Anti-Climacus

I enjoyed the recent Friday Night Lights love fest as much as any fan of the show (have you seen the supercut Coach Taylor pep talk?; a friend and I unironically said "Texas Forever" to each other in talking about the finale), there was something that struck me as odd in the whole conversation: in our current age, we all love TV shows that aspire to be movies. The movie/TV distinction, in essence, is that in the former, there's one coherent narrative or plot which is pushed forward throughout the entire thing, where threads or subplots are continued or resolved in a satisfying manner, and substantive and stylistic flourishes raise the entire exercise to the level of 'art.' Leaving aside whether this is a sufficient explanation of movies, it's undoubtedly the impulse behind the rise of a certain kind of television style: Mad Men, Breaking Bad or The Wire are all often praised in these terms. The criticisms of the last season (or more) of Lost and How I Met Your Mother are also usually phrased in these terms: too many loose ends, no satisfying sense that the narrative is going anywhere, or the places that the narrative does goes are stupid and/or feel too much like a show spinning its wheels.

Friday Night Lights is a show that is critically beloved that falls into the category of shows with continuity problems. Everybody has a favorite example of a character that disappeared, or never materialized: Waverly in Season 1, Santiago in Season 2, Hastings and Buddy Jr. in Season 5, The McCoys, the many age-inappropriate boyfriends of Julie Taylor, etc etc. Fans of the show have an unspoken agreement that The Second Season Never Happened because of the world's stupidest murder subplot, which took up a surprisingly large amount of screen time. There are people who never cottoned on to the move to East Dillon, and there are those (myself included) that found the last two seasons much stronger than the first three.

Which makes me think of this from 2666:

Without turning, the pharmacist answered that he liked books like The Metamorphosis, Bartleby, A Simple Heart, A Christmas Carol. And then he said that he was reading Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. Leaving aside the fact that A Simple Heart and A Christmas Carol were stories, not books, there was something revelatory about the taste of this bookish young pharmacist, who ... clearly and inarguably preferred minor works to major ones. He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecouchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze a path into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

Largely because I think my overall tastes are shifting from small projects executed to perfection to larger ones that can withstand many internal errors or problems. But more on this later.