Friday vs. Collar

A couple of people have been asking me, over and over again, if I'm watching Friday Night Lights and then tsk-tsk-tsked when I admit that I had never watched the show, telling me how it's the best show on TV.

I think "best" show on TV is definitely subjective. I had started watching Friday Night Lights when it first began and just couldn't get into it, so stopped. However, when someone told me that the Family Channel was rerunning the entire show, starting with Season 1 (2006), I decided to see what I've been missing.

When I watched the first episode, I realized why I had stopped watching it to begin with. For one thing I'm not a big football fan. I like football, but if this was going to be a show which spent an hour every week talking about football games, I wasn't really interested. I also found it very difficult to understand about 1/3 of what was said. This being about a high school team, the boys all have that mumble way of speaking which, combined with a Dallas accent makes me have to work too hard to understand what they are saying (add to that the sadly familiar Comcast pixellation that freezes our television for a few seconds several times during a show and it's not very rewarding to even try!).

But the show now has several seasons under its belt and I decided to stick with it, since it is being broadcast, now, a show a night and doing a 4-show marathon gets you hooked faster. I'm now hooked. I still wouldn't say it was the best written or best acted show on TV, but I'm enjoying it and have been informed that as the show moves on the plot lines get further away from just high school football.

It is, though, an odd thing to realize that there are places in this country where high school football is so big that it is the main topic on the radio, the players' homes have big signs in front of them with the name of the player and the position he plays, and most of the town turns out for games.

As passionate as some of my friends are about Friday Night Lights is how I've felt about USA's White Collar, though I have yet to able to get anybody to watch it.

I love the characters, I love the writing, and I love the chemistry between Neal Caffrey, forger and thief, released to the custody of FBI Special Agent Peter Burke (who was the one who arrested Caffry in the first place, after a long chase) in order to help the FBI solve some of its most puzzling white collar crimes.

The problem with White Collar, however, is that I suspect it might be confusing to start watching it now. There is such a continuing story arc, which doesn't affect the weekly crimes to be solved, but is such an integral part of the overall story, that I wonder if anybody could catch up. Who is Kate? Who killed her and why? What is the mysterious music box? These are becoming larger and larger parts of the before and after story and I would probably find it off-putting myself (which is why I rented four seasons of Sopranos before committing myself to watching the new season, back when I was hooked on that show...I needed to know what had gone before).

However, I really strongly recommend investing a little time, renting Season 1 from Netflix or watching it on Hulu to get caught up before it returns next summer.