A new Web series tells the real life stories of our home front heroes who have fought for our country and returned battered and broken in body but not in spirit.
Actress Connie Britton narrates the new web series Homefront Heroes, which puts faces to names and stories to statistics of America’s wounded warriors. The actress chatted with Tonic this week about how she got involved with the webisodes, each of which highlights a soldier’s journey of healing and strength. (Read More…)
1. Friday Night Lights
Friday Night Lights just started its final season and it will be a sad day when Eric Taylor coaches his last football game. For several years now Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton have been the best kept secret on television. They have also been surrounded by some of the best young actors Hollywood has to offer. Friday Night Lights is also like the little engine that could. Low ratings nearly killed the show during the very first season and yet it managed to live on for five seasons and got to choose its end date so they can end the show properly instead of being canceled abruptly and throwing together the last episode at the last minute.
9. “Friday Night Lights”: After losing nearly their entire original cast, most shows would be lucky to maintain even a fraction of its initial storytelling rhythm and overall audience goodwill. Good thing “Friday Night Lights” isn’t most shows. The small-town Texas football drama has gracefully handled the loss of several beloved characters while simultaneously introducing new characters, a new town and a new school. By now, it feels like they’ve been there all along. Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton continue to have the best marriage on TV and they provide the backbone to a show that has miraculously lasted five seasons. When the fifth and final season ends its run on DirecTV’s 101 Network, we will be sad to see it go.
6. Friday Night Lights — It’s easy to run out of superlatives when describing the Peabody and Humanitas Prize-winning Friday Night Lights, the coming-of-age drama about small-town high-school kids in Anytown, U.S.A. In its fourth season, Friday Night Lights took on the biggest bugaboo facing the U.S. culture wars today: abortion, a woman’s right to choose, and what happens when that woman is a scared teenager who knows, deep down, that she’s not ready to be a mother, no matter what her elders tell her. That season-long tension gave Connie Britton some of her most poignant scenes, as the recently promoted guidance counselor and high-school principal who, against her better judgment, tells the teen that, in the end, it’s her decision and hers alone. In the end, furious parents and town residents called Britton’s principal to account for her (in their eyes) immoral and borderline criminal advice, and she was left battered and emotionally bruised in the ensuing public melee. Who won the big game? For once, it didn’t matter.
Once upon a time, television women were bound by the societal expectations of what women were supposed to be: prim, proper, and most of all, domestic. Audiences had to turn to the big screen in order to see slight variations on that. This became the norm for years to come. Certainly, as societal boundaries placed on women began to dissolve, so did the boundaries on women’s roles on television.
And then, something wonderfully bizarre happened in the 2000’s. The best roles for women were being written on television, in large-part due to the rise of cable. (Read More…)
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