No excuses for sports spectating

I consider myself mostly a movie maven, but sometimes I’m a bit of a jock-head. And this has been a particularly gratifying season of viewing for a long-suffering Cleveland Indians fan with a subscription to MLB Extra Innings. So I’ve spent a lot of evenings watching Tribe games instead of films, and I hope to be doing more of the same deep into October (sorry, Red Sox fans -- and as for Yankee fans, tough luck!)

Other sports-related viewing that has occupied my time lately is catching up with the 22 hour-long episodes of the first season of Friday Night Lights on dvd. This NBC show has been critically-lauded and friend-recommended, though not widely watched and just barely renewed for a second season, which starts this coming Friday evening. But now I’m fully on board. The show may not be quite as good as the best HBO series such as The Wire, but does slot in with the all-time best network series dealing with high school life, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freaks and Geeks -- high praise indeed! You may think you have no interest in Texas high school football, but this series has a depth and universality of characterization that opens its soap opera pleasures and intrique to a wider audience than has yet discovered it. The actors are appealing across the board, and the on-the-fly, three-camera filming of scenes shot without rehearsal or staging conveys a rare authenticity for network tv, and a genuine sense of community. Most of the actors are unfamiliar and thereby even more convincing, but the standout is the one carryover from the feature film (also quite good, and directed by Peter Berg who is the producer of the tv series), namely Connie Britton as the coach’s wife and high school guidance counselor. Kyle Chandler is tight-lipped but thoughtful as the coach, the players seem unusually true to life as teenagers, and the hotties that surround them are given significant substance. And I liked a lot of the football action -- though no fan of the game itself -- even if it was implausibly cliff-hanging week after week. My viewing partner, however, tended to sigh when the game started, the same way she used to sigh when Buffy started to kick ass, but despite the obligatory action sequences, she’s hooked on the series as well. And it’s a rare show I could share with my son, a recent college grad with lamentable taste in movies and no interest in football whatsoever. Give it a try, if you’re into regular tv viewing, or queue up the first season on Netflix.