TV Review: The Best and Worst Fall Dramas
A single night on NBC brings together the best and the worst of the fall TV season.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Devin Gordon
Updated: 4:56 p.m. ET Nov 1, 2006
Nov. 1, 2006 - On Monday night, back to back, NBC aired original episodes of the fall season’s worst new network drama, and its best. One of these shows is enjoying killer ratings and is already a hit; the other is barely surviving and probably won’t last for much longer. Guess which one is which.
“Heroes,” which aired at 9 p.m., is the lousy hit. “Friday Night Lights,” which aired at 10 p.m., is the terrific flop. This week, NBC shifted the high-school football drama from Tuesday nights to a one-off Monday tryout in a last-ditch effort to save the show by giving it a chance to draft off of “Heroes"'s enormous audience. It didn’t work. “Friday Night Lights” picked up some viewers, but probably not enough to earn a stay of execution. That’s too bad. Back when I was plumbing through all of the fall season’s network pilots, “Friday Night Lights” was the only one that earned a full-season pass on my overstuffed TiVo. And “Heroes”? I shut off the pilot at the three-quarter mark. Couldn’t stand it anymore.
The fates of these two shows should come as no surprise. “Heroes” is a goofy, optimistic, lightly mysterious show about, well, heroes—and for decades, network television has thrived on heroic optimism. The wrinkle this time is that the heroes aren’t doctors or lawyers but Hollywood-style superheroes. They can’t litigate, but they can fly. On the flipside, “Friday Night Lights” is a gritty, melancholic show about the ugly side of heroism—particularly when that heroism is rooted in something as dubious and fleeting as small-town Texas football. Its theme is the peril of taking ordinary kids and propping them up as superstars, whether they’re ready for it or not. They party, sleep around and win football games, but they also get injured, betray each other, cope with broken families and crumble under pressure as often as they rise up to meet it. Football is a metaphor on the show, but never a clumsy one: for most of these kids, stuck in their small, dying town, the clock is already ticking on the best days of their lives, and they know it. If this all sounds a little too gloomy for a Monday night escape on the couch, you’re right. “Heroes,” on the other hand, has little to recommend it besides escapism. It’s not really about anything. No wonder it’s such a hit.
Both “Heroes” and “Friday Night Lights” are examples of TV’s newfound self-esteem in relation to its historic big brother, the movies. Anything you can do, TV people now clearly seem to believe, we can do better. Or at least just as well. Both shows are descendants of the big screen—“Heroes” from Hollywood’s ceaseless tide of superhero comic-book adaptations, “Friday Night Lights” from the 2005 movie starring Billy Bob Thornton, which was itself adapted from Buzz Bissinger’s classic nonfiction book. Both shows are also fantastically expensive to produce. An episode of “Heroes” reportedly costs NBC $2.7 million, whereas the per-episode price tag of “Friday Night Lights” is $2.6 million. But whereas “Heroes” seems to have poured most of its money into duplicating what Hollywood does well—chic production values, top-of-the-line visual effects—“Friday Night Lights” has focused instead on maximizing the advantages of the small screen.
The actual football sequences on NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” are as mediocre as they were in the movie, but they’re far less necessary on television, and consequently less damaging to the show. Director Peter Berg’s film needed crushing tackles and thrilling touchdowns to attract an audience, but the strongest parts of his film—the parts that clearly most interested him—unfolded off the field, in the rocky personal lives of the players, coaches and their families. On the TV show, which Berg also executive produces, the characters are front and center, where they belong. I never thought I’d care so much about the jocks and cheerleaders I hated in high school. On this show, they have something I never gave them credit for as a kid myself: inner lives. All of the young cast members are gorgeous, of course, but in an ordinary kind of way. They look right, as opposed to looking like the product of a focus group. And, not insignificantly, they can act.
Alas, Ali Larter, the buxom blonde star of “Heroes,” cannot. That should’ve been obvious to anyone who saw “Final Destination 2,” but give the girl some credit—she’s got a heck of an agent. Larter embodies everything that’s wrong with the cast of “Heroes”: a pretty cardboard face that gets less interesting the longer you look at it. Her male counterpart on the show is Milo Ventimiglia of “Gilmore Girls” fame, who evidently graduated from the Keanu Reeves School of Whoa. The characters are paper-thin cliches, particularly the artist played by Santiago Cabrera, a hipster-scruffy, heroin-addicted jerk who paints—very, very badly—with a rug draped over his topless, chiseled torso (because, duh, he’s deep). Even the characters’ superpowers feel tired. Flying? Reading minds? Stopping time? Healing instantaneously? Can’t the most creative minds in television come up with even one superpower we haven’t seen a million times before?
Worst of all, though, is the hokum dialogue, particularly the scraps of mythology that the show ladles out weekly. NBC has gotten two weeks of mileage out of a cryptic bit of advice one mysterious figure delivers to Ventimiglia’s character: “Save the cheerleader. Save the world.” The fate of the world rests on the health of a cheerleader? Even in small-town Texas, where football players are kings and cheerleaders their queens, they’d roll their eyes at that one.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
