TV Watch: Further thoughts on the short final season of "Parenthood" -- and the question of how long a TV season should be

A promo for last week's episode (No. 5 of Season 6) of Parenthood

by Ken

Almost exactly a month ago I voiced mixed feelings about the launch of Parenthood's sixth and final season, in a 13-episode format. The good feelings had an obvious cause: the return of a show I'd joined well into its run but come to value a lot. And the not-so-good feelings had equally obvious causes: the "final season" part, and the "13-episode format" part. Although he show in fact launched in 2010 with a 13-episode season, Seasons 2-5 contained 22, 18, 15, and 22 episodes.

I did note, however, that "judging by the expert way showrunner Jason Katims handled the shorter seasons imposed on him later in the run of Friday Night Lights, he's probably as good a writer-producer as there is at taking advantage of whatever program arc he's given. And five episodes into Season 6, I can declare myself fairly well pleased. There's a highly workable assortment of plot lines: patriarch Zeek's (Craig T. Nelson) open-heart surgery; granddaughter Amber's (Mae Whitman) pregnancy; the brewing crisis in Crosby's (Dax Shepard) life; the train wreck of Sarah's (Lauren Graham) boyfriend Hank"s (Ray Romano) relationship with his out-of-control daughter (with Hank's ex); the apparently final collapse of Julia and Joel's (Erika Christensen and Sam Yaeger) marriage.

And, oh yes, the launch of Kristina and Adam's (Monica Potter and Peter Krause) school. I hope the remaining scripts deal with Kristina's so-far-displayed stunning incompetence at the role of school headmistress, for which after all she has no training. Even apart from her stunning refusal to even try to distinguish between her relationships with Max as a student and as her son, she keeps blurting out nonsense about what-we-do and what-we-don't-do at the new school, nonsense that's making her look as if she shouldn't be allowed any role in the running of the place.

As we wait for the remaining eight episodes to roll, I'm also thinking that maybe the six seasons of Parenthood will be enough.

But there's still that age-old question of just how many episodes there ought to be in a TV season. I should stress that Jason Katims's 22-episode seasons, of both Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, have been outstanding from a creative standpoint. As he himself noted in a Friday Night Lights DVD audio commentary concerning NBC's cutback order, while he liked the idea of being able to focus on a 13-episode arc, at the same time it almost meant all but eliminating the secondary plots that had lent such extraordinary richness to the show's first season. I suppose, however, that from the network standpoint, you have to hope for higher ratings than Jason's shows command to justify that 22-week commitment, and he is starting to look like kind of a 13-episode kind of guy, commercially if not creatively, if we include his newest show, which I'm just catching up on as it starts its second season:

• Friiday Night Lights (2006-10): 76 hour-long episodes in 5 seasons of 22, 15, 13, 13, 13

• Parenthood (2010-15): 103 hour-long episodes in 6 seasons of 13, 22, 18, 15, 22, 13

• About a Boy (2014-present): so far, 1 completed season of 13 ½-hour episodes

22 EPISODES IS A LOT OF EPISODES

And what's wrong with being a 13-episode kind of guy? I don't know that three's anyplace else in the world where even the current U.S. network standard of 22 episodes would be regarded as anything other than nuts. By coincidence, this week I happen to have received my DVD orders of the complete runs of two much-loved shows, which both ran for seven U.S. network seasons. On consecutive days my mail persons brought me:

• the long-available individual-season sets of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1971-77): 168 ½-hour episodes in 7 seasons of 24 episodes each

• Shout Factory's lovely new boxed set of the complete Hill Street Blues (1981-87): 146 hour-long episodes in 7 seasons of 17, 18, 22, 22, 23, 22, 22

I don't suppose this seems exactly a killing pace when you look at, say:

• Perry Mason (1957-66): 271 hour-long episodes in 9 seasons, of 39, 30, 26, 28, 30, 28, 30, 30, 30

Even at the "slimmed-down" U.S. season length, if you stay on the job, the episode totals really mount, as for example:

• M*A*S*H (1972-83): 256 ½-hour episodes in 11 seasons of 24, 24, 24, 25, 25, 25, 26, 25, 20, 22, 16

• Or especially Law and Order (1990-2010): 456 episodes in 20 seasons of 22-24 hour-long episodes (except Season 18's 18)

Yikes! As I've mentioned, I'm not in possession of a boxed set of the complete 456 Law and Order episodes. It's kind of like a piece of furniture. However, the current U.S. network standard still makes for one heckuva lot of production. And I know of one great U.S. TV-maker who seems still mad as hell and still determined not to take it anymore.


