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"  The otherwise forgettable hit film The Blind Side has exactly two things going for it: Sandra Bullock&amp;#039;s Golden Globe-nominated performance as a football-obsessed Tennessean, and a staggering first scene in which said Tennessean breaks down the importance of the sport&amp;#039;s left tackle position. Her case study is Lawrence Taylor&amp;#039;s infamous folding-in-half of Joe Theismann&amp;#039;s right leg, which ended Theismann&amp;#039;s night and, as most every gridiron burnout&amp;#039;s fate as a hammy television commentator would have it, his career. What makes the sequence extraordinary isn&amp;#039;t Bullock&amp;#039;s dead-on Southern accent or the unfailingly gruesome shots of the Squirmin&amp;#039; German blown up on the big screen. No, this kind of twenty-five-year-old Monday Night Football footage shown in different angles and revisited in the context of a major, Oscar-hunting mainstream film illustrates the power of NFL games to captivate the imagination, the intellect, and the gut all at once. You don&amp;#039;t have to be a devotee of Sunday couchdom or NFL Films or even know what&amp;#039;s coming, which is precisely the point of the sequence: Football&amp;#039;s drama transcends fandom, allegiance, comprehension. The Hit Heard &amp;#039;Round the World represents its own scene; gather a collection of such scenes in one game, and you&amp;#039;ve got some of the best emotion on television: stories that even Hollywood especially Hollywood has to borrow to prop up blockbuster appeal.  And this time of year especially this year, when TV&amp;#039;s most arresting moments arrive in the form of e-mails from Conan O&amp;#039;Brien and, sadly, footage from Haiti pro football is unquestionably the reigning drama on television. In one place you&amp;#039;ve got epic conflict, plot, and action, along with the most complex heroes and villains this side of Mad Men. This all unfolds live. With cameras everywhere. Whether it&amp;#039;s the Patriots dynasty dissolving once and for all, or Chad Ochocinco crying on a teammate&amp;#039;s shoulder as the Bengals headed toward a loss, or any of the myriad other events that occurred last weekend, our investments in playoff characters and their predicaments can yield a week&amp;#039;s worth of contemplation and debate among even casual fans. Which is more than you can say for 24. So forget Lost, and kiss Cowell goodbye. Ignore McGwire, and don&amp;#039;t even bother getting excited for next month&amp;#039;s Costasathon. Because right now, and for the next four weeks of our lives, Brett Favre is Jack Bauer 24/7. It&amp;#039;s funny, because I know a lot of movie and TV snobs who refuse to watch football on what might be best described as conceptual grounds. They say it&amp;#039;s either too slow, too long, too macho, or it doesn&amp;#039;t make any sense... I&amp;#039;ve heard it all. Occasionally they&amp;#039;re right especially in the postseason, when games like Saturday&amp;#039;s Cowboys-Eagles matchup dragged on for maximum commercial revenue, and the testosterone soared with the stakes. (Helllllo, Donovan!) McNabb probably should leave the fan-taunting to games where he actually comes to play. Yet last weekend&amp;#039;s classic between the Packers and the Cardinals offered a textbook example of how untenable such arguments can be. Not just because the Cardinals&amp;#039; overtime victory was the highest-scoring postseason affair in NFL history, either, but because of the story it told. Think the final battle in Avatar, with helmets instead of blue skin and walking robots. Well, maybe some robots.  Before any coins were flipped or kickoffs kicked, concussion-prone Kurt Warner was widely speculated to be headed toward retirement. Green Bay&amp;#039;s thriving quarterback, meanwhile, sought to head off Favre&amp;#039;s shadow. Fox included both men in a pregame segment that could have been lifted from the title sequence of any hit prime-time show, or even the playbook of its own American Idol: each in action, then freeze-framed, their names emblazoned below. Sure, it&amp;#039;s hype-y, but in a good way: This is how dramatic ensembles are introduced, to familiarize ordinary viewers with ordinary men walking into hyperrealistic situations. They&amp;#039;re characters, and they&amp;#039;re established and persist as such.  