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TV Newsletter


The Barrett-Solomon Film Exchange continues.

My husband's great gift to me over several months has been "Friday Night Lights," which I wouldn't have watched on my own.

The show was originally marketed as a football story, but when producers noticed that their main audience was affluent women, the marketing changed. ("It's About Life.") However, this switch happened too late for me--so I had to discover the show later, via streaming.

Everyone talks about the big innovation of "Friday Night Lights": It's a prestige drama about a basically functional family. Contrast this with "Mad Men," "The Sopranos," and "Breaking Bad," where members of families are sometimes literally, physically attacking one another, and there is always a case of The Other Woman. "Friday Night Lights" even winks at this prestige formula when it threatens to throw Tami Taylor into an adulterous situation with "Glen," the schlubby science teacher (and ineffective substitute guidance counselor). But when Eric Taylor learns of an awkward kiss, he simply laughs. Then the two Taylors laugh together.

I particularly love the Taylors' brainy daughter, who is a mess, but a mess whose problems are life-sized (and not from a telenovela). Like all of America, I loved little Julie Taylor having a detailed "virginity talk" with her mother. ("If you decide you no longer like having sex with him, you don't have to keep up the behavior, just from routine." "Just because you've slept with this guy, it doesn't mean you now have to sleep with every subsequent guy you date.") 

I loved that Julie Taylor's heartache took the form of a tantrum during the Academic Smackdown. ("How can you not know the date for the Battle of St. Petersburg?????") And I especially loved Julie engineering her own car-wreck after a catastrophe in her freshman year of college. (Julie has behaved in a self-indulgent, thoughtless way--in a way that makes me think of a Lena Dunham character--and Julie must now wrestle, for several months, with the consequences.)

I haven't had anything of similar caliber to offer to Marc, but I did insist that we watch "Mare of Easttown." Like "FNL," "Mare" stretches the TV definition of "family." Though less functional than the Taylors, Mare's clan does actually sit down for a family meeting, and Mare's clan has at least one constructive group dinner over the course of the series. Like "FNL," "Mare" takes special interest in the transition from high school to college, and the young woman in "Mare" has adjustment issues that remind me of Julie Taylor. (Mare is maybe not the paragon of motherhood that Tami Taylor is, but Mare's advice to her own daughter is heartfelt, and sincere.)

That's what we have been watching here. I'm still very much excited for the new Mike White series, and Marc and I are also counting down the days until "Billions" and "Succession" return. Thank God for TV.
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