Well hey there. In case you didn’t know, this is the last week of The Three Strike Rule until the new year. Hey, don’t get mad at me, take it up with the Editor in Chief. Anyway, it’s been a pleasure writing about the boob tube over the coarse of the year; we’ve had some fun. To wrap things up, my compadre, Shaun Hamid, has joined me in giving you our two cents’ worth what 2007 brought us in television. Until next year, aloha.

BEST SHOW

Scott: Friday Night Lights (NBC/DirecTV) The small-town football series’ 2nd season ended on a high note last winter as we watched it regain its form after stumbling with a soap opera-ish murder plot. Still, NBC ran the final episodes with little fanfare, despite the fact that there was little original programming on the air due to the writers’ strike. The network redeemed itself by striking a deal with DirecTV to co-produce a third season. Since October, the satellite provider has been airing these new episodes and come January, those same episodes will air on the peacock network.

The third season has been everything fans of the show love, in particular the study of a working marriage between two of the finest actors on television, Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as Coach and Mrs./Principal Taylor. They are the heart of the show. If you haven’t watched this show yet, what the hell is your problem? More than any other series on TV, FNL approaches each week with intelligence, humor and heart. At a time when the country is in turmoil, here is a quality show that taps into everything that is great about the America and reminds us of what we can be. Procedurals and medical dramas are a dime a dozen, and aren’t we all bored to shit with the woes of filthy rich people? I said it back in January, and now I’ll repeat myself: WATCH THIS SHOW!

Shaun: Mad Men (AMC) In spite of the remarkable amount of attention this show has gotten critically and awards-wise, it still feels unheralded to me. This show consistently elevates itself above much other dramatic fare. No network, NBC to HBO, has a show nearing its quality and innovation currently. While it can be irritating in its few failures, I think that is a testament to a show that a viewer expects so much from. If you have not seen this show yet, and judging by the ratings that may be a good bet, take the leap. It would be unfortunate for it to meet the fate of another similar luminary in another genre: Arrested Development.

(more…)

Shaun Hamid is back tossing his voice into the TV arena with me.  We hope that in the coming weeks you, our readers, will help continue our conversations about television as art and entertainment.

Shaun: The U.S. version of the BBC cult show, Life on Mars, has arrived after much tooling on ABC (Thursdays, 10 PM).  For its premiere it received a rather strong response, but it has been losing its audience in the intervening weeks.  Considering the ambitious nature of the series, and its potential, one can only hope that ABC is patient enough to see if it can find its own identity.

The premise of Life on Mars is that present day NYPD Detective Sam Tyler, played by Jason O’Mara, is hit by a car while investigating a case.  When he wakes up, he is in 1973 New York.  He is not sure if this is some elaborate hallucination or the afterlife.

Occasionally, he hears the sounds of a hospital room in his head, leading the Sam (and the audience) to believe he is in a coma or similar state in 2008.  However, the 1973 world he inhabits is so vivid that it is hard to really know which world Sam knows is actually more real.  In 1973, Sam is still a cop, and he works out of a precinct which is ruled by Lieutenant Gene Hunt (played by Harvey Keitel), with his two main men Detective Ray Carling (Michael Imperioli) and Detective Chris Skelton (Jonathan Murphy).

Sam’s intrusion with his 30 years of advanced political correctness and procedural adherence is not met kindly by the gut-instinct approach of Hunt.  Sam would otherwise go crazy, if he is not already, were it not for the calming force of Officer Annie Norris (an understated Gretchen Mol).  Gene and Sam stand at odds, but in the end they both basically want to do the right thing.  How Sam finds his way to live in this archaic world or manages his way home is what invests you in the series.It’s difficult to not compare this version with the original. Indeed, it is obvious that the minds behind the U.S. version (producers Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec and Scott Rosenberg) are very aware of the shadow that it casts. (more…)