Our TV Endorsements: How are they doin'? (The Dramas)

Yesterday, I looked at two of the 4 shows I endorsed before the fall TV season to see how they're holding up this year. It just so happens they were both sitcoms. Well, OK, you got me. I planned it that way! Yep, and today I'll cover the other two, both hourlong dramas.

Heroes: Too much has already been written about the supposed steep decline of this sophomore series. In fact, a lot of it has been written by the show's own head honcho, who publicly apologized for Heroes' subpar efforts.

Sure, it hasn't been as good as it was last year, but neither is my eyesight, and I'm not about to just abandon it. That was a horrible analogy, but my point is that Heroes is still pretty good overall even though not all of it is working. The new characters mostly washed out, for one thing, and though the creative team seems to believe it's because we got too many of them, that's not the case. It's because many of them sucked.

Look at what happened to the main character (yeah, it's an ensemble, but come on), cheerleader Claire. She was saddled with an irritating boyfriend as the writers made her far less savvy and engaging than she was last season. I believe that since Heroes went through so much plot last year, there was an effort to dial it back a bit and kind of re-explore some basic issues like, how would a person react to having superpowers? How would they live their life?

Problem is, the genie is out of the bottle for many of these characters, and you can't go back to square one for Claire for too long. The way to explore those themes is by introducing--you guessed it--new characters. Personally, I'd rather see the old ones utilized better (need I complain about the Hiro storyline?). But Heroes, though it disappointed this fall and didn't quite end on a strong enough note to make us forget that, is not a failure. It's still a fun watch, and I look forward to seeing what happens when it comes back.

Friday Night Lights: I remember reading the nervous in-print twitters of TV critics who had advance copies of the first few episodes of FNL. "Aw, come on," I thought, "Can it be THAT bad?" I figured critics were getting carried away, assuming the show was dumbing itself down just because of the one big twist they hated.

Well, yes, Landry killing that creep and trying to dump the body was that bad. It really did put a cloud (and not thematically) over the show, and there were signs of dumbing down in order to turn the acclaimed but underseen drama into more of a !BUZZ! kind of show.

Still, I could handle it. So it went from an "A" show to a "B"-grade show. Still enjoyable.

Then NBC put the episodes On Demand, and I got out of the habit of taping it and watching it ASAP.

Then Street and Riggins went to Mexico for a week, and the show lost me. How do high school students just take off for a week without repercussions? Granted, Riggo doesn't care much about classes, but what about the team? I just didn't get this, and if they explained it adequately, I missed it, and it was too late for me to care, anyway. FNL had become too much like 90210, with its own alternate reality replacing the real reality that had been so relatable and so appealing in season 1. 90210 was fine when I was watching reruns with my sisters 10 years ago and laughing along with the show, but I don't want FNL to be like 90210.

So I stopped watching the On Demand episodes, and I got out of the habit of watching the show altogether. Maybe in the future, I'll catch up. If the second season makes it to DVD, I could grab a few discs and give it another chance. But for now, the magic's gone.