Only in its first season now, and just recently renewed for a second, MTV’s Awkward. is one of the most unexpectedly honest series about high school we’ve seen in years. Sure, we all like to gape at the impossibly glamorous teen dramas dreamt up by Josh Schwartz, of The O.C. and Gossip Girl fame. But in real life, high school is raw and uncomfortable and histrionically mundane, and it takes an exceptionally perceptive program to get at the mood of those terrible and wonderful years. In celebration of Awkward., we’ve rounded up the TV shows we think best capture the high school experience.
Hey, Flavorwire readers, did you watch the Emmys last night? There were a few great moments — when Friday Night Lights finally won a few awards, for example — and a few too many jokes that fell flat (why get Jane Lynch to host when you’re only going to let her get in one great zinger about how Entourage explains why she’s a lesbian?). The prevailing mood of the night, however, was neither triumph nor disappointment; it was extreme awkwardness. Relive the mortification and confusion with us as we enumerate the night’s most uncomfortable moments after the jump.
With the 63rd annual Primetime Emmy Awards coming up on Sunday, just about every TV pundit has posted a list of predictions. But here at Flavorpill, we’re less interested in who we think will win than who actually deserves to bring home the trophy — so we’ve put together a roundup of the nominees we’d give the Emmy to, if the decision were up to us. Remind yourself of who’s up for an award here, then peruse our picks after the jump and tell us who you’re pulling for in the comments.
Here’s some good news for those of us who still haven’t gotten over the end of Friday Night Lights and don’t really believe that the rumored movie is ever going to happen: The show’s producers, Peter Berg, Sarah Aubrey, and Liz Heldens, have just sold a new series to NBC. Not much is known about the as yet untitled project, but The Hollywood Reporterdescribes it as “a western story told from a female point of view.” That sounds promising to us, so here’s hoping the show makes it past the development stage — and also that they cast FNL alum Adrianne Palicki… and Taylor Kitsch… and Kyle Chandler… and…
One of the best things we’ve come across lately is this photo of Kyle Chandler — aka Friday Night Lights‘ beloved Coach Eric Taylor — grilling enough meat to serve a famished army and looking utterly stoked about it. What really captured our imagination, though, was Vulture’s inquiry: “Does Coach Taylor–Ron Swanson fan-fic exist yet?” We don’t know that we’d be particularly interested in reading Coach/Ron slash, but it does make sense that they would enjoy each other’s company. Once we started thinking about characters from entirely different TV universes who would be best friends in real life, we couldn’t stop. So, you’ll find ten perfect pairs after the jump; add your own in the comments.
We’ll try not to be too spoiler-y about this, but if you don’t want to hear anything about the most recent episode of True Blood, you’ll want to skip the next paragraph.
Now that we have that out of the way — Sunday’s True Blood sure ended on a cliffhanger, didn’t it? We’ll have to wait until next week to learn whether one of favorite characters really does bite the dust. But in the mean time, all that fretting made us think about characters we loved who were cut from their show too soon. Our top ten are after the jump; add yours in the comments.
There is a lot to celebrate about Saturday night’s Television Critics Association Awards, a smarter, lower-key alternative to the Emmys, whose nominees and winners are decided by the 200 journalists who make up the TCA. For one thing, we were thrilled to see Nick Offerman — who the Emmys didn’t even deign to nominate — share an Individual Achievement in Comedy Award for his hilarious portrayal of Ron Swanson. It was also gratifying to see the TCA name dearly departed drama Friday Night Lights Program of the Year.
The critics’ choices do raise one interesting question, though: In addition to FNL‘s award, the TCA bestowed Outstanding Achievement in Drama honors on Mad Men – so, will the real Emmy drama competition turn out to be between those two series? It’s pretty obvious that we’re in love with both shows here at Flavorpill, but while the criminally underrated FNL just finished a masterful final season and has never been nominated before, Mad Men has taken home the trophy for each of the past three years. That’s enough to place us firmly in the Dillon Lions’ corner for 2011. Take a look at the complete list of TCA Awards winners after the jump and tell us where you stand on Mad Men vs. Friday Night Lights.
Since Lorrie Moore is one of our favorite contemporary authors and Friday Night Lights is one of our all-time favorite TV series, you can only imagine how tickled we were to come across the former waxing philosophical about the latter — which just so happens to be one of her guilty pleasures — in the upcoming August 18 issue of The New York Review of Books.
Here’s a quick sample: “Friday Night Lights is held together by a cast of disconcertingly attractive young people with pink, wavy mouths (a few seem straight out of a Beverly Hills casting agency, marring slightly the verisimilitude). They play kids named Tim Riggins, Tyra Collette, Jason Street, Lyla Garrity, and Matt Saracen, whose names envelop and suit them better than any others could, including the actors’ own. Equally attractive is the only high-functioning family in Dillon: that of Coach Eric Taylor and his wife, Tami, who are played with deep and beautiful concentration and chemistry by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. The Taylors often speak politely over each other, simultaneously, as if in an Altman film, and when they genuinely lose their tempers, which is seldom, it is transfixing, even when the sparring sounds mild.” Sigh. We didn’t know it was possible to miss FNL any more than we already did. Head over to the NYRB’s website to read the full feature.
Just about every time a beloved TV show is canceled, we start to hear whispers about turning it into a movie. Sometimes this chatter begins with the series’s producers; other times, it’s merely wishful thinking by hardcore fans. And over at Vulture, Margaret Lyons is sick of it. “TV is finite. Shows end,” she reminds us. Lyons argues that these adaptations are both financially and creatively unsound ideas: “Studios are motivated by money, and it’s damn near impossible to build a blockbuster on a show that got canceled for underperforming,” she writes, while “Friday Night Lights already had a perfect ending, and Arrested Development works specifically in the context of subverting television conventions.”
While we think Lyons is right about Friday Night Lights‘ perfect ending(although we have to admit we’d go see Coach Taylor and co. if they did make it to the big screen), we can’t agree that it’s always a bad idea to turn a cult hit TV show into a movie.
As you may have noticed, we’re big fans of Friday Night Lights around these parts. And while we realize that are some people who already finished the fifth and final season of the show on DirecTV well before tonight’s series finale on NBC, we know that there are plenty of others who will be in mourning later tonight. Hopefully this news will give you something to live for.
According to TVLine’s Michael Ausiello, the current FNL storyline may continue on the big screen. The film, which would pick up where the finale leaves off, will center on Coach Taylor and Tami, with Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton reprising their roles. “[Peter] Berg, who directed the original feature and shepherded the NBC series with exec producer Jason Katims, is working behind the scenes to make it a reality,” writes Ausiello. And while he points out that going from the big screen to the small screen and back to the big screen won’t be easy, especially from a rights perspective, he seems confident that it will actually happen. Given the stalled out status of the other TV-show-to-film adaptations on our wish list (Party Down, Arrested Development, Veronica Mars), we can’t help but be skeptical. What do you think?
