Albert Brooks's Real Life (1979): Burning Down the House

It's satisfyingly ironic that the first reality show was broadcast on PBS, that most esteemed bastion of social conscience and good taste, in 1973. An American Family showcased the Loud family and their daily lives in a 12-hour miniseries for the delectation of a record-setting millions of viewers. Interestingly, son Lance was perhaps the first openly gay person on television. You don't hear much if anything about this groundbreaking bit of cultural flotsam any longer (although I had read about Lance Loud's association with the Warhol entourage), nor, I daresay, the 1979 directorial debut of comedian Albert Brooks, Real Life, which takes An American Family as its jumping off point. I've enjoyed Brooks's Modern Romance (1981) and especially Mother (1996), and who can forget his portrayal of Tom, the only normal person in Taxi Driver?

In Real Life, Brooks plays "himself," an egotistical, shallow (as he gleefully admits), slightly deluded Hollywood filmmaker with delusions of grandeur. He flatters the regular folks of Phoenix in a pre-credit news conference by telling them that the most dramatic, the funniest, and the most suspenseful things are occurring "in my backyard and yours." So what better idea than to make a movie of a regular family, doing regular things, following them in their daily lives for a year, which yet somehow are more amazing and exciting than the latest hit film? Real Life dryly skewers not, as one might think, the hapless family who would allow cameras into its living room and, ostensibly, its backyard, but the media hucksters who thrive on such absurdity in the name of "reality."

Which family offers themselves up for cinematic preservation? The Yeagers. The always-welcome Charles Grodin plays the veterinarian father who tries to corral his family into presenting its good side, but on the very night, his wife (Frances Lee McCain) has terrible menstrual cramps. The horror! Another funny-awkward bit is when their young teenage daughter, pretending for the cameras to be a famous movie star, innocently flirts with her father: "Kiss me as I've never been kissed before!" she swoons. Grodin is always a pleasure to watch in these moments, here he squirms and tries to laugh off her mugging.

And when he fatally botches an emergency surgery on a racehorse, on camera, Yeager begs to speak with Brooks, who narrates, "He asked to see me alone. Of course I obliged." Beat. Cut to, of course, the two sitting down in front of the camera.

Ultimately we realize that the real drama is not the Yeager family, but the manipulations of Brooks as he tries to cajole everyone around him - psychiatrists, producers, journalists, etc. - to go along with him on his attempt to present "real life." A black psychology professor Brooks hired as a consultant mocks his white liberal guilt, and quits the production staff to write a blistering account of the filming. Brooks dismisses it as a book sold to "those publishers who missed out on Watergate." It gets worse from there for everyone involved.

Checking the credits, should I have been surprised to see Harry Shearer as co-writer? No. Perhaps the best bits have to do with the Ettinauer 2-26XL, the "most versatile camera ever made," and the sight gags, with Shearer as cameraman, are priceless. Who could possibly live a real life with this following them around?

One doesn't have to be familiar with An American Family to get this movie, but the fact is Real Life exists as a comment on a very specific event. It doesn't come close, or even necessarily desire to, the blistering attack on television that is Network (1976), still probably the best go-to film when talking about the predictive abilities of the medium. This early mockumentary, seen today, plays a little too gently to be of classic status. Some of the one-liners Brooks get off are sub-Woody Allen, but his rant near the end of the film, as he struggles to salvage the ending of this work (should he end it like Star Wars? Maybe like Jaws!), is spot-on. And its glimpse into the future of television is uncanny. Anyone interested in Brooks, the evolution of mockumentaries, or a nice glimpse into middle-class '70s life, would do well to check out Real Life .

TV is good for you: Friday Night Lights

When I tell people that I positively love Friday Night Lights and that they should check it out for themselves, I always get the same answer: “Oh, it’s about sports. Enh.” Which is driving me crazy. It's about sports, yes, kinda, but in the same way that The Sopranos is about the mob or The Office is about about a paper company. Football is simply a backdrop upon which the show acts out its dramatic arc.

But in fairness, I guess I can understand that indifferent reaction, because on first glance the show does indeed seem to be about not only sports, but also about teenagers, and religion, and takes place in a small rural Texas town. I can see why my urbane and sophisticated acquaintances of the demimonde would shun such programming.