When it comes to the play-by-play, each NFL playoff game is no more confusing than your average episode of Lost. Newcomers can pick it up in four quarters; the wild Packers-Cardinals tilt would have been an opportune lesson. Even for anyone who&amp;#039;s been watching the NFC West more than the rest of us, it&amp;#039;s perhaps most useful to consider how the stop-start play style wields the rhythmic pulse of dialogue, as though the plays themselves are carefully constructed lines to which the viewer is expected to deliver the response. On TV that duty goes to broadcasters (more on them in a minute), but at home, the succession of slow-mo, close-up, and sideline shots solicits a personal engagement with multiple characters at once. Thus engaged, the action opens itself up; the on-side kick retrieved by the Packers at a critical fourth-quarter juncture is neither impenetrable strategy nor raw power, but rather a sort of finessed whisper you want to lean in closer to hear again and again and probably did on SportsCenter, albeit with the volume ratcheted up to high Schwami hell.  Speaking of which, the pregame shows have their own transfixing procedural qualities to them, featuring said burnouts parsing the intricacies of important plays. The purpose is the exact same as that of Law &amp;amp;amp; Order, Cold Case, and various other prime-time whodunits: to communicate with clarity, intrigue, and elegance how one team plotted a deadly attack against another. Say what you will about Tony Dungy on NBC he&amp;#039;s about as telegenic as a bunion but I could sit all night and watch him break down plays like the &amp;quot;power O&amp;quot; that the Jets used against the Bengals in the final game of the regular season. Under Dungy&amp;#039;s microscope not unlike those of the lab rats in the perennial CBS detective series NCIS the scoring play is broken down to a savvy, perfectly executed offensive calculation. In doing so, Dungy not only demonstrates the mini-dramas in a game where things aren&amp;#039;t always what they seem, but does so in a way revealing the intellect behind the muscle. It&amp;#039;s sublime television, and it beats watching David Caruso whip off his sunglasses for the 800th time on CSI. If you really, really can&amp;#039;t stand the game itself, broadcasters add a surprising narrative dynamic to the NFL postseason. After all, the league turns its individual stories over to profoundly unreliable narrators the burnouts and the gutturally gifted whom you may or may not agree with or even like, but with whom you&amp;#039;re stuck as a viewer throughout the game. It creates sustained tension when, just before kickoff, the entire commentator panel on Fox chooses Green Bay as the seemingly obvious favorite to defeat Arizona on the road, only to see the bloodthirsty Cardinals sprint to a 14-0 lead in the first quarter. It&amp;#039;s a sort of compromised authority that equalizes the viewer and the &amp;quot;expert,&amp;quot; from NBC&amp;#039;s smug, self-satisfied mascot Bob Costas bloviating about a potential Jets-Colts rematch that won&amp;#039;t actually happen for another two weeks (if at all) to CBS&amp;#039;s Phil Simms second-guessing the Baltimore Ravens&amp;#039; heavy reliance on its running game (which ultimately accounted for more than 80 percent of the team&amp;#039;s offense in its victory over the hapless Patriots). If the technique was useful enough for Nabokov to exploit in Lolita or Salinger to apply in The Catcher in the Rye, why shouldn&amp;#039;t it follow that the NFL is rendered all the more complex by characters you can&amp;#039;t or maybe even shouldn&amp;#039;t necessarily trust? I&amp;#039;ll tell you who you can trust this weekend: CBS and Fox, with a counterintuitive, Theisman- and NBC-free divisional playoff spectacle that everyone from Conan to Kurosawa would relish. From the Saints&amp;#039; CNN-ready redemption from natural disaster to the Jets&amp;#039; Lost-worth trip to an intimidating Oasis and Old Man Favre&amp;#039;s comeback conquest of America&amp;#039;s greatest franchise, that&amp;#039;s must-see TV. Although maybe Conan should skip that Packers-Cowboys subtext. He&amp;#039;s had enough drama for one week already. S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded. RELATED LINKS:  PLUS: Does January TV Bring More Hope Than Obama Can?  EARLIER: Should We Just Boycott the Movies in January?   PLAYOFF ANALYSIS: Get Sideline Commentary from NFL Cheerleaders   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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