Friday Night Lights - Season Two

Season two of Friday Night Lights was terrible. It was full of groan-y storylines which even the actors seemed to have a hard time being convinced by, and things too often wrapped up nicely by the end of the episode when actually they should have taken longer to resolve. An example scene:

PERSON 1: I am absolutely going to do this thing and no one can stop me!

PERSON 2: Nooooooo!

PERSON 3: You can’t do it! You might die! Are you even thinking of anyone but yourself?

PERSON 1: You have no idea what it’s like to be me!

PERSON 2 and 3: [wring their hands]

*3 minutes pass*

PERSON 1: Y’know, y’all were totally right. I’m not going to do that thing that moments ago I said I’d definitely be doing. All of my passion’s magically dissolved because there’s not enough time left in this episode to fully explore it. Let’s just hug and go home.

PERSON 1, 2 and 3: [hug and go home]

[Credits roll]

*Eyes roll*

Season two made me roll my eyes at even Tami Taylor and Tim Riggins, two characters I’ve developed full-blown crushes on, so that’s saying something. And now it’s tainted my enjoyment of season three. I’m noticing little problems and reacting as if they’re BIG DEALS, kinda like when Alan leaves his socks on the loungeroom floor and then later says something ridiculous, and if it’d just been the ridiculous thing, I’d have let it go, but because it was the socks AND the ridiculous thing, I think, “Wait - SERIOUSLY?!?!” and huff and puff inside my head about how much better the world would be if everyone did things my way. 

I <3 TAMI

So I’m up to the fifth or sixth episode of season three and already someone’s suddenly in a job I didn’t think she was qualified for, and people have played squash wearing black-soled shoes, and someone left a room without her handbag, and I basically sit here wondering how it’s sunk to these kinds of depths (black-soled shoes, people. ON A SQUASH COURT) after such a cracking first season, and daydreaming about going back in time, travelling to the US, and somehow winning a spot on the Friday Night Lights production team, just so I could correct all of these mistakes.

It may just be that I’ve watched too much TV since starting holidays last week. It may be that I’m irritable and exhausted and underwhelmed by everything, which is my typical let-this-year be-over-soon December mood. It may be that the show really is struggling to reach the glorious heights of season one. I’m not sure.

Distractions

from here

I have half a textbook chapter, a 20-question quiz, and a giant assignment standing between me and my summer holiday, and I’m finding it difficult to just do it, despite being yelled at by Shia LaBeouf numerous times now.

Partly I’m distracted by the fact that we’ve decided to move again (AGAIN). We looked at houses this morning, so “studying” this afternoon has actually involved mindlessly copying words from my textbook into a Word document while mentally arranging our furniture in the L-shaped lounge room of one of the places we saw, and trying to work out exactly how many noise-diminishing rugs we’d need if we were to move into the house with the wooden floorboards throughout. And then there’s the “Are we completely bonkers, thinking of moving again?” thoughts, for which I’ve been making up two answer lists. So far I have:

No!

• Moving will remove an hour of driving time each weekday which could be spent doing more important things, like ACTUALLY READING YOUR TEXTBOOK.
• Moving will mean we can live in a house again, and therefore ditch our tiresome “BE QUIET!!!! People may still be SLEEPING!!!” morning ritual.
• A house will mean fewer stairs. Mo’s convinced this will make his life far more bearable, which would in turn make my life far more bearable. 

Yes!

• Moving will mean packing up all of our stuff and then unpacking all of our stuff.
• Moving will mean saying goodbye to our beloved neighbours, who have become close precisely because we hear their children running through their apartment at 6am and we run into each other on the stairs and share the bin duties and bring in each others’ washing when it’s about to rain and look after each others’ kids when one of us desperately needs to run to the bottle-o and buy some wine and pitch in to get the garden looking neater before David comes home from hospital -- all of the mini-community aspects of apartment living that I love so dearly. I won’t necessarily miss having to respond to text messages asking if Hazel’s okay because she’s been heard crying noisily for most of the morning, but I will miss the walk home from a friend’s house after dinner together literally taking 15 seconds from their front door to ours (even less if you jump the stairs, like Mo does).

So. We’re leaning towards the “No!“ and hoping we’ll find somewhere perfect and have the move over and done with before my next class starts (midway through January). 