But why didn’t just plain folks dig on the show? Why are they avoiding it in droves? Americans loves sports, they positively ooze Christianity, most of them are teenagers and the flyover states are made up solely of small towns--all things that I myself avoid as much as I can--so why won’t people watch? Is it because the show combines all those elements, transcends the clichés, and then turns it all into something special and rare and satisfying? FNL deals with each subject reverently, seriously and with true artistry. Maybe that’s confusing to people. Americans apparently only wants to watch TV shows about CSI agents, superheroes, castaways, grumpy doctors, or Zach Braff's hair.

But enough about what Americans want. What I want is for people to watch Friday Night Lights (and, oh, the coincidences, they do occur—the DVD of the show’s first season has arrived! And for a piddly $20!) The show is so many things I’m not interested in in real life, and yet it soars, and I have to follow.

Set in the fictional Texas town of Dillon, the series begins with the arrival of the new high school football coach, Eric Taylor, (Kyle Chandler, once Grey’s Anatomy’s doomed bomb squad technician, and seen in Jackson’s King Kong doing a hilarious Ronald Reagan impersonation) and all eyes are on him to take the Dillon Panthers to the state championship. He brings with him his wife Tami (Connie Britton, reprising her role from the 2004 film) and 15-year-old daughter Julie, who isn't quite impressed with her father's newly "heroic" status in the town.

The show gets the difficult things right without being sentimental or obvious: the pressure Coach Taylor feels to live up to his position as a sort of holy man to the small town; the give and take of a marriage in which both partners are committed to one another yet also ambitious in their own careers; the drama of high school life, with its minor events that seem to those involved of epic importance; the easy and unostentatious way the players pray before games; and tensions in race relations that are still never far from people’s minds even in the “new” South.

(from left: Saracen, Riggins, Smash)

The characters besides the Taylors are filled in well in the first episode, especially the football players themselves: the "dream couple" of team captain and star quarterback Jason Street (whose polite, deferential manner to the town's female mayor prompts her to advise him, "Listen to early Black Sabbath; it'll make you mean") and head cheerleader Lila Garrity; the awkward, insecure backup QB Matt Saracen (easily my favorite character, played by Zach Gilford), mostly waiting out games on the sidelines, taking care of his ailing grandmother while his father is in Iraq, or hanging out with his dorky friend Landry, who himself wants to start a Christian speed metal band; the driven and charmingly egotistical "Smash," who gives himself his own nickname and dreams of one day endorsing both Pepsi and Coke; the troubled--and quite often drunk--Tim Riggins, who has a volatile relationships with Smash, his older brother, and his girlfriend, the cynical, scheming Tyra who loves to dismiss Dillon's obsession with football... and a good handful of folks more. The pilot episode deftly weaves the fabric of the characters' lives and the town's livelihood together.

This is helped by the hand-held cinéma vérité camera work, which enables the show to achieve a verisimilitude rare for television (some people, I guess still nauseated from Blair Witch Project, find this irritating; the show's only one-star review on Amazon blames this sole aspect for the show's lack of success. Feh). The actors don’t use standard marks for positioning as the camera roams around—actually, struggles to keep up—to give their performances an effect more natural and spontaneous; actors’ rehearsals are kept to a minimum, and what we get is as realistic a portrait of regular people’s lives as we’ve seen on TV. Witness the encroaching dementia of Matt Saracen’s grandmother, or the fights between the Taylors when their daughter Julie tries to assert her individuality by dating Saracen; the bipolar breakdown of Smash’s new girlfriend and his attempt to console her; Riggins’s confrontation with his errant father; Landry’s dogged pursuit of the just-out-his-league Tyra; used-car salesman Buddy Garrity’s constant meddling with the Coach’s decisions about the Panthers (obviously because he has no sons old enough to be on the football team; his daughter is Lila, the head cheerleader).

Well, of course, I don't want to give away any spoilers for those of you about to watch it on DVD, or even on the NBC website--which for some reason removed the credits, so you don't get the very good opening music by W.G. Snuffy Smith. Check it out in this clip, and listen to the understated, elegiacal, yet somehow still defiant and hopeful score that truly captures the show's spirit:

Fortunately FNL avoided cancellation after a season of lackluster ratings and is set for its second season, beginning October 5. But it’s being moved to the prime-time wasteland that is Friday night at 9:00 p.m.—hey, don’t high schools have football games on Friday nights? Did the execs at NBC think people were confused that a show with “Friday night” in its title was shown on Tuesday night? Hm. Questions worth asking. But not here. Good luck, Friday Night Lights. See you soon.

And look! Cheerleaders! Well, one, anyway.