Skip to main content

Monday Miscellany--The Television Edition

1. I saw the ABC Comedy Better Off Ted last week while I was in Washington D.C., and it was pretty good. I will put it on my DVR list and see if I still like it a month from now.

2. I also saw Chuck again for the first time in months last week and, is it just me or is this the same show every week? Seriously, NOTHING has changed in six months? He still freaks out about spy stuff, he still thinks Sarah is hot, he's still nice to his sister,* he's still able to know stuff from the computer in his head, and he's still jealous of his former college roommate the spy. There's consistency and then there's "isn't this a re-run?"

3. There's talk that Friday Night Lights may get picked up for another season. I'm of two minds about this news. On one hand, YAY, because FNL is an amazing show (and the third season shows no signs of letting up on that). On the other hand, hmm, because some of the characters are graduating from high school** and, I'm sorry, but I'm not sure I want a Friday Night Lights without Tim Riggins or Matt Saracen. (CALL ME, TIM!) From a story perspective,*** they could certainly keep Tim in town--he's allegedly going to college in the fall, but Tim Riggins is not the type of kid to actually succeed at college. Without his brother, and Lyla, and his coach to keep him in line, Tim is a one semester and out kind of kid. Matt, however...the only way that Matt's story works without being crushingly depressing**** is if he gets to go away to college. And the poor guy deserves a happy ending. So I'm torn.



~~~

* One of the things I've always liked about Chuck is Chuck's affectionate and functional relationship with his sister, and her basically good relationship with her fiance Captain Awesome (and the name Captain Awesome). They'd be boring as main characters, but as terciery characters, they are a charming dose of normal.

** Always a problem when you use real people in shows--they age. Sigh. Sometimes life is sooo inconvenient.

*** Note that I'm watching as the show airs on NBC and haven't seen the whole of the third season yet, so don't ruin it for me if you have.

**** Something I wouldn't put past a show that portrayed Matt's father--an Iraq veteran--as a selfish ass who would rather be at war than home with his mother and son.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

On Mary Sue

I recently read a Very Popular Book in a Very Popular Series, which I was going to talk about here until I read the second book in the series and realized--OH NO--that the main character of the book is a total Mary Sue. sigh. For those of you who didn't spend time in the fanfic world, a Mary Sue is a character who everyone else loves. She's a stand-in for the author (fanfic is written mostly by women, which is why "Mary Sue," although there are some Gary Stus out there as well).She's beautiful (but not too beautiful), she's funny, she's self-deprecating, she's smart, and all the other characters will fall head over heels in love with her and think she's awesome. (An example, if I wrote Friday Night Lights fanfiction, Mary Sue would move to town and become Riggins' girlfriend, and Jason Street would have a crush on her, and Lyla Garrity would like her and even Tyra would must us some grudging respect, and their lives would all be better for k...

Why Are The Characters Friends?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of books where the main character and her best friend don't get along. This is confusing to me. Why is the main character friends with someone she dislikes, or is afraid of, or actually hates? I get that it happens--I've seen Mean Girls . I've read Queen Bees and Wannabes . Heck, I'm old enough to have been the prime audience for Heathers . But in order for this fractured best friend relationship to be convincing, it has to be set up. In both Heathers and Mean Girls , there's a reason why the protagonist is friends with a bunch of b*tches--she chose to be. She knows that they're jerks. In fact, she can feel herself becoming a jerk right along with them. It's part of the character arc, the point of the story, that being friends with these girls is not who she really is. But the relationships I've been seeing lately don't make that kind of sense. The protagonist doesn't have a reason to be friends with...

Why I Quit NaNoWriMo at 42,000 Words

So, I quit Nanowrimo last week, after I'd reached 42,000 words. That's crazy, right? I mean, I had eight thousand words to go (have, I guess, since it's not midnight, yet), and I could certainly have made. I still could, in the nine hours I have left. But I'm not going to. It just hit me a few days ago, right before Thanksgiving, that I wasn't going to finish. The thing is, I started Nanowrimo to knock out a draft of the Next Book and I did that. In 42,000 words. HAHAHAHAHA! you may be saying. "Jay, there's no way that you have a viable YA book in 42,000 words." You're right. But I wasn't writing a final draft, I was writing a first draft. And I'm a reviser, not a planner, so that means that what I actually got was 42,000 words of a possible path that the book might take. The actual draft of the book that's fit to show anyone (think two to three drafts from now) will be considerably longer, and will actually make sense.* The ...