And while a large part of my mind is preoccupied with decorating the interiors of houses we may never live in, a smaller part is trying to distract me from anxious moving thoughts by thinking, “I wonder what will happen next in season two of Friday Night Lights?” and, “I wonder if this season will get any better, because I’m not particularly enjoying any of the storylines at the moment.” And then a different part of my mind chimes in with, “I know! Instead of watching TV you could keep reading that book you picked up last night! That was fun!” It’s talking about The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, which Alan found at a garage sale and I decided to check out at bedtime last night thanks to the lack of books on my physical to-read pile (I have approximately 7 reserved at the library, and any bet they’ll all suddenly come in at once, after months of waiting for them). I ended up reading two chapters instead of the one I’d allowed myself, both of which had me silent-laughing into my pillow so as not to wake Alan. I’m still not entirely sure what the premise of the book is, but Jon Ronson is a journalist whose investigation of a mystery has now led him to researching psychopaths (it’s nonfiction). Ronson is relate-ably neurotic and incredibly funny, and I’m finding the book fascinating, hilarious, and therefore difficult to put down. Here’s a sample:

In another office a neurologist was studying the July 1996 case of a doctor, a former RAF pilot, who flew over a field in broad daylight, turned around, flew back over it fifteen minutes later, and there, suddenly, was a vast crop circle. It was as if it had just materialised. It covered ten acres and consisted of a hundred and fifty-one separate circles. The circle, dubbed the Julia Set, became the most celebrated in crop-circle history. T-shirts and posters were printed. Conventions were organised. The movement had been dying off – it had become increasingly obvious that crop circles were built not by extra-terrestrials but by conceptual artists in the dead of night using planks of wood and string – but this one had appeared from nowhere in the fifteen-minute gap between the pilot’s two journeys over the field.

The neurologist in this room was trying to work out why the pilot’s brain had failed to spot the circle the first time around. It had been there all along, having been built the previous night by a group of conceptual artists known as Team Satan using planks of wood and string.

And then a much smaller part of my mind’s telling me, “Dude, reading that book is not counted as study just because it happens to explicitly mention psychological concepts. You only have one week left of study! READ YOUR TEXTBOOK!”

Offspring | Friday Night Lights | VEEP

I speed-watched the first season of Offspring in the few days before my last class started, and LOVED it; if my library’d had season two, I’d have borrowed it in a heartbeat/whenever we could next get there. I asked my sister to check her library for season two, but had no luck there either, and I considered buying it, but couldn’t quite bring myself to (the money, but also the thought of owning just one season of a TV show that’s not the first season makes me feel weird). And then I remembered I was still a member of the library from the place we lived in before the last place we lived in, so I checked their website and THEY HAD IT!! It came in just in time for this break - thank you, Jesus.

Anywho, back when I finished the first season of Offspring and realised I might never be able to watch season two for free, I decided instead to check out Friday Night Lights, which had been recommended to me by a couple of friends. It took me a little while to get into it – it’s based on the players and coaches of the Dillon Panthers, a high school football team in Texas, so there wasn’t too much I related to initially, but gradually I became a little bit obsessed and now that I’m watching season two of Offspring I’m finding myself wishing I was instead watching Friday Night Lights and finding out how my friends there are getting on in season two of their show, and I’m desperate to borrow it and continue my one-episode-per-night dates with them. It’s very well acted, and there are interesting and lovely characters and plots (I pretend the kids are 20 rather than 15 or 16, and that makes me feel better), and I’ve cried a lot while watching, and laughed quite a bit too, and basically I’m completely hooked and desperate to find out what happens next. CLEAR EYES, FULL HEARTS, CAN’T LOSE. 

Season two of Offspring’s not as good as the first, I reckon, although I don’t know whether this is because I cheated on it with FNL or whether it’s because something’s actually changed. There seem to be more ‘as if’s about this season (like, do people actually spontaneously pash other people after knowing them for three episodes’ worth of time?! And why is there suddenly an anaesthetist always around when there was none last season, and where is the replacement paediatrician this season, huh? THINK OF THE BABIES! It seems the writers are more concerned with Nina’s next romance. Also, watching women give birth while lying on their backs drives me crazy). I’m not too far in yet, though, so perhaps the season gets better as it goes on. (I finished watching it today; it does. I now don’t know whether to move onto the third season of Offspring or whether to switch to season two of FNL. This is perhaps the toughest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life.)

In the last week of my class, before I started the second season of Offspring, I borrowed the second season of VEEP from the library, because the episodes only go for 20 minutes (or so) and I found it to be a nice way of taking my mind off study for a bit before heading to bed. I find VEEP 6.5-out-of-10 entertaining rather than hilarious, but Julia Louis-Dreyfus is just incredible to watch; the awards she’s won for her performance in the show are absolutely deserved, and I’m sticking with it purely to marvel at her brilliance.