Britt's On

Wellll week 2 of my fall TV-palooza has nearly wound down, in fact I don't think I have any other new shows to watch at this point, but I'll probably hold off a day or two before posting my thoughts, because I still have a decision to make on one show.

Whilst shampooing my hair, I started to think about the sitcom, the comedy, the dramedy, whatever you want to call it, and how there are really four distinct styles out there right now...and that not all comedies appeal to all people. In fact, I rhapsodized the other day about why I wasn't watching Two Broke Girls: the particular style just wasn't for me, despite liking the cast and concept. So without further ado, I bring you the four pillars of the modern day comedy.

It's funny that two of the best shows on television right now air in the summer, at least on network television for one of them (some might argue True Blood also stands strong as another summer entry, although Emmy voters may disagree). I'm talking about two programs that are inherently, dramatically different, yet find ties in their collective strengths.

The first just ended over the weekend, DirecTV's / NBC's brilliant Friday Night Lights. To be fair, the show is the more flawed of the two, often sacrificing realism for my most hated plot technique, 'slate wiping', but it's still one of the best things on the small screen these days. I honestly don't get why it doesn't have more of a following, particularly in the US of A - it's a show about football with plenty of hot dudes and dudettes to drool over! Regardless, FNL remains one of my most-looked-forward to programs on a weekly basis, and this last season still delivered with another tally in the 'W' column.

The other show is the much more publicly lauded Mad Men, which airs on AMC in the summertime and fall. Set in the 1960s world of advertising, the show plays out like a film, sometimes at an oppressively tedious and dense pace, although it still manages to provide plenty of watercooler chat every Monday. I've found the people that are the most fervent supporters of the show are the ones that watched early on - I caught up with Season 1 in a very short period of time so I could start watching Season 2 immediately. I've noticed many of the people who joined up for Season 3 (or afterwards, due to the hysteria around it) are less enthusiastic about Matthew Weiner's attention to minutiae, and how the show is really about more than just some pretty faces acting out dramatic scenes.

There are flaws to both shows to be sure, but they are ultimately two of the best written, best paced shows on television (I only wish they had a few more episodes each per season). But what does a show about present-day small town Americana have to do with a show that is diligently obsessed with 1960s culture set in the Big Apple? Plenty:

Ensemble Casting - this is a 21st century trend, to be sure. Over the last decade we've seen a plethora of shows flourish with the stream of thought that there is safety in numbers, a big turnaround from the earlier decades where stars named shows after themselves (translation: if a show aired called The Mel Gibon Hour, you probably wouldn't watch it). A few of the more famous examples include Degrassi: The Next Generation (a format they piloted in the 80s), Gilmore Girls, and Lost, and the failed drama FlashForward that was cited as 'too broad' of an ensemble. Both FNL & MM have thoroughly embraced the ensemble cast, or in the case of Gilmore Girls, the 'community' cast wonderfully.

On FNL, we have a core couple - Coach Taylor and his wife Tami Taylor - played with brilliance by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, both finally earning Emmy nods this year. From there the tendrils spiral outwards: football players on Coach Taylor's multiple teams and their families and their girlfriends and their friends, members of the cheerleading squad, pushy booster club members, school administrators, and even the city's mayor are all part of the narrative here, even if they don't all have major storylines. The show does an excellent job at providing you with a familiar cast of faces that populate the town of Dillon beyond a core cast, and make it seem more wholly realized (something Gilmore Girls 'Stars Hollow' did perfectly).

On Mad Men, we have the natural office setting for a range of core, mid-level, and fringe characters. Although Bert Cooper (one of the founders of the show's agency) has never had a standalone storyline, the show wouldn't make sense without him. Beyond the office we also get glimpses into the personal lives of the office workers (and even further beyond that through the eyes of leading female Betty Draper's relationships with friends, family, and various men). Matthew Weiner is smart though, as the majority of his storylines outside of the office still tie into what's going on in the office: Don Draper's constructed lifestyle is enabled by the very fact he is in advertising. Weiner demands you remember characters that may have only appeared once in the last few seasons when they randomly pop up again years later (as Anna, Don's pseudo-wife / sister did in this last episode).

Either way, both shows are fantastic at creating a pyramid of characters that don't hog the spotlight - they each get their times to shine while quietly developing their major moments with small moments episode to episode. FNL this past season struggled a little with letting their increasingly diverse cast have equal playing time, but overall I still felt a connection with the new characters while satisfied with the resolution of the old ones.

Moving Forward, Moving On - Another major hallmark of both of these series is their ability to let characters move on with their lives (and leave the narrow nexus of the show's focus).

