It’s good to see our patron saint, Erin Andrews, back in some kind of sports context. However, she is still haunted by her Dancing with the Stars history.  Bring it back to the sidelines, EA.  Enough with the entertainment stuff.

Seriously.

In 2003 ESPN decided it was going to delve into drama.  If it were possible for unintentional humor to be intentional I would say that the channel produced something really funny and smutty—two qualities I wholeheartedly enjoy in a media text, and, let’s face it, in life.  PLAYMAKERS is a series about a professional football team—The Cougars—who hail from an unnamed city in America.  And the focus of the show can be summed up in one word: SCANDAL.  Drugs, violence, injuries swept under the rug, depression, anxiety, swindling, sex stuff, sexuality stuff, lawsuits, miscellaneous health issues, intimidation, gambling, rambling, and scrambling.

The only reason I watched this show was because I read that the NFL—the league on which the program is obviously based—got all pissy about the show’s scandal-laden portrayal of professional football and threatened  to scale back its relationship with ESPN if the channel did not cancel it.  Pretty easy decision for ESPN, right?  Should we continue this sort of dumb show or protect our relationship with America’s most profitable sport?  Clearly, we should continue to make PLAYMAKERS?  Do we have the talent to continue the singular drama of the first season?  No, who could?  So, rather than continue the program past its peak, ESPN did the right thing and cancelled it after one season.  It worked out for both sides: ESPN has the satisfaction of knowing that it puts creative integrity first while protecting its connection to the NFL. And the NFL doesn’t have to sweat this searing indictment of a fictional version of itself.  As a sidenote, I find it pretty funny that the NFL would take issue with a show like PLAYMAKERS.  No one really watched it to begin with.  Second, it is absurdly over-the-top.  It was such a soap opera that I made a bet with myself midway through the season that at some point one of the players was going to get amnesia from a concussion he suffered, or that a player’s evil twin was going to kill the player and try to take his identity and only his best friend on the team—with whom dead-twin-player-brother shared everything—would be able to tell something was amiss.

When I was in Spanish class throughout high school a common project would be to make videos where we spoke in Spanish.  Naturally, we would base these videos on the Telenovellas we often watched when our teacher didn’t want to work.  We even tried to make a bumble bee costume one time.  We took their most idiotic, unbelievable parts and reproduced them in even more idiotic and unbelievable ways.  My signature move in our videos was putting my face in the camera, placing my hands on my cheeks all HOME ALONE style, shaking my head, and saying “ay yiy yiy” in a high pitched voice.  As an excuse to video the girls on the gymnastic teams, we set one of our videos as gymnastics murder mystery.  A girl was thrown off of the high beam by a jealous teammate and we had to solve the case.  But the detectives (one of whom I played) didn’t catch the culprit in time and she plunged to her own death when she caught wind that we were about to get her.  The video ends with my character reacting to her death and the utter sadness of the whole situation: the jealousy, the pressures of being a student-athlete, the economics of desire.  Crouching over her corpse, I leaned into the camera, shook my cabeza and whispered, “Ay yiy yiy.”  This is pretty much how PLAYMAKERS depicts football.  The writers probably read something about cortisone shots in pro football and decided that opened the door for them to fill their fictional league full of heroin addicts.  I could recount a couple of juicy instances, but will instead just give a rundown of the main characters—who cover all the bases for the scandal-obsessed program.

DH, Riding the Dragon

1)      Demetrius Harris: young hot-shot running back.  This dude’s got the swagger.  He’s the new kid of the block, but he’s not gonna take shit off of anyone, especially Leon Taylor, the fading, class-act veteran who he been brought in to replace.  But there’s a big problem with DH, as he’s called: the dude loves to freebase crack.  He does it in the car, he does it in the bathroom, he does it in the stadium, he does it at his dealer’s place.  DH’s big issue is being able to separate himself from “the streets.”  He doesn’t trust the organization but his friends just want to play video games and get fucked up.  What’s a girl to do?  At one point in the show he gets sent to a secret rehab facility, which he escapes from.  My second favorite instance is when he connives a seemingly milk-toast teammate, Thad Guerwictz, to buy him drugs at halftime.  My first favorite DH instance is when he visits a kid who is sick in the hospital and, jonzin like a mother, steals the kid’s pain medication.  Another great nostalgia-trip with DH is that he is played by Omar Gooding, who was one of the semi-troubled kids in HANGING WITH MR. COOPER.

Leon (l) to DH: If you were my wife, I'd beat you up

2)      Leon Taylor: fading star.  Taylor’s sort of a tragic figure in this program.  He seems like a real stand-up guy.  He opens the season knowing that he is being fazed out and decides that he’s going to do everything he can do win back his job.  He even challenges DH to a 40-yard-dash in the first episode and loses.  Bummer.  He might be too eager to get his job back, though, because he starts juicing, only to quite shortly afterwards because he was feeling an lost sense of self.  The real kicker with Leon, though, happens when he gets into an argument with his wife about his wanting to go to a new team and her desire to stay in the fictional metropolis where the Cougars play.  She comes at him, he grabs her wrists, and pushes her off.  She ends up on the ground and a wife-beating scandal ensues.  I’m not defending Leon at all, but it seemed to me that the way they chose to depict his abuse was surprisingly understated.  He winds up having to deal with his apparently terrible anger problem, hold press conferences, and get smeared in general.  You would think, given the program’s penchant for hyperbole, that the show would have had him snap and tackle her or something.  Then he could have said something like “I can’t turn it off.  I play a violent sport and I’ve, I’ve, become a violent man.”

