Sunday, October 22, 2006

Ummm, I think it's called nausea?

With Grey's Anatomy moved to Thursday nights and Desperate Housewives relying far too heavily on Eva Longoria's semi-clad tiny torso for ratings bumps, the only TV left to consume on Sundays is sports.

Sure, there's LPGA, MLS and NASCAR racing offered on networks major enough to only need a single digit but what Sundays in October really come down to are football and post-season MLB. The Sunday sports viewing sesh can be broken down into 3 segments: Morning, Afternoon and Night.


Morning's obviously noon pregame coverage for a 1:00 game. Afternoon's the second game of the afternoon at 4:00 EST. And Night is usually NBC's new Football Night In America and, for today, MLB on FOX's presentation of Game 2 of the World Series.

CBS and FOX have had standard Sunday football packages for the past several years. 2006, however, saw NBC break back into the football business by launching its own primetime Sunday football showdown to usurp the network share lost by Monday Night Football's move to ABC affiliate ESPN. NBC celebrated the launch of it's new sports show franchise with the lamest name it could possibly come up with: Sunday Night Football and its associated analysis program Football Night In America. Right when it seemed NBC couldn't get any whiter they spice up their promo video with a rap song lacking so much melanin that the unacknowledged perpetrator could only be MC Powder.

NBC's shortcomings as a sports network are only reinforced by a terrible presence in the field of digital media. Though its SNFONNBC website boasts pretty bad-ass graphics, it's really nothing more than a Flash window with sound effects ripped straight out of Tecmo Bowl. It's now week 6 of the NFL and NBC's football home page still hypes a Manning Bowl that took place two months ago.

MLB on FOX = Huge DB's on FOX

This weekend also saw the start of the World Series on FOX with Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Ken Rosenthal and Chris Myers handling the live game coverage. A new addition to the pre and postgame coverage, however, is guest analyst Eric Byrnes, formerly of the Oakland A's, whom we have the pleasure of seeing every time the series returns to Detroit this year. If anyone saw the coverage they'll understand that the picture posted to the right does not nearly do justice to how big of a douche bag Byrnes actually is. Like, I don't know of any dictionaries that actually have pictures but, you know, if there happened to be one that existed and if it actually chose to water down its credentials as the only dictionary to have pictures by including definitions and illustrations for words like "douche bag" then I'm sure Eric Byrnes would be smugly staring back at us between entries for "doubtless" and "dough."

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

FNL, SNL, WTF?

Kyle Chandler stars in this Peter Berg television adaptation of the Peter Berg film adaptation of the Buzz Hissinger Book of the real-life-story "Friday Night Lights."

Let's try to clear things up. Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip airs on Monday nights and is about a sketch-comedy show that films on Friday Nights. Saturday Night Live IS a sketch comedy show that airs on Saturday nights, however, without its former head-writer, Tina Fey, whose new show mocks Saturday Night Live on a Wednesday Night, which is the day after Tuesday night when NBC has decided not to confuse anyone and slot Friday Night Lights. On a Tuesday. Night.

The Big 3 companies (not counting Mack Brown who throws his own weight behind the show's desperate plea for authenticity) behind this production are NBC Universal Television (obviously), Imagine Television and Film 44. Brian Grazer is the bigwig of Imagine Television and is responsible for a slew of critically and consumer acclaimed shows such as Arrested Development, Playmakers, Sports Nite and Felicity. Film 44 is Berg's new production company and has 4 projects slated to bow by 2007, FNL the first.

In addition to the pedigree of David Nevins and Brian Grazer, Friday Night Lights has the music of he who seems to be the de-facto NBC in-house composer as of late, W.G. Snuffy Walden who's work on NBC shows is prominent on three series this fall - Studio 60, Lights and Kidnapped. The real question is, though, why didn't Berg stick with the original team that scored his feature version of Hissinger's book? Music credits on the film go to Texas-based instrumental group Explosions in the Sky and Brian Reitzell and David Torn of Evolution Music Partners. Snuffy, however, takes what seems like the same signature sound of the motion picture and mimics the shit out of it. Why? Hopefully a myspace message to Texas Band can clear things up.

explosionsinthesky@yahoo.com wrote back:

they ended up using a couple of songs for the first
episode. they may follow up and use some in the next
as well. we got lucky to be a part of the movie and
now it looks to have spilled over to the t.v. show.
thanks for thinking of us and i hope you like the
program.

take care of yourself.
explosions in the sky

So looks like the makers of music young men want to clay-shoot to are still involved in the creative process of the series, and this blogger spun conspiracy from an end credit for no reason.

Maybe Peter Berg can clear it all up here.