Friday Night Lights stumbled with this a bit by having some of their early regulars stick around a year or two past when they should have presumably graduated high school, but for the most part, when you leave Dillon, they give you a nice swan song and goodbye. It's very much like real life - there are reasons why someone might come back to their small hometown, just as there are reasons we might not have seen the last of Smash, Jason, Lyla, Julie, Tyra, Matt, Tim, and Landry (the original cast of teens that have since moved on). Although the show strained against letting go of its stars early on, I give it kudos for working hard this transitional year to introduce new faces while saying a long goodbye to old favourites.

Mad Men is perhaps a more jarring version of this rarely seen phenomenon. When Sterling Cooper dissolved itself into Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, a slew of beloved second-tier characters were caught in the crossfires. Smug accounts man Kenny Cosgrove, second-rate creative guy Paul Kinsey, and closeted graphic designer Sal (among a few even more minor characters) were on the chopping block. In some ways, it's been a creative coup for Weiner - instead of chipping away and stringing out Sal's homosexuality, he was able to write him off the show with ease and relative legitimacy, while still providing a bookend to his primary storyline. Rather than ride out the tensions between an increasingly bitter Pete and chockful of goodness Kenny, the writers sagely let Pete prevail...for a day or two anyway.

Going back to my earlier point about Mad Men's community cast, some might argue it has a smaller cast of leads than FNL, and I would agree to a certain point - at the end of the day Don Draper takes way more prevalence over anyone else (unlike Coach Taylor, who is always present, but doesn't always have a lot to do). Weiner will let his regulars lapse (see: Joan in Season 3, who, as expected of her, quit her job when she got married only to find she really actually needed the money and disappeared for about half the season) for episodes at a time, because the real true focus is Don, and to a degree Betty, but even she can disappear, as she has so far in this season. The amount we see a character largely has to do with their orbit around Don Draper.

I could go on and on about the strengths and similarities between these two seemingly different shows - great casting, fantastic writing, authenticity - but at the end of the day, the two reasons above are what makes each show really special. They are willing to break the television rules - and while I doubt we'll ever see Don Draper leave and the show continue on (ahem, The Office), or that Tim Riggins will be a non-entity on next year's FNL, I don't doubt the creators will continue to entertain us by making surprising, sometimes hard choices and deftly deleting people from the lives of our stars...just like in real life.

Orbiting around,

- Britt's On

How clever! I’ve just discovered that Life Unexpected, the new CW show, can be conveniently shortened into LUX, the name of the main young character. Anyway, all my online searching has turned up the following: that although LUX wasn’t doing spectacularly in the ratings at the end of February, it was performing equally well on the two nights it was aired (on repeat), with new, equal portions of viewers on both nights. Add to that a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly that cited it as one of the Top 20 most downloaded shows (with fellow CW sibling Gossip Girl at the top spot).

Hopefully the CW is wise enough to keep this show around. With the cancellation of Melrose Place certified, there’s a good chance LUX will stick around to plug up that spot, or to complement either One Tree Hill or GG on Monday while the other one is paired with a newcomer in place of MP.

Anyway, I have to say, LUX has quickly become one of my favourite new shows, although it’s not without its problems. I feel like I have written this post in here somewhere, but yet I don’t have a Life Unexpected tag…so I can’t have.

The most interesting thing about a show like LUX is that it appeals to a pretty vast demographic – truth be told, the more interesting dynamics of the show come from the adults, which are conveniently young thirty-somethings. But you still have storylines featuring young Lux, which allow us past-high-schoolers to indulge in some high school drama that we all still kind of crave.

It is snappily written with actually laugh out loud funny delivery, comic timing, and jokes – but it’s also very good at pulling on the heartstrings and making you have serious emotional reactions of nerves, excitement, and shock. It’s also got an interesting cast of characters that rotate in and out on a weekly basis (similar to the awesome township casting of Gilmore Girls).

That being said, there are a few things that need to be ironed out. For one, they need to make Lux a little less desperately whiny (enough with the hand wringing!) and give her some storylines of her own, beyond the trite Bug/Jones triangle. Neither one of these guys really fits with the Lux character we know, so why not let her start from scratch. Introduce a new guy to the mix next season – perhaps another bad boy with a heart of gold a la Jess on Gilmore Girls, to compete with the bad boy she currently prefers, Bug.