ANOTHER APPROACH TO THE TV "SEASON"

I've mentioned before the glorious evening at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria -- despite the torrential downpour outside -- when David Chase was on hand to talk about The Sopranos after a screening of the show's first and last episodes. As I've mentioned frequently, before The Sopranos Chase was already one of my TV heroes from his work on three sensational -- and different-as-could-be network series: The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure, and I'll Fly Away. So I was a little surprised to hear him speak with what sounded like stingingly present bitterness, or even horror, at the factory-like way network series are produced.

His case in point was Universal, where of course he cut his TV teeth, and where at the time almost uncountable hour-long series were being churned out in full-network-season helpings. And I guess that's an experience, as both participant and observer, that can leave permanent scars. The obvious question, which has been raised frequently, is how it's possible to produce creative work of top quality in such quantity. It sure sounded as if Chase isn't likely to go back to that world anytime soon.

Cable, of course, has offered TV auteurs a different way to go. Compare:

• The Rockford Files (1974-80): 2-hour TV movie pilot + 123 hour-long episodes in 6 seasons of 23, 22, 22, 22, 22, 12 (the latter owing to James Garner's physical incapacitation)

• The Sopranos (1999-2007): 86 hour-long episodes in 6 seasons of 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 12+9

In the wake of The Sopranos, other TV auteurs have taken excellent advantage, as for example:

• Mad Men (2007-2014): 92 hour-long episodes in 7 seasons of 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 13, 7+7

• Breaking Bad (2008-13): 62 hour-long episodes in 5 seasons of 7, 13, 13, 13, 8+8

Still, the networks, major and minor, aren't likely to be converted to this model anytime soon. It just doesn't fit their economic model, in terms of either program scheduling or the aftermarket where U.S. TV shows finally pay dividends -- syndication and, now, DVD sales. Amazingly, some awfully good work gets done. In addition to the shows just mentioned, think of:

• The Good Wife (2009-present): so far, 112 hour-long episodes in 5 completed seasons of 23, 23, 22, 22, 22

• House M.D. (2004-12): 177 episodes in 8 seasons of 22, 24, 24, 16, 24, 22, 23, 22

• Gilmore Girls (2000-07): 153 episodes ini 7 seasons of 21, 22, 22, 22, 22, 22, 22

But my goodness, it's hard. I can scarcely begin to imagine the kind of fanatical dedication it took, and the toll it took, on Gilmore Girls creator-showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino to maintain the episode-to-episode quality of her show through the six seasons she survived with as little help as her network provided, only to be forced out over that very issue.


MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE POND

As I noted above, seasons of this length are, as far as I know, a uniquely American phenomenon, and are endured because the potential financial rewards are so large. I've also been looking at the numbers of some British shows, and I want to continue with that in a 9pm PT/12 midnight ET post.

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TV Watch: "Friday Night Lights" provides reason to celebrate the existence of DVDs

At the center of it all: Eric and Tami Taylor
(Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton)

by Ken

With the cancellation of today's Municipal Art Society walking tour to Willet's Point, Queens (I sure hope that leg comes around soon, Jack Eichenbaum!), I found myself with an unexpected day of leisure. Oh, there were thousands of things I could have plunked onto the schedule, but instead I took advaantage to pursue my current video craze and finish the race through Season 3 of Friday Night Lights. And tonight I am a big fan of the whole DVD thing.

First, because it would be a terrible shame if the five seasons of Friday Night Lights (2006-11) were nothing more than a dazzling memory of one of the most remarkable accomplishments in the history of the English-speaking television world. Here it is all gathered together, not just for the considerable pleasure of rewatching but as a demonstration that those of us who wrote enthusiastically about it while it was on the air weren't imagining its qualities -- the show seems even more extraordinary on re-viewing, especially in a clump.

Second, in the case of Friday Night Lights, the special features, which don't look so special, turn out to be extremely special. In fact, through much of Season 1, I think I mostly skipped over them; at some point I'll have to go back and check them out. What we get are deleted scenes for most episodes and one or two episodes a season with a commentary track. As we learn in the commentary track for the Season 2 opener with executive producers Jason Katims and Jeff Reiner, as well as from the deleted scenes themselves, the deleted scenes were a key part of the way the show was made and were cut, not because they weren't good enough, but because something had to go.

