I thought MY show had problems.
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I've been watching the John Adams series on HBO, and I love it. But last night, it struck me he had started to remind me of another HBO character. But who? Let's see. He's grumpy. He's charmless. He says inappropriate things. He goes to Paris and gets on everybody's nerves. He goes to Holland and gets on everybody's nerves. His wife is on his case about how disengaged he is from her.
Ah! He's Larry David
They should spin off a smaller domestic comedy series from "JA," more about John and Abby and their nutty friends, especially Ben Franklin who is basically just Jeff Garlin anyway. 
It would be called ""Curb Your Democracy."
Watching five seasons of "The Wire," I was left unsure about the show's overall attitude toward the war on drugs. Some of the show's most heroic characters seem pretty committed to taking down the dealers.
So I was intrigued to read this, in which the writers for the show not only oppose the drug war but dangle the idea of jury nullifcation on drug cases.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
I'm also intrigued by their argument that police departments are no longer able to work effectively on other cases, including murder. I've had the sense recently that murders in Hartford just don't get solved. Check out this map.
For an absurdity extending beyond the absurdities depicted by the writers of "The Wire," check out this guy, who did ten years for selling grow lights and fertilizer.
Can "Friday Night Lights" be saved? And can Tim Riggins?
It's Saturday, so theoretically this article hasn't even been published yet, but many of us get the Times advance sections on Saturday, so we've read the whole thing. As you can see from the appended comments, the FNL fans are riled up at Virginia Heffernan, even though she's an FNL fan. (I'd feel a little worse for her if she hadn't, in the past, been too cool to be a guest on my radio show. She is, however, a terrific TV writer, which is why we wanted her.)
Check out the passion in some of those comments! People get prettty worked up about FNL, and I think they're reading Heffernan as taking a blame-the-victim (a little) approach.
After a shaky start this year, I think the show has found an interesting new footing. Last night was one of those episodes in which football was absolutely invisible. Not so much as a snap on the practice field. I can understand how that happens, partly because they're trying to cram so much plot into 45 minutes or so and partly because they're chasing a demographic that would never watch "a football show."
But I think it's a mistake, aesthetically, not to touch at all on football in any given episode, because the strivings on the field are so obviously a means of reflecting and refracting all the other strivings in life. I'm especially keen on the strong linkage, this season, between football and Christianity. Towering over that dynamic is Tim Riggins, the embodiment of fullback-as-Christ-figure. He is exalted. He suffers. He is abased and reviled. He rises up. That which is divine within him wars with that which is human. I bet Sister Wendy could direct us to some Riggins-like Renaissance rendering of Christ, although Jesus is rarely depicted as pumped to quite that degree. (It seemed for a while as as though Matt or Jason would compete for the role of Christ figure, but Riggins clearly owns it -- even though Satan keeps showing Smash the kingdoms of the world. )
Heffernan is right that the series rarely emits the clang of a false note or an obvious contrivance; but I thought last night came close. Would that girl's parents really have invited the Williamses over to dinner for the purpose of ambushing them about miscegenation? Nah! It would have been handled a lot less directly. The veneer of pleasantness would have been maintained while the relationship was quielty gutted; and the Williams family would not have been invited to sit around the table and negotiate openly about it.
It do agree with Mrs. Corinna Williams though. That girl is nothing but trouble. She's also an uncharacteristically flat bit of casting, writing and acting so far. She does, however, fit in with Dillon's unique demographic: the only high school in America where everybody is at least 25.
One more thing. Daniella Alonso has to be the most attractive woman on television. I'm assuming her character has been summoned back to Guatemala for a post in the new Colom cabinet.
The idea of visitors is biblical, maybe archetypal -- help me out on that one, Jungians. They should come at night. They should come in threes -- as did Zophar, Bildad and Eliphaz to Job, as did the Christmas ghosts to Scrooge, as did the wise men to baby Jesus.
So Rozerem "Your dreams miss you?" ads -- fine though they be -- are out of balance, with just a beaver and Lincoln. (Also, does this man dream of anything but pubic hair?)
Junger than springtime are the new AT&T television ads featuring Big Papi, Big Blonde (I didn't get that it was Christina Applegate) and Big Cat (not exactly the Narnia lion but close enough). Three visitors. The masculine,the feminine, the Christian-feral.
ADDENDUM: Actually, there is a third Roz visitor! Diorama, who is not lazy like JWC, looked up one of the original Rozerem ads and spotted what seemed like a spaceman. Actually, it is a deep sea diver. That's right, a diver. The guy in the commercials isn't really very mysterious about what's missing from his life, is he?
I don't want to say too much more about "Friday Night Lights" because some people probably haven't seen it. (If you want detailed plot analysis, Catlin has got that.)
But Jude's comment on the preceding post is spot on. There's some thing a little off about the whole series, and not just the way it suddenly introduced that big old Billy Jo McAllister moment.
One of the charms of last year was the constant tension between the discipline inherent in football and the hormone-crazed off-field wildness of teenagers. That was gone in this year's first episode because the football part seems an afterthought.
Another of the charms was the chain of mostly underplayed moments in the life of a small town. Family moments. Crappy job moments. Chamber of Commerce moments. Dating moments. Race moments.
Things fall apart. The center does not hold. (And if he does, it's a fifteen yard penalty.) But you know what I mean. The people of Dillon, Texas are -- like the rest of us -- caught up in mainly centrifugal forces. They are constantly spun away from one another, only to be drawn back by the unifying love for Panther football. Where was all that last night?
On an unreleated note: This is sort of an interesting question -- rather than a matter resolved. Is it a good thing that the working class characters on "Friday Night Lights" have the high gloss pulchritude of characters in dramas about the rich and beautiful?
Sort of. I mean, money doesn't make you beautiful. But it can make you healthy enough to maintain your good looks. Half of the FNL characters are part of SCHIP Nation. You're telling me Tim Riggins has access to good dental care? (Not that he'd use it if he did ...) That Tyra gets to see a dermatologist? In that sense, Landry -- he of the uncorrected overbite -- is one of the better representations of the life the series supposedly depicts. He has the closest thing to teenager skin I've ever seen on primetime.
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