Sunday may be the last NFL game any of us sees for a while due to a likely lockout next season. In a nutshell, the NFL Players Association (which may be the weakest union in the history of unions) wants to maintain the status quo (in which their players have awful benefits and literally kill themselves on the field every week for money a Major League Baseball player would laugh at), but the owners and the league want to screw over the players even more. On the other hand, the NFL wants to add two games to the NFL season, so I'm conflicted, which is probably how some Romans felt about the gladiators.

Even if the NFL is back next season, we're still facing a long time without football. So you should watch Friday Night Lights. Get season 1 on DVD and go to town.

Scratch that. You don't need to like football to watch Friday Night Lights. In fact, even if you couldn't care less about sports, you should watch Friday Night Lights. This is because Friday Night Lights has quietly been one of the best shows on television the past five years. The show is currently in its fifth and final season, and while it'll be sad to see it go, few series have had a more consistently great run. No show portrays family dynamics or life in a mid-sized Texas town as well. Actually, I don't know about the last part, because I've never lived in a mid-sized Texas town. I visited Waco once, and I left amazed at how little there was to do.

Fact: I've converted more people to Friday Night Lights than I have to Jesus. Which is embarrassing since I grew up evangelical. Why do people listen when I tell them about FNL, but not when I tell them Christ died for their salvation?

At this point, I think we might all be legally required to have Bieber fever.

How did patrons at BK Carne Asada and Hot Dogs react when an actor posing as a security guard racially profiled another group of actors posing as a Hispanic family? Let’s roll the tape and find out!

"Are you flipping kidding me?" yells Rebecca Russ, a restaurant patron who gets in the guard's face. "You want to ask them if they belong here? Do you belong here?"

"Don't you guys want to know if they have ID?" the security guard asks.

"It's nobody's [expletive] business, get out!" yells Russ. "Oh my God, I want to punch him! ... They have a daughter!"

Not that my opinion matters, but this rocks. And Rebecca Russ, you rock too. The show came about because producers wondered how Arizona citizens would have reacted to SB 1070 if it had been enacted last year. To be fair, South 12th Avenue is probably one of the worst best places in town to try such a stunt, but it’ll make for a pretty good show.

The show airs tomorrow. There’s more information here.

The Zona Zoo concept is all well and good, but is there a fan wearing Disney merchandise to distract opposing free throw shooters? Not that I recall.

This seems like the sort of thing that neither the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor or Glenn Beck would be thrilled with, but thanks to whoever thought of blending the two together via YouTube Doubler.

Click through and take it all in. "The entire Mediterranean is on fire", indeed.

[HT: GQ]

I'm no marketing expert, but somehow I doubt mainstream America are going to be too excited to see a baby (even a "test" one) smashed against glass.

Mediapost Marketing Daily:

HomeAway.com's upcoming Super Bowl commercial and marketing campaign includes a "test baby," which accidentally launches in the air and smashes against a glass wall in a tiny hotel room.

The campaign, developed by Austin, Texas-based ad agency Vendor Inc., kicks off Super Bowl Sunday with the debut of new 30-second spot that challenges travelers to ask themselves: "Why hotel when you can HomeAway?" It airs during the third quarter of the Fox broadcast of Super Bowl XLV on Feb. 6, as reported in Marketing Daily on Nov. 16.

This year's creative takes a different tack than the company's 2010 Super Bowl spot, "Hotel Hell Vacation," which reunited Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo in their roles as Clark and Ellen Griswold from the 1980s comedy "National Lampoon's Vacation."

The 2011 spot stars the fictional "Minister of Detourism" in a top-secret government testing facility where he highlights the pitfalls of cramped hotel rooms and showcases the benefits of vacation rentals: Privacy, space and freedom. A family is seen in a "hotel room simulator," where they suffer from "limited space syndrome" and struggle to get comfortable in the cramped quarters. Then, in a chain reaction, a "test baby" is accidentally launched into the air and ultimately crashes against the glass of the hotel room simulator before sliding slowly to the floor.

[...]

However, HomeAway says it used the test baby scene to create a "Super Bowl-worthy" moment that breaks through the clutter of so many ads, says Brian Sharples, chief executive officer of HomeAway, in a release.
"While everyone loves babies and wouldn't want to see a real infant get mistakenly flung into the air, we hope viewers will get a good laugh from our test baby's unfortunate flight," Sharples says. "The comic situation is used to highlight the fact that families, particularly those with children, could use a little extra space when traveling."

Brilliant, HomeAway. Just brilliant.

• Photo by burningkarma, Flickr

But I'm not entirely sure why it's widely regarded as the greatest sitcom ever right now. It's mockumentary style is a decade after that format's prime. It wraps each episode in a Full House-style watered-down lesson. It blatantly panders to base male instincts through all of its female characters except Alex, sort of like I did by including a picture of Gloria at the top of this post. Plus, Modern Family is commonly compared to Arrested Development, which makes no sense. The whole point of Arrested Development was that no one learned any lessons. Ever.

While all of these aspects of Modern Family bug me, I also recognize they're what makes the show so popular. There's something for everyone. There's the gruff, stubborn patriarch. The goofy, tech-obsessed dad. The non-threatening, asexual gay couple. The Asian baby. The charmingly violent Latina sex symbol. The bratty adolescent sex symbol. The type-A, housewife sex symbol. Manny. The dumb kid who you just know is going to be a rehab mainstay 12 years from now. The only demographic not covered is African-Americans. It is to Modern Family's creators' and writers' credit the show is so widely appealing and hilarious, because that is no simple feat. 15 years ago, I doubt anyone would've predicted the third most popular show among Republicans would prominently feature a gay couple raising a baby together. It's impossible not to like, and as I said at the top of this column, I like it a great deal.

Modern Family is not the best sitcom on TV, though. That's my point. I'll get to what is in a minute, right after I talk about other stuff you should watch this week.

While it's not really in my nature to be happy when other people are successful, Dan Savage's column appears in our paper and he also the editorial director of Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger, so he gets an exception to my grumpiness for the news that he might get a show on MTV.

From Entertainment Weekly:

MTV has ordered a pilot that follows Savage as he tours college campuses giving his brand of brutally honest (and sometimes graphic) sex and relationship advice. In the format, Savage takes questions from an auditorium audience (similar to his recently completed college tour).

Lawrence O'Donnell takes Keith's place and the somewhat insufferable Ed Schultz takes O'Donnell's slot. According to the NY Times, Olbermann "came to an agreement with NBC’s corporate management late this week to settle his contract and step down."

UPDATE from Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast: "A knowledgeable official said the move had nothing to do with Comcast taking control of NBC next week, although the cable giant was informed when it received final federal approval for the purchase that Olbermann would be leaving the cable channel. This official described the dramatic divorce—Olbermann was about halfway through a four-year, $30 million contract—as mutual."

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Those kids are really psyched for these Spongebob Happy Meal toys.

Related, but poorly recorded: