Friday Night Lights is a good show, and part of why it’s good is its commitment to a particular form of realism. Specifically, it seems like the show quite often ‘allows’ events to happen that don’t seem like they ordinarily would in this kind of American drama.

Thus, the experience of the show can often be that you’ll say, “Oh, man, it would be crazy if X happened.” And then X happens. It impresses me just how often the show acknowledges particular, generally ‘more complex’, interpretations of situations almost immediately on your thinking about it yourself. It has layers.

One of the most stark moments in the show comes in Season 2 when (avoiding spoilers) someone kills someone else, more or less by accident. It’s one of those TV violence moments I wish I saw more often – dire consequences coming from situations that simply get out of hand. In the heat of the moment, one character hits another with a pipe, and that guy dies. That’s one of those things that can happen in real life, and it’s shocking to have it happen to a character you know and like.

In some ways, some of the nature of the show weirdly reminds me of The Wire. I don’t think I’d claim it’s as good, or necessarily that close in quality, but it has some of that same lack of flinching when it comes to difficult dramatic moments.

Finished watching season one of The United States of Tara today. The dramatic ending was alright, as far as that kind of thing goes. Perhaps a little anticlimactic, if we’re being honest.

One thing about the season as a whole, though, was the portrayal of Tara’s family, and the changes it went through. In particular, at the beginning of the season, I felt quite refreshed by their representation as being genuinely happy together (if, of course, suffering through wacky times). This was especially true of the parents (Tara and Max), who came across as being genuinely in love and devoted to each other. And good parents.

As the season progressed, though, it all largely went to shit. Maybe that’s unsurprising – after all, it’s drama, right? – but I found myself mourning the loss of a happy/good family on TV. They kind of pulled it back a bit at the end of the season (again, predictable), but even that rediscovered closeness was, I felt, somewhat tainted by the bad juju that had gone before.

This seems to be a general feature of all those hardcore drama series (from HBO, Showtime, etc.) – a lack of happy families. Would it be too much to ask for a well-written, happy family, with the drama located elsewhere in the show? Or does drama, being the opposite of comedy, require misery in all its phases?

This is Kate McReary from Grand Theft Auto IV. When she got shot outside the church the character you control, Nico Bellic, got very upset. I did not.

This disjoint between me and the narrative is a basic issue with all the freedom provided by games like GTA IV. Importantly, during the game, I never had Nico act like he cared about Kate. He took her out on one date and then ignored all her phonecalls and wheedling. In terms of actions he couldn’t have cared less.

Unfortunately, the narrative must grind on, and the narrative in GTA IV involves Nico thinking Kate’s the one for him. This feels like a betrayal to me, in the sense that the actions that I took as Nico are basically being disqualified from the narrative of the game.

On the other hand, what are they supposed to do? If you want to have drama and so on, you need stuff like this, and you can’t rely on the player to play along with it.