We also need to give Ryan a little more depth. I’m actually on team Cate & Ryan, but I enjoy a pining Baze. Ryan’s best scenes, by far, are the ones where we get to seem him open up outside of his tenuous scenes with Cate. Those scenes take place with Lux, and the two of them have a sweet, more realistic father/daughter bond than Lux and Baze. It would be nice to see more of Ryan’s world – who were those groomsmen at his wedding? – outside of the Lux/Cate/Baze world, especially if things continue to be rocky / doomed in that part of his life. We can’t rely on these little Lux windows to continually bring Ryan back from obscured, understandable douchebaggery.

Another problem, likely because of the short season, is the uneven development of the characters outside of our core trio, Ryan being the most glaring example. Baze has a bad relationship with his dad, as demonstrated, but the climactic golf parking lot showdown felt a little…false? We get a lot of the “You always thought I would fail dad!” but it didn’t really give us much insight into why this might be, or where Baze failed, what turning point in his life sent him down his barfly pasture.

Also, in going with my earlier critique of Lux’s boring teen storylines, we really need to have some better character development amongst her circle of friends. I don’t care about Tash or Bug at all right now, nor do I really care to learn more.

There was a hint of high school friendship extensions (which can still be hilariously, competitively done as per that standby, Gilmore Girls) but they were quickly squashed. So Lux should be a million times more miserable at school than she currently is, but because her school life is so boring, we see nothing of it, just her dramatic home life. If you’re going to put her in a bad situation like that, SHOW US. Or come up with a solution. Lux needs compatriots outside of her parentals also.

One final word. Gilmore Girls was about a mother / daughter yes, but in the ways their lives would intersect: family dinners, disagreements about boys, and moments of weakness. Right now LUX is trying to make the relationships between their core trio (+ triangle with Ryan) what the entire show rests on, but for it to be truly successful, we need to build a world around each character, and let their lives intersect naturally. The drama on Gilmore Girls often involved Rory and Lorelei together, but the root cause was often from an outside source from one, or both of their worlds.

That is all, I hope to see a return for this show with some improvements – it has amazing potential and I love the core cast.

- Britt’s On

So two of the shows I regularly watch - One Tree Hill, and Friday Night Lights, are in seemingly paradoxical states.

Okay, different, but somehow similar. One Tree Hill, currently in its sixth season, is facing the imminent departure of the shows two stars - Hilarie Burton (Peyton) and Chad Michael Murry (Lucas, er, kind of THE star of the show). Worst of all, it looks like they'll pull a cheesy wedding day death based on a totally random, spontaneous incident where Peyton having a baby is vaguely fatal. While Lucas and Peyton have never ever ever been my fave characters, their story is kind of the heart of the show - much like Karen and Keith's was a few seasons ago (again not my faves). Without them, I'm not sure where they're planning to take the series...but we'll get back to that.

On the flipside, Friday Night Lights (FNL) has gone through 3 seasons - the latter two of which they've stretched the age of some of the main characters - Tyra, Lyla, and Tim in particular all seemed to be seniors or at least juniors in Season 1, yet are just graduating now with established sophomores come seniors Landry and Matt. The funny thing is, FNL was taped about a year ago, aired on Direct TV about eight months ago, and got renewed for two more seasons two weeks ago. So you do the math - it's been a few very swan song, poignant episodes packed with tears and drama and heart. Now the big question on all the fans lips is where do we go from here? I stated my theory already, Coach T is going to get fired and head for team underdog at East Dillon High - which gives them more flexibility if they stayed at their current school with a new cast. My friend Sarah thinks they might move to San Antonio to keep dreamtastic Timmy Riggins on the show. We'll see...

So here is the paradox. Both shows are losing some of their core cast members. What now?

One Tree Hill has suffered a bit last season, but moreso this one, because the show lacks the momentum of the four high school years (in fairness! they stretched each year - 11 and 12 - over two seasons and acknowledged it). Back then, it was about the State Championship and getting out of high school alive. The producers made a relatively wise choice of fast forwarding past college - more tideous basketball and watching them grow apart - and brought things together in a emotionally fraught and interesting season last year.

This year however, there's been zero momentum. The interesting career positions each character was in at the beginning of S5 have all been erased - Lucas' career options recently abruptly shutdown, Peyton is semi-managing a record label under a mega label, Brooke is doing nothing but working in an empty storefront and designing endless wedding dresses, Hayley has quit her teaching job but also isn't interested in singing again, and Nathan is in a minor league for basketball but with little to show for it on the home or work front. Where are we going? Where's the ambition? I want things to *finally* happen for Brooke, and I want the writers to decide whether they want to give Hayley or Nathan a fairy tale career ending as they snatched them away over the last two years. S6 did start off with a bang (literally) but it's quickly degressed from there without a final build-up.

