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2020: Best TV of the Year


 



I can't keep up with new TV as it happens--the idea seems overwhelming--so my TV Hero of 2020 is Tami Taylor, from "Friday Night Lights." Yes, Tami has been absent from the small screen for several years. But 2020 is When I Found Her.

Tami lives in a heavily Christian town in West Texas, and her husband coaches football, and yet so many of Tami's issues are relatable for me. She can't connect with an inexplicably difficult teenager, and she spends many of her on-screen hours wondering about the cloud of adolescent moodiness wafting down through the hall. She, Tami, would like to have a career, and she finds this project difficult in the context of her family. Also, Tami can be hot-headed; she is correct to identify a young new English teacher as "skeezy," but she is perhaps unwise in the way she handles this skeeziness.

Tami would like information about her daughter's possible new boyfriend, but she can't get that info, and so she just begins calling the guy "the Swede." (It's not clear the guy is actually Swedish, and the nickname is impossibly glamorous and inappropriate for some shmo from Odessa, Texas--but isn't that just like life?)

As a guidance counselor, Tami finds herself awkwardly advising a kid on love issues--and the source of the kid's pain is *Tami's own daughter* .....

Tami encourages some popular seniors to take over a benefit event--how could Tami do the work, when she has a tiny baby?--but the plan backfires when the seniors turn the event into a kind of Roman orgy/ sex auction. 

Tami has a randy husband--but, really, Tami wants to dump her baby in a professional's hands and escape for one night of wine-drinking and book club.

Tami lived my own reality, for me, on the small screen this year. I'm referring mainly to Season Two--which is a bit of a trainwreck, but still so watchable--and I look forward to many, many more hours of Taylor Drama. "Friday Night Lights" is my Best TV of the Year.
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