  Call the Waaah-mbulance.

A Weepy Series Finale

So I'm a sucker for a pregnant midlifer--so shoot me.

In the series finale of the wonderful Friday Night Lights,Tami Taylor, played by Connie Britton, discovers that she's pregnant, after trying for a second child for many years.  She tells the nurse that she always assumed "it wasn't in God's plan."  The nurse responds, "It looks like God changed his mind!"  That scene made me teary, though I believe hubby was more choked up about the Dillon Panthers miraculous come-from-behind victory to win the Texas state championship football game.  See?  It's a show for everyone!  I learned from reading the odd blog from NBC that the Taylors are in their forties, closer to boomerhood than I thought.  What's odd about NBC's live blog with Kyle Chandler, who plays Coach Taylor, and Britton, is that they are actors.  Not a real coach and his wife.  So, no offense, but who cares what they say about high school football life in small-town Texas?  I guess it's vaguely interesting for show gossip purposes, but I'd almost rather that the real actors be shrouded in mystery, so I can pretend that these people are all real, and not just fictional elements of a smart producer's mind/brain.

TiVo ReHab

It has been suggested that I might want to go into TiVo ReHab.  Very tactfully suggested, I might add, by my friend Kate.  And it is certainly tempting, especially on such a filthy, disgusting day as this one, in which we had every brand of precipitation ever invented.  We had snow;  we had icy rain;  we had sleet;  we had freezing rain;  we had hail-like particles;  we had unidentifiable stuff coming from the sky and landing on the ground.  It was gross.

But, then, if I went TiVo cold Turkey, I would miss Extras, the hilarious HBO comedy in which there are scenes so painfully humiliating and funny that I am forced to fast foward them.  This week, there were two.  In the first, Andy is acting in a very gay play directed by Ian McKellen, and in the last scene refuses to kiss his gay lover so his old high school pals, who are in the audience, won't think he's gay.  In the second, Maggie is having dinner at the agent Darrell's apartment, when he stops to deal with the toilet, because he doesn't want her to see what he left there that hasn't quite disappeared on an initial flush.  He takes a whisk and a plastic bag to deal with it. Painful funny. 

And I'd miss

Rome

, including Mark Anthony in full beard, moping in

Gaul

in all his lovely glory.  And the grownup Octavian, looking quite lovely.  And the bevy of Boomer lovelies, the women who apprently steer the whole power struggle vehicle that was ancient

Rome

.

Wait.  I'd also miss Friday Night Lights, the sweet footballish soap opera that tugs at my heartstrings, even though I really can't stand football.  Last night's episode featured realistic racial tension, marital bickering, ineffective parental discipline, and teen daughter rebellion, all depicted rather perfectly.  Coach Tyler, the focal point of the story, just missed Boomer-dom by a year, having been born in 1965.  (Well, Kyle Chandler, the actor who plays the coach, that is.)  Still, there are rare sightings of actual Boomers in the cast, though you have to wait patiently and look carefully.  Hey, look, there are two!!

No TiVo ReHab for me.