Will Superman stay in the sunshine? Hint: The odds of pleasing all the blue-grassers most of the time is as futile as trying to catch the wind..

heh heh

HT: Josh Hutcheson

PLAAAY BALL….for the love of the big red machine, please dear God, tell me he governs better than he pitches!

The Mayor of Cincinnati is a right-winger who goes juuuuust a little bit left…

I love the look on ex-Red Eric Davis after the pitch is thrown…

ht: Sports Guy

The play’s the thing: Friday Night Lights and The Shield bring it home

Ask one of the best bloggers in the East Tennessee blog-a-teria what the best show on TV might be.  R. Neal will tell you, and he’s right.  I like Neal’s politics and I love his taste in TV.

If we’re talking non-cable, two shows stand tall amongst the dreck: Friday Night Lights, and now returning for its 6th season, ‘The Shield’.

Both shows employ documentary techniques and both delineate and describe a universe as real as any so-called non-fiction Dateline piece.

Friday Night Lights is ostensibly about football.  The truth is, you don’t even have to know what the difference between first down or an onside kick to enjoy this show.  I’m scared the reason the show is faring poorly in the ratings is that people think it’s a sports show.  The show is about high school (a subject TV gets right again and again and again).  It’s about small-town life and sex and race and prejudice and booster-ism and family and first love and hucksters and pride and fear and faith, and that’s just the beginning.  It never after-school-specials any of these issues and you don’t leave each episode happy that the issue of the week is all wrapped up and resolved.  In short, like any good novel, the show creates a world that we recognize and understand, and sometimes, that ain’t pretty.

Kyle Chandler, the actor who plays the head coach of the football team is an understated dream of an actor.  The rest of the cast is not far behind.  Do yourself a favor – watch this show tonight.  Check out some of the complete episodes on the website.  You won’t be disappointed.

The sixth season of ‘The Shield‘ opened last night on FX.  If you ever wanted to read Moby Dick because you heard it was the classic American novel and you just couldn’t get through it, or wanted to see ‘Les Mis’ with a different spin, set in the claustophobic world of an LA police precinct, this is the show you need to catch.

Michael Chiklis and Forest Whitaker are teaming up for what is probably the best footwork you’ll see south of Dancing with the Stars.   Vic, the Chiklis character, is an incredibly robust, totally corrupt cop.  Whitaker is the IAD guy who has become obsessed with the pursuit of this corrupt ‘whale’.  The show is dark, sometimes funny, and features easily the best ensemble cast on ‘regular’ TV (on cable, ya gotta go with ‘The Sopranos’).

So much of TV is darvocet and just plain asinine (including the stupid American Idol that I can’t quit watching).   Friday Night Lights and The Shield provide the antidote.  Sometimes the cure isn’t pleasant, but you gotta want more in life than Sanjaya and Simon Cowell.