Heigl stars in lacking ‘Firefly Lane’
Netflix’s new melodrama “Firefly Lane” is ridiculous. And it doesn’t waste much time getting there. It opens with TV talk show host Tully Hart (Katherine Heigl) flashing back to an anguished moment from her early 1970s adolescence, when her stoner/hippie mom returned to take her from the relative safety of her grandma’s house to ride in a smoke-filled VW microbus to an antiwar rally, where she’s quickly lost and abandoned.
This is just one of many dizzying flashbacks that explain the lifelong friendship between Tully and Kate (Sarah Chalke). They meet a few years after the protest, when Tully’s mom, a complete burnout, arrives in a farm community where Kate, an unpopular adolescent nerd, lives next door. The series takes the women from their teens to their 40s using the crutch of pop songs, fashions and period gadgetry in all of the worst ways.
The plot, thin at best, unfolds in fits and starts, riding the Mobius strip of continual flashback and flash-forward. Tully, cool in high school, rises quickly up the journalistic ladder, but loses confidence and self-respect after settling into hosting an afternoon talk show dispensing dumbed-down New Age pablum for a bored and gullible audience.
Kate trails after her, seemingly more personally fulfilled, but weighed down professionally by the responsibilities of single-motherhood. For reasons unexplained, Kate may go from electric typewriters to a Blackberry (apparently the present day is 2003), but never abandons the oversized glasses of her youth.
The dialogue here is laugh-out-loud ludicrous, and the soap operatics are as subtle as a sledgehammer. When Kate spies a handsome editor, Heart’s “Magic Man” starts blasting on somebody’s radio. Tully careens from meaningless sex to too many Chardonnays and meaningful glances over the ledge of her penthouse’s garden to the streets below. As Peggy Lee might sing, in a smarter show than this, “Is That All There Is?”
Like a lot of terrible shows, “Firefly Lane” is just short of becoming dreadful enough to enjoy. Add it to the jumble of Netflix
offerings (“Emily in Paris,” “Bridgerton”) that dare viewers to binge away as if attacking a tube of Dollar Store junk food. It’s bad and bad for you, but sometimes you just can’t help yourself.
› A peculiar NFL season concludes with a Super Bowl without Clydesdales. Apparently, Budweiser, all but synonymous with this festival of consumerism, has decided to sit this year out. But there’s no stopping Boomer Esiason and Daniela Ruah from hosting “Super Bowl Greatest Commercials 2021” (8 p.m., CBS).
While still television’s biggest annual event, this advertising fest seems increasingly anachronistic on a medium dominated by platforms like Netflix, where consumers have fled to avoid commercials entirely.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS
› Halstead’s trial goes well on “Chicago Med” (8 p.m., NBC, TV-14).
› Uma Thurman narrates “Pumas: Legends of the Ice Mountains” on “Nature” (8 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings).
› Trapped in a freight elevator on “Chicago Fire” (9 p.m., NBC, TV-14).
› Hondo sticks up for his foster brother on “S.W.A.T.” (10 p.m., CBS, repeat, TV-14).