"Friday Night" delight: Same team, new season
Also, "The CGI Wizard of Oz," and how does Keith Olbermann really feel about Bill-O?
Just because you made a wonderful TV show that all the
critics loved and everybody at the network was pulling for and it won a
Peabody Award doesn't mean it didn't deserve to be cancelled.
And maybe that's what accounted for the unusually good mood on Tuesday, as the cast and producers of “Friday Night Lights” milled in the hallways of the Beverly Hilton before their session at the critics' press tour. Wearing fancy clothes instead of their frumpy TV wardrobes -- I briefly mistook Connie Britton, stunning in a skirt and high heels, for the young starlet of another NBC show -- they hugged and joked and chatted with each other and with some of the journalists who'd provided moral support to them last season. After all, not everyone thought they'd have this reunion.
“I doubted it,” said Kyle Chandler (pictured above), who plays Britton's husband and the coach of the fictional Dillon Panthers on the show. “I told Connie earlier in the year, 'It's coming back,'” but inside I'm going, 'Oh, man….' (So) to have NBC so firmly behind it, I mean, this is just spectacular.”
Averaging barely more than 6 million viewers a week, “Friday Night Lights” wasn't even a top-100 show last season. It finished behind “Kidnapped,” “Crossing Jordan,” “Raines” and “The Black Donnellys,” none of which NBC decided to renew.
And while it is back for another season, it's back on Fridays, one of the least-watched nights of television. But it is a night when NBC could give the show a later time period than 7 p.m. in the Midwest, when it was on last season. And as NBC entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman pointed out, the title of the show is “Friday Night Lights,” so putting it on Tuesdays might not have been the greatest idea.
That wasn't the only time the network dropped the ball last season.
“We promoted the hell out of it on 'Sunday Night Football' in September last year, and in retrospect, that might have been a mistake,” said Dick Ebersol, the head of NBC Sports. “I happen to believe that 'Friday Night Lights' is the best show on television right now. I think it does a much better job than 'The O.C.' ever did in terms of revealing the realistic life of teenagers in this country. It does very good actually showing what it's like to be a married couple in America today.”
But instead, NBC chose to promote “Friday Night Lights” as a football soap opera, and that, said Ebersol, “was not good for the show.”
When the show resumes next season, get ready for a fast-forward. Producer Jason Katims said the storyline will resume eight months in the future with the coach and his family in separate towns: he in Austin, having accepted a college job, and she back in Dillon, where she's given birth to a surprise child while their other one, the teenager played by Aimee Teegarden, will be “acting out more than she ever has before,” said Katims.
Needless to say, the long-distance situation won't last, nor will “Friday Night Lights” if more people don't start watching. But the producers have no plans to tamper with what they -- and a lot of professional TV watchers -- feel is a very good thing.
“It's hard to imagine how we'd change it,” said Katims. “I mean, we are adding superpowers this year for a couple of characters, but other than that….”
In other press-tour happenings, the story that made Kansas famous is being reinvented by the SciFi channel, with the help of a lot of CGI and former Hallmark Entertainment head Robert Halmi Sr.
“Tin Man,” based on Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, will be a three-night miniseries starring Zooey Deschanel as Dorothy Gale, who, in the words of SciFi's Dave Howe, is “plucked from her humdrum life in Kansas and thrust into a fantastical realm” known as “The O.Z.”
Halmi, the ageless producer who remade everything from Moby-Dick to Gulliver's Travels to Merlin for TV, said, “I have always said through the years that every great book should be redone every 35 or 40 years because a new generation has to see it.”
Alan Cumming will co-star as the man without a brain.
And MSNBC's Keith Olbermann may have come up with the perfect way to describe his relationship to Bill O'Reilly, his arch-nemesis on Fox News Channel. Appearing before a friendly audience at a press breakfast, Olbermann was asked how he really feels about O'Reilly, whom he calls out for nearly nightly scoldings on his “Countdown” show.
“My gratitude to him has increased with each passing week,” said Olbermann, who still trails “Bill-O” by a mile in the overall ratings but has seen his audience leap 70 percent in the past year and is now MSNBC's highest-rated personality. “Every time he does not say my name but tries to pretend he's shooting somewhere around me in the NBC family, somebody writes an article about him that includes me in it.
“It's really --” and here, Olbermann paused for the punchline -- “it's as, to some degree, a virus feels about the host.”
The virus will be become the host next month when Olbermann moderates a forum with all the major Democrats running for president. That will air Aug. 7 on MSNBC. Fox News Channel had to cancel a similar forum when key Democrats refused to appear on Fox. Olbermann said, "I don't know if I would have advised (the candidates) to avoid free television time, whether it's on Fox or Al Jazeera."