Katims was the overall master of the show, responsible for its creative content, doing a lot of writing himself and apparently overseeing the rest, while Reiner, responsible for the translation of that content to the screen, apparently did pretty much the same thing with the corps of directors. They explain that they were allowed to shoot enough film to assemble an initial 80-minute cut for their eventual 43-minute end product, where most shows start with maybe six minutes that need to be cut. This gave the editing process vast opportunities but also enormous burdens; clearly an enormous amount of utterly air-worthy content had to go. Often, the producers explain, scenes that were too strong in their own right benefited the show by being cut. I only wish that: (1) we had been given even more of the cutting-room leavings, and (2) we had the possibility of seeing the scenes undeleted -- i.e., in place as part of the episodes.

I WROTE ABOUT FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS A NUMBER OF TIMES . . .

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Friday Night Lights remains one of the best things on TV, for viewers who happen to have found it

A "two-minute recap" of Friday night's episode, 'The Son'"

[at 00:56 (scene beginning at 00:45)] "I gotta get up there in front of everybody and say good stuff about this man. And all I really want to say is, 'Here lies Henry Saracen. His mother annoyed him, his wife couldn't stand him, and he didn't want to be a dad, so he took off, to be in the Army, because that was the only way you could come up with to get out of here and ditch all your responsibilities and no one could call you out on it and that worked out great, so you just decided to enlist four more times, and that ended up getting you killed, and now here you are, and all you got left, all you left behind, is a mother with dementia, a divorced wife, and a son -- who delivers pizza.' "

-- a drunk Matt Saracen, drinking beer on the football field
at night with his friend Landry and Tim and Billy Riggins

by Ken

Now that NBC has finally slipped the fourth season of Friday Night Lights onto the schedule (following its first run on -- what was it? -- satellite TV?), Friday nights at 8pm ET/PT, apparently to guarantee minimum exposure (is NBC actually still in the TV business?), I hope there's somebody actually watching. It's always been a show that was relatively unafraid of being realistically depressing as it looked, not just at high school football in West Texas, but the hard realities of supporting a family, adolescence and high school life in the early 21st century, the strains of two-earner families, balancing work and family (especially when work is as macho a calling as coaching football), real life with a new baby, community values with regard to sports and education, dead-end lives and hopeless poverty, race, and on and on. But in the first three seasons there were successes most of the way to balance the rigors and failures. The new season has gone really grim.

I've written about the show a number of times -- the last time at length here. I think Tami and Eric Taylor (Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler) are one of the great couples created for the screen, large or small. Actually, they would be wasted in film, which couldn't begin to take advantage of the fullness and depth of the relationship. And if things got complicated last season with Tami being promoted to principal of Dillon High, that's nothing compared with this season, with Eric having been forced out of his job at Dillon and taken on the labor of building a football program at the newly reopened, dilapidated old East Dillon, the school for the wrong part of town, the part that never sees any development money or hope.

The producers have managed to hold onto some of the great now-graduated characters, like athletic genius but life screw-up Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) and the accidental championship quarterback Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford). Poor Matt is the sweet, earnest grinder who does everything he's asked and is mostly never rewarded. With his Army father in Iraq and no one to share the care burden for his grandmother (Louanne Stephens), who teeters between the near and far shores of dementia, Matt has been shouldering a load beyond what should be asked of someone twice his age. Presumably the thought in his own mind has been that he has to hold things together, somehow, until his father returns.

And then came Friday's episode. (SPOILER ALERT IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE EPISODE YET.) Matt's father isn't coming home. It was an incredibly powerful episode, with large numbers of townspeople showing support, and poor Matt too muddled even to begin to imagine what kind of support he needs. Especially while he's still sorting out his feelings about his father. There was a wonderful line about how he poured all his hate on his father so he didn't have to hate anybody else.

The episode was a gorgeous piece of writing, as always amazingly respectful of its characters' realities, and the cast remains uniformly remarkable. My goodness, this season even super-booster Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) has become a sympathetic character, now that we've discovered how much rottener the boosters of a high school football program can be. And who accompanied Buddy to the Saracens' wake but his daughter Lyla (Minka Kelly), presumably back from college? Lyla had no lines that I noticed, but you got the idea we're going to be seeing more of her. Fine by me.