Olcyzk: Looks like a biker, feels like a kitty

3)      Eric Olcyzk: big linebacker.  This dude’s a sensitive flower.  At the beginning of the season he paralyzed a guy on another team.  He felt really bad about this and started having scary flashbacks on and off the field.  At one point he went to counseling and even started to take some meds for his issues—a real shot to his masculinity that he hid from his teammates.  Olcyzk is also Leon’s best pal and advocate.  He’s a quiet dude who listens while Leon goes on and on and on about how upset he is with the team’s brass.  The most interesting thing about Olcyzk is that he has some serious daddy issues.  His dad was his high school coach.  One time during two-a-days his dad made the team practice super hard without water breaks ala Bear Bryant.  Well Olcyzk’s brother was on the team and wound up dropping dead during practice—seriously.  Consequently, Olcyzk doesn’t like Daddy Olczyk very much.  But he is willing to forgive.  Unfortunately, his dad is hard-headed and doesn’t like to talk about his feelings.  So it seems like Olcyzk’s therapist could double up on some family counseling in addition to the post-traumatic stress stuff he’s treating him for.  But really, folks, it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure out that both issues are intertwined.  Sure, Olcyzk paralyzed that guy.  But it’s really his emotions that are in paralysis—he resents himself because he fears he will become his father.  Like, obviously.  So now that Olcyzk is healed I can move on to the next patient.

Coaching, it's killing me

4)      Coach George.  Coach is a pretty standard, distant-father type of guy.  He separates himself from the players just so much so that he can make judicious roster decisions.  He fittingly resents the team’s owner, who forces coach to make unpopular decisions and only cares about the bottom line.  Seems pretty typical, right?  Well, guess what?  Coach is dying.  Dude has cancer.  Macho man that he is, he doesn’t tell anyone and just keeps working, even though he gets weaker and weaker as the season moves forward.  He eventually reveals his illness and the team uses it as motivation in one way or another.

SEXPILLSSEXPILLSSEXPILL

5)      Derek McConnell, the stud, good-looking quarterback.  The guy has movie-star looks and is a decent QB.  But he pops more pills than Doctor Mario and he’s a low-down sex addict.  Refusing to end his season because of an injury, McConnell just gulps down pills and takes shots one after another until he’s able to play.  He also fucks a different woman each night—including the owner’s college-age daughter at one point.  He has one of the team assistants find a cute lady and take her down to the locker room at halftime. He then sets up a date for later that night, wherein he bones her.  While you would think that this behavior is really a mask for some personal issues he needs to work out, he just seems to be a wildman who loves sex. He shows no self-reflexivity or even thoughtfulness about his ways.  I kind of like this aspect of the program, though, because so much of the other stuff is so annoying in its moralism.  Sure, it implicitly casts judgment upon him.  But for the most part McConnell is an amoral breath of fresh air.  If they made pills for sex, this guy would be in hog-heaven. Wait a second…

We're all really just looking for love

6)      Thad Guerwictz.  So we’ve covered most scandals. But we haven’t had a gay player.  Until, Thad (and I love that his name is Thad).  Guerwictz seems pretty straight-laced (no pun intended) and the guys like to tease him for being a goodie-two-shoes.  He never womanizes and is polite.  Obviously, he’s gay, right?  But Thad is pretty tortured by having to lead a double-life.  When players start to get suspicious he starts dating a woman he doesn’t even dig.  He also breaks up with his beau because of these pressures.  Bad move, though.  His ex-boyfriend gets pissed and starts hinting that he’s gay when Thad is hanging with teammates at a club.  Thad then punches his face in to say that he doesn’t like gay dudes.  His teammates are a little shocked, but pleased for the most part with his hate crime.  But then the boyfriend comes to one of the Cougars’ practices and announces, very loudly, that he and Thad are/were boning.  Thad is ostracized by the team and gets rather bummed.  His teammates even start beating on him in practice.  But Thad decides he will not go down easy and starts working at a RUDY pace to show his teammates that he’s tough as shit.  Then, in a dramatic locker room moment he says “yo, I’m gay, but I’m a football player and man and a tiger” and blah blah.  While the more staunchly bigoted Cougars still refuse to talk with him, most of the others accept him back into the fold and learn to open their minds.  But the kicker is toward the end of the season when the coach announces that the team has only one person going to the Pro Bowl.  Guess who?  Yep, it’s Thad.  Groundbreaking.

So PLAYMAKERS is a pretty good watch in certain ways.  If you like football, camp, and overwrought drama, it’s for you.  If you are interested in the NFL’s paranoid approach to controlling its image, it’s for you.  If you want to learn about one of ESPN’s least respectable moments, it’s form you.  If you want to watch something that is not totally obvious and at times insanely idiotic, it’s NOT for you.

But, I will save the best for last.  My absolute favorite part of PLAYMAKERS is its use of 2^nd person internal monologues.  The main characters—particularly Eric and Leon—have these great monologues where they say things like “You tell yourself, it’s a game and the violence happens.  But what happens when the violence of the field finds its way into the home.”

Truth, Drama, PLAYMAKERS

certified

Yo guess what? Strasburg has to get Tommy John surgery! While it in no way, esp. w/ today’s technologies, means his career is over, I would like to remind everyone of my previous post.

I’m just sayin’.

-noun

1.  imagination, esp. of wondrous things.

2.  a kind of writing that often features supernatural or magical creatures or happenings.

3.  a hallucination.

4.  a kind of music.

5.  a form of football gaming that takes over one’s life, rendering him useless in other pursuits for 5 + months; often accompanied by a preceding 3 month planning period wherein one experiences massive amounts of anxiety and self-loathing.

-verb

1.  to waste one’s life on a relatively empty pursuit.

I suck

Sad for the girlfriend that he possibly domestically assaulted. Sad that she was dating him. Happy to go all schadenfreude on Mariotti.

Also, I think this guy is trying to be funny: