zkonedog

The 1990s Dallas Cowboys were an enormously entertaining bunch-as talented as they were mercurial with personalities like Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith, Michael Irvin, Deion Sanders, & Jimmy Johnson. When this documentary focuses on those players and squads, it really cooks. Even if slightly before my "football time" in terms of the early-to-mid 90s events playing out, it was fun/nostalgic to relive those events and learn the behind-the-scenes foibles of it all. The rise from "worst team in football" in the late-1980s to "team of the 90s" was fascinating, as was the Johnson-to-Barry-Switzer coaching handoff. As a history lesson of the 1990s Cowboys, America's Team is utterly engrossing.

Then there is the Jerry Jones material. The doc is ostensibly focused on him (he appears in every episode), but it doesn't necessarily lean into that angle every ep. I'm glad of this, as the Jones-focused episodes were the ones I gave 8/10 stars instead of 9 or 10. Those episodes aren't bad, but they represent a sympathetic platform for Jerry that ultimately is not warranted or realized. Much like, say, the Vince McMahon documentary, here Jones tries to "set the record straight" on many of the narratives surrounding him-but fascinatingly does just about the opposite. A man who-for better or worse-truly will not be swayed by outside opinion. I came away from America's Team with the exact same opinion of Jones that I had going in-a Texas gambler who hit it big with the Cowboys franchise purpose and, while marketing the team into the stratosphere (to his enormous credit), always proves meddlesome as the only Owner/GM in the NFL.

So, my thoughts on America's Team are extraordinarily clear: The Jerry Jones-focused episodes aren't bad, but they'll have you rolling your eyes on numerous occasions. Meanwhile, the meat of the 1990s Cowboys history/nostalgia tour from directors Chapman Way & Maclain Way is tremendous-enough so that I can pretty easily give the overall experience a really solid 9/10 stars.

Summing up 10 seasons of Smallville with a star rating and a brief review is a difficult task considering its breadth of material. It's especially tough when the show has meant different things to me at different times in my life. While watching the early seasons live (or close to live), I considered it a masterpiece. Upon a decades-later rewatch: the warts (especially how the characters are utilized) are more apparent.

I think a brief narrative approach is best here:

The first four Smallville seasons constitute the show's "Clark Kent (Tom Welling) in high school" initial vision/premise. There is a lot of good material here, even considering the requisite amount of 23-episodes-per-season filler installments. This is where Clark pines for Lana Lang (Kristin Kreuk), forges an interesting bond with Lex Luther (Michael Rosenbaum), and is taught valuable life lessons by parents Jonathan (John Schneider) and Martha (Annette O'Toole) Kent. By the end of that fourth season, the air was starting to leak out of the balloon a bit.

Somewhat amazingly (perhaps freed from stories needing to take place in high school halls), the fifth season is the series' signature effort. It is the one--and only--Smallville season that perfectly combines excellent plotting with sensible character arcs. Two of the series' finest episodes--Lexmas and 100th ep Reckoning--occur in S5.

Alas, the post-high school magic can't last forever and the show muddles along in seasons 6/7--becoming soap opera-ish and wheel-spinning as the original creators (Al Gough & Miles Millar) struggle to heed their "no tights, no flights" initial creed and vision.

After S7, Gough & Millar turn the series over to various executive producers and some casting changes shake up the character mix. Much like S5, this enlivens the proceedings for a time (more "Lois (Erica Durance) & Clark 2.0"), with S8 a step up from S 6/7. But again, such improvement does not hold: S9 is a march-in-place mess, while the final S10 makes too many questionable character flip-flops to be considered anything but mediocre.

Overall, the hallmark of Smallville all the way through is that it contains moments/pockets of genuine emotion and character depth--especially if you are a fan of the Donner/Reeve Superman canon (of which Smallville is clearly ensconced). A couple of my all-time favorite television episodes occur within the series and for the times in which it aired (2001-2011) it fit nicely into the TV landscape.

The biggest downfall of Smallville: Pretty much all the way through (though especially in the last couple of campaigns) it operated on the philosophy of molding character motivations to fit the plot-of-the-week. A very "90s/early-00s" TV approach. This allowed the series to run for quite some time--but also almost guaranteed that sharp-eyed, loyal viewers would grow tired of characters behaving wildly different week to week just to suit that particular 42-minute plot. While perhaps not as strict as, say, Seinfeld's "no hugging no learning" week-to-week policy, a lot of that old-school TV DNA is baked into the series.

I ultimately settled on a 7/10 ranking for Smallville-as-a-whole. The first 5 seasons utterly floored me as an adolescent, and that has to count for something. But its filler-heavy, somewhat character-agnostic approach to storytelling doesn't necessarily age all that well 20-some years down the road (especially in later seasons where episode quality can vary wildly week to week). I will indeed "always hold on to Smallville", as it were, in an emotional sense, but objectively it is more "solid" overall than "spectacular".