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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
MONDAY: "Monday Night Football" (9 p.m. ET, ABC)
ABC stalwart "Monday Night Football" once featured right-winger Dennis Miller as a commentator. Miller may not be around to inject politics into "MNF" anymore, but Al Michaels, who currently holds down the fort with John Madden, has been there to pick up the slack. Witness this exchange from an early September game between the Indianapolis Colts and New England Patriots in Foxboro, Mass. (The Patriots had just recovered a Colts fumble, swinging the momentum their way):
Madden: "That's what you call a flip-flop."
Michaels: "Well, we're in the right state for that, John."
It's not hard to see why football has such appeal for right-wingers. On the field, the game is incredibly complicated, with intricate blocking and defensive schemes and play calls that depend on the kind of quick thinking and deceptive tactics seen in high-level chess games. But it is also a fundamentally simple and satisfying game to watch, with 60 minutes of bone-crunching action resulting in a clear winner and loser. There may be complexity in the details, but the rhetoric, with its invocation of warriors, heroes and goats, is sweeping and grand. Think of the tone of NFL Films videos, where a reverent voiceover speaks in moral absolutes of soldiers who battle on a frozen tundra, the fight for dominance seen through the prism of tradition.
The Bush team, of course, understands that such rhetoric has an innate appeal. One's place on the political spectrum could perhaps be measured by to what degree we're won over by sweeping phrases like "freedom is on the march," five words that strike me as both genuinely patriotic and alarmingly simplistic. There's not an overwhelming red/blue divide when it comes to football, except perhaps when you account for the intensity of fandom in the South, where college football plays a much larger cultural role than it does in places like New England. But perhaps the division exists in what we take from it. The NFL has relentlessly used the military in its promotions, something liberals tend to find crass and conservatives don't seem to mind. Football can be used to reinforce the thinking behind Bush's vaguest rhetoric, with its ties to patriotism and its presentation of a nuance-free world of black and white with winners, losers and very little in between. For those on the right, it makes one hell of a metaphor. The rest of us just want to watch a game.
TUESDAY: "Gilmore Girls" (8 p.m. ET, The WB)
It took me a long time to actually sit down and watch "Gilmore Girls," and for good reason: There seem to be more than enough reasons to avoid it, such as the beatific New England locale populated by seemingly stock "eccentrics" we've all seen on countless other shows and an intro that suggests a level of teenage chickiness most would find impossible to take. But "Gilmore Girls" is a pretty damn good show, with a built-in class critique more powerful, if less obvious, than its spiritual cousin on Fox, "The O.C." The back story is that Lorelai Gilmore ran away from home at age 16, abandoning her wealthy parents to raise her newborn daughter, Rory. Now Rory has become a teenager who lives with Lorelai in Stars Hollow, a town near Hartford, where Lorelai's parents make their home.
If "Gilmore Girls" had a conservative slant, Lorelai would likely have spiraled downward after her teenage pregnancy, returning to the fold to find her way. But she went her own way, and after a bumpy road, she's actually doing pretty well -- and her daughter, who recently enrolled at Yale, is almost preternaturally well adjusted. Her parents, meanwhile, are a mess, emotionally distant ciphers insulated by their wealth and seemingly unable to maintain a real connection with anyone, including each other. The show, which is awash in clever, rapid-fire repartee, inverts the lessons built into the vast majority of conservative, family-centric shows, from "Leave It to Beaver" to "7th Heaven." The message of "Gilmore Girls" is that unconventional choices can add up to a better life than traditional ones. "The O.C." may have a more obvious wrong-side-of-the-tracks dynamic cribbed from "The Outsiders" and countless predecessors, but "Gilmore Girls"' message is ultimately much more subversive. (And just in case you're still not convinced, consider this: In the alternative America of Gilmore Girls, Al Gore occupies the White House.)