My question with OTH in relation to FNL is would OTH have benefitted from college years? I'm not sure. I think the lateral drift of the characters would have been depressing, as it is on most shows that go to college, but at the same time the forced closeness (and desire to stay in Tree Hill) today is equally irritating. So is the prospect of killing off a major character for contractual / dramatic reasons. Just have her leave people. Have you learned nothing from S3 of The OC?

FNL...I'm guessing the grads will not be seen in college. The writers have two choices as I've mentioned - to send them off gracefully with a story arc like Smash & Street, or to feature them as minor recurring characters in their other lives. Another theory my friend Sarah had was Coach Taylor might end up at San Antonio state, thus giving him a chance to at least continue coaching Riggins, but we'll see.

Before I depart, let's rank the success of college seasons on other shows I've watched:

Dawson's Creek - 3.5/5: The show actually did a decent job of portraying college in its 90s pretentious way, Joey got better hair, and they finally did away with Dawson by making him exist in a world separate from the rest of the Creekers.
Pros: Less Dawson, continued enjoyable drama, the awesome episode with Joey and Pacey in the K-Mart.
Cons: Noticeable (although acknowledged) drift of the characters, Extreme emo Dawson and the death of his father, Busy Phillips as Audrey = worst cast addition ever.

Gilmore Girls - 4/5: A friend of mine is watching GG for the first time on DVD right now (thanks to moi) and it's making me reflect that the high school years really were fun - with the wider cast of characters from Rory's school definitely outweighing her college castmates. That being said, the show was about Rory's academics / future more than her friends, and ultimately, about family ties which the show never lost - other than that patch at the beginning of S6.
Pros: Smart move on the writers to make Rory choose Yale - it invoked serious family drama, but ultimately kept the family bonds in tact with Rory/Lorilei, Also Logan was a welcome change of pace from Dean, and seeing Rory evolve into someone more confident was nice. Plus Paris (realistically) stuck around. Also the show just let Rory grow more because it wasn't just about "getting into college" it was about boyfriends and futures and careers.
Cons: Some people complain Rory became too stylized in college which I somewhat agree with. Also, the loss of Madeline, Louise, the Puffs, and the various other high school castmates was sad, but realistic.

Buffy - 4.5/5: Let me clarify. Buffy herself went to college for approximately 1.5 seasons - but really, Season 4 of the show was "the college year" that made lots of puns and metaphors, and also heartbreaking drama, of typical college experiences (one night stands, missing home, and getting stupidly hammered to name a few). By the middle of season 5 we had nary a class scene with Buffy, who dropped out as explanation, and returned for one ill-fated class at the beginning of S6. That being said - I give Buffy a 4.5/5 for the college years because to me, Seasons 4-7 are the best of the series (4-6 really), and Willow was attending college for most of them. Season 4 was a transition / turning point, and thus, I gave it a solid mark.
Pros: The show always used typical high school drama as metaphors for the monsters it created (ex: Angel in S2). In college (s4), it did the same thing, but with a few seasons of doing this under their belt, it was much better executed (imo), and generally the funniest season of the show. S5-S7 were just way better in overriding story arcs than the earlier seasons. The fact Buffy never seemed to be in class (nor did Willow or Xander) was finally more logical, and honestly, freeing. Also, glad they acknowledged that Xander was the Pacey of the bunch - not in school, and struggling a bit, but ultimately both work it out.
Cons: S4 in particular had a relatively weak story arc, and mostly rested on its funny / smart college metaphors. Also, Buffy & friends never complete schooling which somewhat makes this a moot show.

The OC - 1/5: Marissa (Mischa Barton) died at the end of Season 3. It was stupid. The one thing I was looking forward to was seeing Ryan go to college, move on, and possibly add a new interesting female to the cast (and playing a guessing game as to who it would be?!?!). Well. The writers decided to predictably - for casting reasons, not for actual story / character relevance - pair him up with goody two shoes/show ruiner Taylor (Autumn Reeser), which, if you watch the beginning of S3 again, is ludicrous. Aside from that, Seth - the token brainiac - wasted away his unwanted gap year and decided to randomly become a movie critic by season's end, and Summer's experience at Brown was laughably bad - thus she dropped out early.
Pros: None. I hated all the characters added / focused on at this point (especially Taylor, Katelin, and Summer's stupid hippie friend) and the 3 main young leads felt disconnected without bonding together to save the day for Marissa.
Cons: Everything. See above.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head...till next time.

Britt's On