I imagine most people who are excited about Kyle Chandler's casting in J.J. Abrams' new project with Steven Spielberg are excited because they love Friday Night Lights. Me? I'm excited that he's getting back in to science fiction.
I think I've alluded a couple of times to my love for Ian Abrams' Early Edition, but it really was a tremendously formative show for me, the first television program I watched with any kind of regularity. The premise was outrageously stupid: what entity decides that the best way to prevent tragedies from happening is to deliver the Chicago Sun-Times a day early to a depressed divorced stockbroker who must decide on his own whether or not to prevent the day's worst headlines from taking place? And did I forget to mention that a tabby cat and a magic pocket knife are involved? Really, it's kind of embarrassing to think about now.
But Chandler was just ridiculously charming in the role, a real grownup without any super powers who suffers real consequences for his obsession. His personal life suffers (the redheaded reporter who got away certainly influence my repeated home dye jobs in college, if not my choice of careers), he fails sometimes, he's alienated, he doesn't have any superpowers. I also like that he ends up running a bar instead of being a stockbroker. The show was a fairly subtle bit of sci-fi, but I think that's a good thing, at least for this project. Chandler had to do a lot of excusing his odd circumstances in a normal world, and I think that experience will serve him well, especially if Abrams and Spielberg choose to situate something unusual in a familiar universe rather than creating an entirely new one.
The show's a real throwback. It's probably the last television show that will have home newspaper delivery as a prominent plot point, unless it's a period piece. The series had a wacky-friend dynamic that I think Joss Whedon kind of obliterated for good television by bringing out the depth behind the wackiness on his shows, and it also had a welcome attention to both racial and ability-based diversity. I don't know that anything like it will be made again, and I'm not sure that anything like it should be made again. But I do feel rather warmly towards it.