AFTERTHOUGHT (Monday): The pressure to simplify in the interest of brevity can go too far, and it was wrong of me to say that Matt Saracen has "no one to share the care burden for his grandmother." It was true when the state of her dementia became too advanced to ignore, but as Friday's episode reminded us, the return of Matt's mother into his life, accepted even more grudgingly by her former mother-in-law, actually has given him someone to share the load.

Matt (Zach Gilford) and his grandmother (Louanne

Stephens) at his father's funeral in Friday night's episode

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Mother's Day on "30 Rock": Oh, the horror!

by Ken

Imagine the surprise of NBC chief cheese Jeff Zuckerman to discover that there are actual disadvantages to not having a programming department. Sure, you save a lot of money in salaries that way, and considering the quality of the stuff the last programmers standing at the network were putting on, the falloff in quality wasn't as severe as it might have been with the new scheme of having Jay Leno standing by around the clock with a card table and folding chairs, ready to go before the cameras to run off his mouth anytime the network had anything else to send out over the airwaves.

It's nice to have Friday Night Lights back finally, even if this season has already been shown . . . what was it, on some satellite feed? I tried to watch a couple of episodes online, until I found out that eventually they would be run on Last-Chance Television, NBC. And now that I've gotten to watch the first episode again on a proper TV, I see that it looks surprisingly normal, considering this drastic budget cuts. (As I understand it, instead of scenery the actors are acting in front of old sheets hung on the wall -- cheaper than using a green screen -- which was later filled in with an Etch-a-Sketch.)

She's back! Colleen Donaghy descended on Jack, not because of Mother's Day, but because word had reached her in Florida of the chaos in Jack's love life.

But to get back to this crazy scheme I'm proposing that NBC employ actually "programming people," let's say there were such, keeping body and soul together on modest six-figure salaries, and not just people who thinking up "ideas" for new shows (not to be confused with that preposterous time-filler in the post-30 Rock time slot, where each week several pleasingly cheeky folks like Ricky Gervais watch video of scary people in pathetic relationship crisis , then take cast votes in favor of one aggrieved party or the other -- is it still on the air? what the hell was that anyways?), but maintaining periodic contact with the people putting out their existing "programming."

Let's say that such "programming people" got wind that the 30 Rock people, who continue to do brilliant work seemingly heedless of the disaster area their network has become, rather as if George Bernard Shaw had written a couple of vimtage plays while sailing on the Titanic, were planning, of all things, a Mother's Day show! Naturally this provided a pretext for a return visit from the sublime Elaine Stritch as Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin's) truly infernal mother.

JACK: Happy Mother's Day, Colleen!
COLLEEN: I'm not here about Mother's Day, John Francis. You know who's in my water aerobics class down in Florida?
JACK: Yes, Mother, I've memorized the names of everyone who's in your water aerobics class.
COLLEEN: Patricia Goodban (name?), whose sister runs the Friday night bingo game at Our Lady of Reluctant Integration in Waltham. Turns out last week that the game was won by Anne O'Connor, who mentioned that her niece, Nancy Donovan, got divorced and was runnin' around with a hotshot in New York City who pours scotch like a woman.
JACK: If I don't always share my personal life with you, Colleen, it's because you've never approved of any woman I've shown an interest in.
COLLEEN: Now that's not true.
JACK: I'm not having this conversation with you right now. I have work to do, and I'll be joining you for lunch. [KENNETH the page enters.] In the meantime, Kenneth here will be entertaining you. [JACK leaves.]
COLLEEN [to KENNETH]: Okay, entertain me!

This year the 30 Rock gnomes hatched a mad for Mother's Day. The entire TGS staff is ordered to bring their moms to town to appear on the show, in a desperate effort to counteract the disastrous P.R. of the network's airing of its supremely offensive show Bitch Hunt (with Will Ferrell as the marauding bitch hunter).

So it's not just Colleen Donaghy who's back, but Jenna's (Jane Krakowski's) appalling mother Verna (Jan Hooks, given license to be as revolting as she can be). Meanwhile Liz (Tina Fey) catches her mother (Anita Gillette) leaving money for the show's food spread.

LIZ: Mom, what are you doing? You don't have to pay for the food.
MARGARET: Honey, nothing is free. You remember that when a man buys you an expensive meal.
LIZ: Yeah, that's happening a lot.

