Clear eyes, full hearts, time to lose Street and Smash

Not a lot of news out of press tour day one, it sounds like, other than Chandra Wilson trying to defend Katherine Heigl's Emmy non-submission soundbyte, so instead I'll point you to a couple of non tour-related things:

• Michael Ausiello, now at EW, reports that the abbreviated Direct TV/NBC third season of "Friday Night Lights" will write out both Jason Street and Smash Williams, which is no doubt a budget thing but also a case of the writers not knowing how to deal with two characters who wouldn't be on the football team, in high school or, in the case of Smash, even living in Dillon when next season begins. (Again, Jason Katims is going to try to keep the show in real time. On the one hand, that gives them some distance from various season two storylines that weren't working. On the other, I once again feel like they're missing the opportunity to mine a lot of story from the rest of that football season and then what happens once the season ends.) I love both these characters, and think both Gaius Charles and (especially) Scott Porter have done outstanding work, but I can understand the rationale from moving on once they've each gotten a proper send-off.
• I'm going to have a big feature on "Generation Kill" on Sunday, the morning that the HBO Iraq war miniseries (produced by "The Wire" team of Ed Burns and David Simon) debuts. One of the things I discuss there, and that I'm going to discuss in my blog review of the first episode, is that the show suffers from the "Band of Brothers"/"Black Hawk Down" problem: lots of unfamiliar faces, most of them young and white, in identical uniforms, and an unfamiliar but elaborate command structure. At one point in watching the first episode, I wrote in my notes "I HAVE NO IDEA WHO ANYONE IS" -- and I had read Evan Wright's book the year before. Simon doesn't believe in holding the audience's hand, but I would strongly recommend checking out all the PDF files that HBO made available to the press explaining who's who, what the command hierarchy is, what all those anagrams mean, etc. The files may or may not wind up at the show's official site at HBO.com, but in the meantime, Mo Ryan has uploaded all of them to her site. I would say it would greatly enhance your viewing of the miniseries -- the first episode in particular -- if you had a computer handy so you could keep those reference guides handy.