07.00 Friday Night Lights
08.00 Cavemen
08.30 She Spies
09.30 The Twilight Zone
10.00 The Hitchhiker
Friday Night Lights. Season 2, Episode 5. "Let's Get It On" After a disappointing start to the second season, FNL delivers a perfect episode. Wow. Quite a ride this one. Every scene, every storyline, is a zinger. I loved it. The Tyra-Landry stuff is the best. He finds himself, suddenly, the star of the team (and all the best scenes in this episode are Landry scenes) and she finds herself in a confrontation with Landry's father (the always superb Glenn Morshower) and in a heart-breaking final scene, she breaks up with him. Then, quietly, goes to her car and cries her heart out.
Coach Taylor and Tami have some great scenes. He wants to kick-start the romance in the marriage again (after the arrival of the new baby) and it's hilarious to watch his plans in action. They really are the Best Couple on TV. Having Coach back with the team makes perfect sense, too. The whole storyline that had him living in another city was a waste of time/space. I'm glad it's over.
The complex friendship between Jason, Riggins and Lyla yields some wonderful scenes/moments in Mexico. The highlight was Riggins letting his guard down long enough to tell his friend that he loves him. Powerful moment.
Finally, Julie makes a play to get back with Matt and (very wisely) tells her to forget it. The Julie storyline has been superbly written and played. She's been behaving like a spoiled teenage bitch, but the writing has given us depth and motivation for every stupid thing she has done. Consequently our sympathies have always been with her. I feel a little sorry for her, as Matt walks away, but I still think he was doing the right thing.
In every way, this was the first perfect episode of the season. Every joke was funny, every shocking twist makes sense and every heartbreaking moment sends you reaching for the tissues. When the show does episodes like this, there is nothing on television that can touch it. Not even Lost.
Cavemen. "Caveman Holiday" Another of those episodes with a pretty good idea but not enough jokes to make it work. Early episodes were like this, then the show overcame it and managed to turn out a succession of very funny installments. This is not one of those.
It is the Caveman holiday of Long Night. Basically, it's Christmas. All Cavemen gather and celebrate the traditions that came from the time when they survived the Ice Age. Andy (the innocent one) is over-eager, Nick (the cynical one) is happy to sit back and make fun of it all, while Joel (the mature one) is trying to put it all behind him and act like this is just any other day. He goes to work as normal. And then... guess what? Towards the end of the story he has a glorious epiphany and rushes home to join in the festivities. Yuck. The episode is trying hard to be a send-up of Christmas episodes but there aren't enough jokes to make it work and it ends up being an example of a bad Christmas episode.
She Spies. Episode 1. "First Episode" The writers of this (Ron Osborn & Jeff Reno) worked on shows like Duckman, Moonlighting and The West Wing. And it shows. This is fast, funny and smart. It breaks the fourth wall in sly ways and has a lot of nods to the fact that it's a television show that knows it's on television. Three beautiful ex-cons are hired by the government to form a team to fight for justice. In one scene, the stumble onto the set of television show. About three beautiful ex-cons who have been hired by the government to form a team that fights for justice.
Moments like that abound. There's on-screen captions, shameless plugging of the Universal Studios Tour and a million other things that tell you this is not a typical action/spy series. The cast are superb, particularly Natasha Henstridge who seems totally clued into the tone of the show and plays every scene/joke to perfection. She reminds me of Bruce Willis and the way he played David Addison. David could take the seriousness of the crime seriously and then make a joke about the upcoming commercial break. Henstridge does that here. She's worried about the senator's live in one scene and criticising the conventions of television in the next. And the audience is with her every step of the way.
Good fun.
The Twilight Zone. Season 3, Episode 1. "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon" In 1988 the CBS Twilight Zone revival jumped to syndication, a much-lower budget and into the hands of a story editor called J. Michael Straczynski. I have a love-hate relationship with the 45 episodes that aired on CBS. Some were brilliant, some were awful. It was all over the place. Some tales were too long, and some were way too short. The visual style didn't appeal to me, either. The CBS series lacked direction. It lacked focus. It produced many classics, but there were many stories that just didn't work at all.
The third season is different. JMS wrote 12 of the scripts himself. And - I suspect - had a firm hand in the creation of the other 18. No matter how they came to be, the fact remains that this final season of The Twilight Zone is terrific. Each episode is driven by a very strong story idea (and many of them are supremely cool). I love this version with a passion.
The season gets off to a great start with "The Curious Case of Edgar Witherspoon". It's a classic. Every bit as good as the best of the original run. J. Michael Straczynski wrote it. Cedric Smith stars as a doctor sent to investigate a very unusual man (Harry Morgan) who has built a large Rube Goldberg machine in his apartment and insists that he must keep tending to it, or the world will fall into chaos and destruction.
What a brilliant story idea. Typical of JMS. Smith and Morgan play their parts to perfection. Stripped of the high budgets of the first two seasons, there's nothing left but story. And with talent like this, you need very little else.
A cool little tale that will stay with you for years...
The Hitchhiker. Season 3, Episode 1. "Nightshift" Unsatisfying opening episode to the third season. The cast are great. Margot Kidder is very good as a mean nurse who treats the elderly people under her care with an iron fist. Darren McGavin never utters one word of dialogue and yet totally manages to steal the whole show because he's so good. He is Darren McGavin after all, so you would expect that. Finally, there's Stephen McHattie (one of my favourite actors) at his sleazy best as the nurse's crook boyfriend. So, yeah, the cast are great.
And the visuals are great. Every shot is beautiful, dark and scary. It looks like something special.
But the whole thing seems somehow unfinished. When the closing credits roll, you feel that there is much more the story. It feels like the opening 30 minutes of a movie, or the opening gambit on an episode of The X-Files. It's interesting and exciting. It's even scary in places (when the creature chases the evil nurse, for instance) but the ending is too open-ended for my liking. It's all a bit vague and random. Maybe if McGavin's character had said something, or we got the sense that the old people had summoned up the creature or something.
It's good enough, in many ways, but certainly not an example of The Hitchhiker at it's best.
Highlight? Friday Night Lights (perfect)
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Wed, Oct 29, 08 - Friday Night Lights, Cavemen, She Spies, Twilight Zone, Hitchhiker