Gross Frank's mom (Patti LuPone) hands Liz a photo of "Little Frankie in the bathub getting ready for the senior prom." Lutz's mom looks terrifyingly like "her" son -- a barely human appearance for someone of either gender. Whereas beautiful new kid Danny, the all-Canadian-boy-next-door, and his Japanese mother are horrified when it's suggested that he's adopted.

Since it has proved impossible to locate Tracy's mother based on the limited information he's able to supply (he remembers seeing her once in 1984), director Pete comes up with the idea of hiring a suitable actress to play the role, and Tracy's okay with the idea ("like when they was looking for John McCain's running mate"), except that he insists on names for his fake-mother candidates -- someone like Phylicia Rashad, for example.

All of this without even mentioning that Liz's mother had the one true love Liz dreams about meeting, only it wasn't Liz's father, it was Buzz Aldrin. And all of this in just a half hour, with all sorts of plot mayhem barely touched on here.

What I'm saying is that if NBC had "programmers," they would have pounced on the idea of an hourlong Mother's Day episode in a special Sunday time slot. Or maybe a two-part episode begun Thursday night and completed tonight. Instead it seems just a matter of time before 30 Rock is leading into Bitch Hunt in the late-Thursday time slot.

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Postscript to my post about Imus, and a postscript to it (in which Tami and Eric Taylor are nominated as America's Hottest Couple)--and one last PS

Thanks to everyone who's chimed in re. my earlier post. I think we really do need to talk about, well, stuff.

I've pretty well had my say, so I just want to add a couple of notes.

First, I want to put the time frame I was writing about in perspective. By the time there was an Imus show to watch, the end was near for me. The handwriting was on the wall. That already represented an advanced stage in the process of the I-man's self-reinvention as a posh Connecticut right-winger.

Does anyone remember when there was such a thing as an NFL blackout? When we couldn't for love or money get the home games of our home teams on TV? When the true crazies actually drove outside the 75-mile blackout radius to someplace where they could watch their local heroes on the tube?

I can hear the young uns out there moaning, "What's the old coot going on about now? Didn't he know how to turn on the damn TV?"

Trust me on this one, young folk, there really was such a time.* And back then it was my habit to listen to New York Jets games on WNBC radio on Sunday afternoons. Which meant that when my clock radio turned on on Monday morning, there was Imus. Of course I remembered him from the even older days (like, before the First Cleveland Exile), but he was at the top of his form then--decades before there was any thought even of syndicating the radio show nationally, let alone simulcasting it on TV.
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*Just for laughs, I looked it up. The NFL's old absolute local blackout policy was changed in 1973. Yikes! Hmm, I notice that I don't seem to be laughing. Not even smiling.


POSTSCRIPT TO THE ABOVE POSTSCRIPT--RE. THE TAYLORS

In case anyone wonders about the reference above to listening to Jets games when I couldn't get them on TV, hard upon my diatribe about the corrosive effect of our worship of athletes, let me make clear: I love sports. Baseball is probably as close as I get to a religion. What I hate is both the commercialization and the mindless deification of the performers.

That's one of the great things about Friday Night Lights. Nobody could love football more than Dillon High coach Eric Taylor, but his love is for the game--the beauty and intensity of it, the pleasure of teaching it to his players and watching them develop. Unfortunately, that gets largely lost in the obsessive, life-or-death worship of the town's fans, and the disfiguring effect it has on the socialization of the school's students, which falls smack in the bailiwick of his guidance-counselor wife Tami. (And the Taylors also have a daughter attending Dillon.)

In addition to being hands-down America's Hottest Couple, Tami and Eric Taylor (Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler, above), have been engaged in a struggle for their family's, and I think the country's, soul. Seriously, it's a great show. (And there's so much going on in it that I haven't had a chance to touch on.)


OH, AND ONE LAST POSTSCRIPT--ABOUT CLEVELAND

We don't seem to have heard yet from any outraged Cleveland boosters, but I just want to say that, really and truly, no disrespect was intended to what I'm sure is a fine city. My older brother was born there, in fact, though the family had gotten the hell outta there, I mean "moved on," by the time I came along. I'm fairly sure I was once dragged, er, taken there, to visit old family friends I'd never met and surely didn't give a damn about. That's about as much as I remember about the event.

Um, say, that's a fine orchestra, that Cleveland Orchestra [above]. Though I can't say I care much for that Franz Welser-Moest fellow. (He's still the music director, isn't he?) I liked that George Szell. I guess he hasn't been there for a while, though. (1970, you say? Oh.)