Friday Night Lights is Crap

Friday Night Lights used to be a pretty good show. Predictable- yes, forumalic- for sure, but entertaining nonethelss. The last few weeks, however, the show has degenerated into a farce with absurdly dull and illogical plot lines and appalingly aggresive product placements that seem to be driving at least one plot line in the show. Product placement is nothing new- but FNL seems to be taking crass commercialism to new lows.

The trend started a few weeks ago with someone on the show saying something like "hey- let's all go to Applebee's." This past friday night, though, FNL took it to whole new level by having someone suggest a trip to Applebee's, and then actually showing them going to Applebee's and ordering their signature "sizzling apple pie." The epdisode actually featured two scene's shot inside an Applebee's! But wait....it gets worse!

Later in the episode the wheelchair bound, ex-football hero Jason Street takes a job as a salesman at Buddy Garrity's Chevy dealership, and, in one absurdly ridiculous scene sells a Chevy Tahoe to an indecisive customer with a passionate and earnest speech about how "life changes so fast- look at me (in the wheelchair), if you want this truck so badly, you deserve it, you're going to buy this car today!"

If all of this weren't bad enough, at the end of the scene Chevy aired a “commercial” that essentially just reminded us of what we had just scene on the program, airing footage of Street selling the Tahoe, with the narrator saying something like, You just watched Jason Street talking about the new Chevy Tahoe, blah, blah, blah.

Obviously advertisers are getting wise to the fact that many of us are Tivo/DVR’ing programs and fast forwarding through commercials, so they’re inserting their products right into the plot lines of shows, and then re-airing the footage during commercial time, so you’ll stop your fast forward when you see the faces of characters from the show in their commercial. Its all very disgusting, and, unfortunately, very American.

What I’d like to know is: did the NBC sales staff actually allow Chevy to script a portion of the actual show? Did they tell NBC to have Street become a car salesman so he could sell the Tahoe? If so, this is a scandal in the magnitude of Watergate, the JFK assassination, and Monica-Gate. Well, ok, maybe I’m overdoing it, but if the networks continue to commercialize their content to a degree where there is no discernable difference between the show and the commercials, who will be around to watch, or will Americans even notice?