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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Bravo's fine tradition of torturing creative professionals continues with "Step It Up & Dance" while NBC's "Friday Night Lights" gets another chance to shine.
By Heather Havrilesky
Read more: TV, Arts & Entertainment, Heather Havrilesky, I Like to Watch
April 13, 2008 | When my sister and I were kids, we made our Star Wars action figures go on dates with each other. First we'd take turns picking our favorite action figures, then we'd set up "apartments" for each of them. (We knew from "Three's Company" that single people always lived in apartments.) Next, Luke would knock on Leia's door, but she'd usually say she was busy or had to wash her hair, because she secretly wanted to go out with Mark (that was the hunkier "Empire Strikes Back" version of Luke) or Harrison (the hunky "Empire Strikes Back" Han Solo). Finally, once everyone went on dates and kissed good night and went on dates again without any broken hearts or unexpected pregnancies, we needed to mix things up a little. So Mark would dump Leia for Bespin Leia (the fancy "Empire Strikes Back" Leia who Lando said truly belonged with them "among the clouds" of Bespin City), and Bespin Leia would cheat on Mark with Harrison, or Luke would start stalking Carrie ("Empire Strikes Back" Leia in "Hoth" garb). But even with so much drama and intrigue in the air, the second we started to mix and match the couples, we'd quickly begin to lose interest in the game. Who cared if Bespin Leia dated Mark then Luke then Harrison then Luke again, really? After a while, the relationships felt arbitrary, and sometimes Leia would elope with Chewbacca just to piss everyone off.
Whenever a solid teen drama like "The O.C." (in the early days) or "Gossip Girl" or "Friday Night Lights" starts to stumble down a soapier and soapier path, and the quarterback pines for the coach's daughter who likes the bad boy who wants the cheerleader who likes the strait-laced geek, and then everyone changes partners and do-si-dos? I think about our hormonally charged action figures, knocking on doors as we put the finishing touches on their apartments: That was the best part of the game. The heart-pounding anticipation of love, waiting to see if the devil-may-care smuggler pilot liked you, too, and hoping against hope that he'd take you out for a ride in the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
That's why, when on "Friday Night Lights," former cheerleader Lyla started dating a good Christian boy and quarterback Saracen fell in love with his grandmother's nurse and bad boy Riggins was pining for Lyla and geek Landry loved bad girl Tyra who secretly loved him, too, I wanted to say to the show's producers, "Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!" In other words, cut this soapy musical chairs routine and give us something with some heart and a little grit, damn it! Put away the dolls and write a real story, for Chrissakes!
Knock-knock jokesThis means I finally have a reason to watch the last episode of the (strike-shortened) second season, which has been sitting on my TiVo, unloved and forlorn, for weeks now. Thank God FNL's producers will have another chance to recapture the soul of the show's first season. In the second season, they clearly wanted to prove that FNL wasn't really about football, but as a result, the football team felt like an afterthought. During the first season, we understood the role of the team and its games in the town of Dillon. We saw how many lives were wrapped up in the teams' victories and defeats. We met ordinary people with ordinary problems.
You can't just make all your main characters fall in love with each other, confess their love, break up, change partners, rinse, repeat. All we saw, show after show, was some character knocking on the door to some other character's house to confess his love, and then she'd say she had to shampoo her hair or they'd kiss and the music soared and that was it. What really went on between Saracen and that nurse? We never knew. Why was Riggins hung up on Lyla? How did Lyla feel about Riggins? Who can say?
This is a common problem for dramas, particularly those that bring to life the often fickle concerns of teenagers. You introduce a big group of characters who fit into a story organically: Landry is Saracen's snide buddy and sidekick, Tyra is Riggins' lost ex-girlfriend, Lyla is the handicapped star quarterback's supportive girlfriend. Once you start dreaming up new story lines, though, you make the mistake of putting your sidekicks and exes in the spotlight, and suddenly you not only have way too many characters to service, but you've got sidekicks trying to hold down their own stories. Of course we love Landry as the snappy sounding board for Saracen's angst and confusion, but do we really want him front and center? No. He's just not all that charismatic -- he wasn't made for a leading role. Giving him a major plotline is like having Leia elope with Chewbacca.
Worse than all the changing partners, of course, are the moral dilemmas faced by these teens. "Should I really dump this body in the river?" "Should I invite my thug friends to my surrogate daddy's house?" "Should I beat that racist guy's face in and risk losing my scholarship?" "Should I skip practice and get wasted with Riggins?" While Landry's murder plot was as ill-considered and unbelievable as Chewbacca opening fire on a crowd of lovelorn action figures (I'm pretty sure that happened in our childhood games at least once), these other, smaller indiscretions are the lazy equivalent of "The O.C.'s" endlessly repeating "Welcome to the O.C., bitch!" style of fisticuffs.
Surely there's more to being a high school kid than unrequited love and big, stupid mistakes! But at least now FNL's writers have another chance to show us the sometimes mundane, always heartfelt concerns of the down-to-earth, sentimental, small-town folks we grew to love in the first season.
