Reel Politique: DVD Review, Friday Night Lights and Heroes
Where would NBC be without its cheerleaders?
I don’t mean its corporate fans or the ad salesmen or the execs on the board. I mean, literally, its cheerleaders. You’ve got Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) in Friday Night Lights and Claire Bennet (Hayden Panettiere) in Heroes, NBC’s most esteemed show and its most popular show in that order. Save the Cheerleader and Save the World was the tagline for Heroes but it might as well have been Save the Cheerleaders and Save NBC.
Friday Night Lights won a Peabody award this summer, Peabodys being the esteemed elder brother to the special needs Emmys, which ignored the show. Friday Night Lights has a fervid if small fan base, but the network to its credit remains behind it. I think that anyone who sits down with the DVD set for season one, which is now out from NBC-Universal ($29.99 [a bargain], 22 episodes on five discs, Dolby 5.1, English subtitles, released on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007), will be most eager to become a Friday Lighter when the second season commences on Friday, October 5 at 9 PM.
A nice little Jewish lady of my acquaintance rates Lights as one of her favorite shows. “Who’d think that I, of all people, would love a show about redneck white Christians in the south playing football?” That’s a fair summary of the show but it’s more than that, too. The series has almost dreamlike quality, possibly due to the Soderbergh-film-style music (either Bennett Salvay, who did the music for six of the show, or W.G. Snuffy Walden, who did 16 episodes; Cliff Martinez does the music for Soderbergh’s films), that exist conterminously with the raw realism provided by now-standard the hand-held camera, also a Soderbergh touch. In the first episode, the presence of a local news camera crew establishes the shaky cam, and henceforth, it is everywhere, even in the bedroom. Perhaps it takes a “Jewish sensibility” (outsidership, analytical intelligence, wit and a taste for ironies) to “see” this bedrock American material plain (Peter Berg, the creator of the show, and a prominent actor and director, happens to be Jewish), in the manner that the great studio chiefs of the 1930s created an America more American than the one Americans lived in.
The plot of the show, in brief, follows the family and career of the new Dillon High School football coach, on whom local pressure is brought to bear thanks to the obsession with football among the local gentry, and to family issues, such as his daughter dating the new quarterback and his wife taking a job as counselor at the high school and later possibly getting pregnant. The show also explores the lives of the players and their attendant families, mates, and assorted hangers on, plus occasional interlopers into the fragile sociology of the town, sending ripples of resentment or desire across its gentle surface.
Friday Night Lights is a surprisingly gripping show, more than just a soap opera or melodrama, and the game sequences are genuinely suspenseful. My only cavil is the paraplegic story line. One of the teen characters, Jason Street (Scott Porter) suffers an injury in the first episode and throughout the rest of the series revisits his situation, happening in a separate world. Like women in prison films and race car movies, paraplegic story lines are nearly always the same. The injured is at first disbelieving, then angry and tries to push away the girlfriend; the girlfriend is loyal, but then begins to drift; the injured falls in with other cynical disabled people who open up his eyes to the realities of his situation, and so forth. To its credit, the paraplegic story line in Lights goes in some unexpected directions near the end of the season.
What I like most about the show, however, is that it is a portrait of a perfect marriage
Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is a good looking, competent, admirable man who manages to make good decisions in continually difficult situations. His wife Tami (Connie Britton, who also played the equivalent role in the source movie), is a sexy, rounded, intelligent woman who both takes the town football obsession seriously and cynically at the same time. Their relationship is a full one, with fights and reconciliations, intimacy and occasional estrangements, but always under the banner of the union’s solid strength. It’s the best marriage on TV.
The five-disc set comes with a promotional making of, “Behind the Lights: Creating the First Season of “Friday Night Lights” and most every episode has a few deleted scenes, which don’t necessarily enrich the story lines but do give the loyal viewer a few extras minutes with his favorite characters.
There have been very few truly accurate adaptations of the comic book spirit to the screen. In fact, I can only think of one, and I’ve been saying this since 1987: RoboCop is the only really great comic book adaptation, and it wasn’t even based on a real comic book. But it captures the spirit, the narrative flow, and even the body shapes, of the silver age Marvel comic books.
Well, finally, after many years, Heroes is the second one. A sort of variation on Marvel’s comic X-Men, the show is everything that the X-Men movies should and could have been but weren’t. And like the best shows on TV right now, such as The Wire, it as a complexity that demands the viewer pay attention. Maybe some people dropped out after the first two or three “confusing” and inconclusive episodes, but those who stayed turned the show into a hit. Since one of the few cultural pleasures on offer these days is the plot twists of good TV shows, I’m not going to say a word Heroes narrative line except to note that its creators are not afraid to knock off characters whom the viewer may have grown attached to.
Heroes comes in a great package ($59.95, 23 episodes on seven discs, Dolby 5.1, English subtitles, released on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007), with loads of extras. Under half the episodes has a commentary track, and most of them have deleted scenes. The yak track participants comprises a wide range of the show’s participants. For example, disc one features a commentary from show creator Tim Kring, which accompanies one of the main supplements, the un-aired 78-minute pilot. Disc four contains commentaries from Panettiere, with fellow cast member Greg Grunberg, along with one of the producers, on episode 13, while on disc six, episode 19 features its writer, Chuck Kim, and innovatively the assistants to Kring and one of the other producers. The seventh disc contains most of the supplementary material. It leads off with a 10-minute promotional making of, which is followed by a short piece about the special effects and another about the stunt work. More interesting is a profile of the show’s resident artist, Tim Sale, who in the real world has drawn everyone from Superman to Spider-Man. Equally interesting is a seven minute segment the show’s score and its composers, who happen to be bygone Prince collaborators Wendy (Melvoin) and Lisa (Coleman). A throwaway supplement is Mind Reader, a stupid “game” included on one of the middle discs. The (pricier) HD version of the set has even more features, which includes (minimal) web content access, U-Control, which allows the viewer to zoom in on things such as one of the character’s art work, and video versions of the commentaries. Heroes season one is a must have for comic book aficionados, comic book-to-film hopefuls, and fans of good, solid television. Heroes takes to the air again on Monday, September 24th.