The Best TV Week EVER?
OK, that headline may overstate the case a bit, but I do think this is the most
important week yet of the new TV season, introducing several of the year's very best new and returning series.
Tonight (Tuesday) brings us the premiere of NBC's wonderful, soul-stirring new drama
Friday Night Lights. Don't let the football backdrop throw you. This show, inspired by the book and movie about a small-town Texas high-school football team and the community that hangs on its every victory - or, God help the coach, defeat - etches an intimate, searing, authentically emotional portrait of American life. It is so rare these days to see a show built around everyday people: their passions, frustrations, beliefs (religion is a major undercurrent here, never patronized or exploited), along with the tensions of race and class conflict.
As the embattled new head coach, Kyle Chandler has never been better. (Connie Britton, repeating her role from the movie as his wife, is equally fine.) The young actors playing the teammates and classmates are impressively naturalistic, even when they're fulfilling stock roles like the town tramp, the virtuous cheerleader, the coach's aloof daughter, etc.
I love this show, and it gets even better over the next few weeks. I've seen three episodes, the third of which I watched in my office (a mistake I probably won't make again, as I was fighting back tears a handful of times, and professional critics are supposed to be more stoic, at least in front of coworkers).
I'm more worried for
Friday Night Lights than for any other new series this season. The time-period competition is fierce and seems to leave little room for this show to be discovered. Sports-themed dramas don't have a great track record in prime time, and it doesn't help that sports fans - not that they're the only target audience - will be distracted by the beginning of post-season baseball on Fox. I feel like doing what the Dillon Panthers do before the big game each week: Saying a prayer on behalf of this brave, outstanding drama.
Tuesday also welcomes the CW's
Veronica Mars to a new network and a new night, and let's hope this move pays off for the perennial underdog. The first episodes in Veronica's new college setting are a return to top form, with plenty of humor amid the mystery as our heroine once again finds herself a bit of an outcast as she snoops in places where she's most decidedly not welcome.
Then comes Wednesday, with what is likely to be the two most thrilling consecutive hours of TV this week, starting with the long-anticipated return of
Lost in a jaw-dropper of a season opener that is full of surprise and suspense and discovery, with Jack, Kate and Sawyer in various states of captivity. The first few minutes are a knockout, with a shout-out to Stephen King and the glories of populist pulp fiction that
Lost understands perhaps better than any other current series.
King's trademark style of placing ordinary folks in fantastical settings is very much on display in the revelations of this opening scene. From there, the focus is primarily on Jack (with another compelling flashback that reveals his less admirable, more obsessive side) as he deals with his new, mysterious prison. (Where they've locked Sawyer is much more fun.) I can think of no show that takes more risks more successfully than
Lost. It is beyond great to finally have it back, for however many weeks we get until its mid-season hiatus.
Lost is followed by another terrific character-driven drama that likes to play with time:
The Nine, which boasts the most riveting pilot episode of the season to date. (I haven't seen beyond the pilot, which is a little worrisome. But for now, I'm hooked.) Like so many new series this fall,
The Nine strikes me as a gripping miniseries masquerading as a weekly drama, and I'm uncertain how its intricate, intense premise will play week by week. But I can't wait to find out.
The show presents a well-cast ensemble of disparate characters yoked by trauma: a 52-hour bank robbery/hostage crisis that changed them forever.
The Nine follows these characters in the aftermath, as they try to re-enter "normal" life, while also playing back tantalizing, mysterious glimpses of pivotal moments during the bank crisis. I worry that, as happened to
Invasion last season,
The Nine will be too exacting a show to be paired with
Lost, which tends to send its fans running to message boards or other means of communicating with fellow fans and friends the instant the show is over. (I can only imagine the traffic after the season opener is finished.)
The Nine is well worth sticking around for. Great characters, great writing, great production: What more could you want?
The week comes to a smashing close on Friday with the return of Sci Fi's
Battlestar Galactica, picking up with many of our heroes stranded on the bleak, Cylon-occupied territory of New Caprica. (The military leaders aboard Galactica and Pegasus have leaped away after the season-ending Cylon invasion, plotting a rescue from afar.) For the first batch of episodes,
Galactica is less traditional sci fi than it is a timely and tough war allegory, with plot elements resonant of World War II (collaborating with the enemy, roadside massacres) and the current conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan (suicide bombers, a violent insurgency, the question of torture and due process for accused terrorist suspects). Deeply, richly suspenseful and brazenly topical,
Galactica deserves any and all accolades it gets.
Just think. This week alone brings us premieres of
Friday Night Lights, Veronica Mars, Lost, The Nine, Battlestar Galactica. It honestly doesn't get better than this.
