“Friday Night Lights,” the endearing, poignant, beautifully acted and creatively filmed drama on NBC, has its season finale Wednesday at 8 p.m. Wednesday on KUSA-Channel 9.
The best show you’re not watching – honestly, it’s not really about football – just keeps getting better.
The high school relationships are heartbreakingly realistic, the adult conflicts and aspirations are equally well defined, and now, in case you haven’t heard, there’s the matter of the final game of the season.
The Panthers are going to State! OK, that part does involve football.
The championship unfolds in the finale, along with Coach Taylor’s decision about a job offer from Texas Methodist University.
There will be no official word until May on whether the series will be granted a second season. “Lights” is on the bubble. But NBC should be embarrassed not to decide in favor of this wonderfully textured hour.
The fact that “Lights” was honored with a prestigious Peabody Award last week can’t hurt. Has a network executive ever canceled a Peabody winner and lived to tell the tale?
If you’ve seen the promos talking about a baby for the Taylors (Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton portraying the most wonderfully loving couple on television), you may be nervous about where the show is headed. I’m keeping faith with the producers for now.
Clear eyes, full hearts, great scripts, can’t lose.
“Black Gold”
Put down that grande latte and listen up.
If you were to follow the beans that went into your designer cup of joe, trace the amount a multinational corporation paid the farmers and learn how coffee is the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil, you might feel differently .
“Black Gold,” on PBS’s “Independent Lens” tonight (at 10 p.m. on RMPBS KRMA-Channel 6), by filmmakers and brothers Marc and Nick Francis, is an eye-opening espresso jolt. (The movie had a brief theatrical run in Denver in December.)
The film follows Tadesse Meskela, a man on a mission to save 75,000 Ethiopian coffee farmers from bankruptcy, seeking buyers who will pay a fair price.
Globally, we drink more than 2 billion cups of coffee a day. Since 1990, retail sales from coffee have increased from $30 billion to $80 billion a year. Four multinationals dominate the market: Kraft, Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee.
These statistics are juxtaposed with baristas at Starbucks filling orders and taking cash as fast as they can work the steamer. The chairman of Illy Cafe talks about the aromas and flavors – chocolate, flowers, fruits, honey, toast – and the search for the perfect bean with as much pride and expertise as the best winemaker. It takes 50 perfect beans to make one good cup of coffee.
Meanwhile the farm workers in Ethiopia earn less than 50 cents a day.
After hearing from a chirpy manager at Starbucks in Seattle, attending a World Trade Organization summit, explaining the futures market and the middlemen involved in the coffee trade, and witnessing the anger of African trade representatives, we follow Meskela back to Ethiopia.
The country is in the midst of a famine. Coffee farmers facing bankruptcy have been forced to replant their fields with “chat,” khat, a profitable narcotic that is more profitable.
If Africa’s share of world trade in coffee increased by a single percentage point, it would generate $70 billion a year – five times what the continent receives in aid. It will take changes in every coffee drinker’s perception to alter the system. This sensitively made film is a first step in that re-education.
“Riches” marathon
FX will run a marathon of the first five hours of “The Riches,” airing Friday (4/13), from 9 p.m.-2 a.m., with limited commercials.
Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver are mesmerizing as Doug and Dahlia Malloy, a pair of Travelers , or itinerant con artists, who steal money from the clan’s bank, flee and assume the identity of a deceased couple, Douglas and Cherien Rich. They move into the Rich’s McMansion and set about stealing the American dream. The best scam is
Dahlia’s trick to get the kids admitted to a fancy private school. It’s dangerous faking a way of life, but the Riches’ new neighbors and colleagues seem equally bizarre in their own ways.
New episodes continue weekly through June 4.
TV critic Joanne Ostrow can be reached at 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com.
