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Last night’s television selections were top notch. Thank you TV Gods! Let’s start with the show no one watched: Friday Night Lights.

Since the series premiered last October I’ve been waiting for them to tackle the very apparent race issues in Dillion, Texas. What made this week’s efforts so brilliant was how such a weighty (and rarely seen on network television) subject was played against one of the funnier b-stories they’ve had in the “Powder-Puff Football” game. It’s hard to work race into a single episode without it coming off as an After-School-Special discussion topic (luckily it appears this weeks actions by the team’s black players will be carried over into the story lines for at least the next week). Still, the motivations were direct but never seemed forced. I liked how Smash went from having more or less no real opinion on the school’s (and the town’s) divide to being an organizational leader calling for their football practice walk-out.

Also interested was how the whites were responding to all of this controversy. In classic American fashion their comments would always sound encouraging upon first listen but after replaying back in one’s mind came off at best close-minded and at worst horribly racist. Friday Night Lights succeeds like few mainstream entertainments do because this difference is never just flat out said.

On the cheerier side of the fence, the Coach’s reaction to his daughter being picked quarterback for Powder-Puff football was priceless. For a character who is seen smiling so rarely, it was great to see him teaching Julie Football Theory 101.

Also, did anyone else think that Landry’s thoughts on “pheromones” might have been one of the weirder things he’s ever said?

Over on ABC, Lost kicked off is sprint to no where. More on it right after the break…

Let me come right out and say that I LOVED this episode despite its obvious flaws (like the fact that we still haven’t heard word-one from a good portion of the original cast). I’m not as concerned about character doing things that make sense as some people may be. If what they’re doing is rooted, at the very least, in some plane of logic I’ll go along with it. I’m in it for the drama and the suspense. We all know that if it had been us on the island, we’d have figured out what the hell was going on about a week and a half after landing.

The one thing that annoyed me about last night’s installment was that it should have aired in November. Had this been the episode that capped off the fall mini-season I probably wouldn’t have spent the past three months sulking around, complaining about the demise of one of my favorite programs. As a conclusion to those six episodes, I think it really delivered. We could have started fresh in February with a return to the rest of the cast. Had that fall season been billed solely as Jack, Kate and Sawyer’s adventure with The Others, I think more people wouldn’t have gotten as drunk on the Hater-Ade (you just can’t dangle a Locke and Hurley out there and then take it away without looking back).
Great moments from last night:

• Seeing our THIRD Deadwood survivor.
• Having Sawyer refer to their actions as the old “Wookie in handcuffs trick”
• Knowing that Mac isn’t too busy banging Dennis’ Mom to get hit in the head with the butt of a rifle.
• That whole A Clockwork Orange mind-frying scene with Carl.
• Having a flashback that contributed greatly to the story on the island.
• That shot of Ben from under the operating table where he’s talking to Jack and Jack’s face is framed in the bend of his arm*.

I’m curious what everyone else thought. Who knew the Lost love-fest from two years ago was going to turn into one of the more divisive shows on network television?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 2:01 pm and is filed under ABC, Friday Night Lights, Lost, NBC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.