Critics love it, so it is perhaps no wonder that “Friday Night Lights,” the TV-show that was spwaned from a movie that was spawned from a book, is faltering, flailing and probably dying in the ratings. The viewers just aren’t there.

I can’t say I’m all that surprised. The problem with a football show is that its natural audience, guys who watch football, would rather watch football than a show about football. That makes scheduling alone a hassle: College football takes up all of Saturday, NFL all of Sunday, Monday nights are occupied by, yes, Monday Night Football, then college football returns on Thursday night and on Friday night there’s high school football all across America, and even more college football on TV. That leaves Tuesday and Wednesday. That is not a large window of opportunity.

However, network shows aren’t made for men but for women, which means “Friday Night Lights” the TV-show is heavy on relationships and what we can call issues - and there goes the guys who like watching football. Of course, many women hate football since football is the married woman’s main competitor when it comes to making claims on a husband’s time. What you end up with is a show that can’t appeal to its superficially natural audience and won’t appeal to its actual potential audience.

And then there’s the basic trap of any show or movie: The Hero who is similar to so many writers, only more athletic. Contra Costa Times‘ TV critic Chuck Barney gives the game away in a piece where he’s begging his readers to watch the fundamentally flawed show:

Exalted quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter), a young man with an arm forged by the gridiron gods, suffered a paralyzing injury in the season-opener. Now, longtime bench-warmer Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), a shy, bookish young man, is struggling in his stead.

Peyton Manning, Donovan McNabb, Ben Roethlisberger, Tom Brady… all shy, bookish men.

While the ratings for whichever evening news show Katie Couric hosts has dropped, the fall hasn’t been nearly as dramatic as the one the XFL experienced. So while the ill-fated league started out stronger, Ms. Couric has better legs. But we already knew that.

Katie Couric’s debut show with CBS News recorded a 9.1 Nielsen rating. By comparison, the XFL’s first game on NBC scored a 9.5 rating.

Just saying.

In today’s Washington Post, columnist Anne Appelbaum contrasts the pathetic lies of James Frey - whose fabricated “memoir” has become a major embarrassment for Oprah Winfrey, the high-priestess of self-obessed emoting - with the pathetic lies of Lillian Hellman who in 1973 published her supposed memoir Pentimento, in which the author cast herself as heroic anti-Nazi fighter.

Appelbaum’s compares Frey’s made-up lie of victimhood to other recent faux memoirs whose writers created tear-jerking stories of personal hardship:

These fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, “autobiographical” tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, whose touching, prize-winning “autobiographical” tale of a Ukrainian girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

And the trend continues: In the past few days, yet another prize-winning author, who calls himself “Nasdijj” and claims to be the son of a violent cowboy and an alcoholic Native American woman (and who, as a child was “hungry, raped, beaten, whipped and forced at every opportunity to work in the fields,” he told an interviewer) — has also been “outed” as a white writer of erotica named Timothy Barrus.

A parallel development is the absence of real-life military heroes in public life. Event though many have been minted in the our current wars overseas, none of them have been embraced much by the wider public, and certainly none of them has become a household name. They aren’t invited to latenight talk shows to discuss what they did and why, and they aren’t held up as role models.

To be more specific: Sales of these faux memoirs are driven by women. Why is it that women prefer lies about pretend bums over true stories about knights in (metaphorically speaking) shining armor?

“Sacha Baron Cohen aka Ali G was dunked in the sea by Pamela Anderson’s bodyguards - after rugby-tackling the actress at her dogs’ wedding.”

Ananova reports on the Malibu Massacre.