At the firm insistence of my editors, I submitted the Lions/Joe Pera Season 1 comparison article for the Pulitzer, the Schmulitzer (which is like a Pulitzer but it’s only voted on by ordained rabbis) and even the Who? Litz?-er, the award for articles written by people who are acquainted with people who’ve kinda forgotten the name of the band best known as the performers of My Own Worst Enemy. Bupkus! Not a single award. Not to toot my own horn too much, but I thought it was a halfway decent article with an interesting gimmick. It was the top #DetroitLions for several hours on Twitter and the top #JoePera for several days. That’s not saying much, but it’s not nothing. Still, to no avail. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the gatekeepers of serious journalism and/or the world at large have absolutely zero interest in a bizarrely written, sometimes incomprehensibly worded blog post about the Detroit Lions and how various players and facets of their organization abstractly compare to individual episodes of a short-lived alt comedy comfort show that’s been cancelled for several years. Whatever. I’m not bitter, but I’ll admit that not getting the Who? Litz?-er really surprised me because, as you can probably imagine, it wasn’t a huge field.
But I’m not deterred. Like I said, the awards push was an afterthought of people higher up than me on the org chart here at michaelwritesthelions.com. I came close (especially on that Who? Litz?-er), but I didn’t quite have enough juice to get over the top. In a way, you could say my article’s performance mirrored that of the very Detroit Lions it was exploring. And exactly like those actual Detroit Lions, this writer is gonna reload and go again with the same core (concept for a column). Except this time, the core (concept of the column) is gonna be faster, stronger, wiser and more seasoned while still in its prime. With that in mind, I proudly present a deep dive on the 2023/4 Detroit Lions & Joe Pera Talks With You (Season 2).
General Manager Brad Holmes is Episode 1, “Joe Pera Talks with You About Beans” — The second season of Joe Pera Talks With You opens with a montage that evokes unbridled optimism, underscored and intercut with a performance of Bob Dylan’s Mighty Quinn by Joe’s middle school choir. Things are great at work. What’s more, Joe and Sarah have made their relationship official and it has blossomed. They’re glowing with joy as they share breakfast with Joe’s Nana. Gratefully inspired by his good fortune, Joe uses this episode to explain his deciding on an ambitious undertaking: a bean arch. Optimism abounds so much that our ambition leads us to challenges we now welcome with gusto. This is where the Lions are, and it’s chiefly due to our architect Brad Holmes. There’s no two ways about it in the NFL: the teams who draft the best consistently get the best results. Sounds simple, but for something so thoroughly true it doesn’t get mentioned as often as it should. Coaches and coordinators can prolifically scheme through sleepless weeks and inspire like Julius Caesar but it’ll never matter quite as much as the quality of your players on the field. Brad Holmes has nailed draft picks. They haven’t always been the flashiest. At times, they’ve appeared slightly odd and out-of-touch (a RB and LB both in the first round?! …six months later it works out great), but what’s true more often than not is that he drafts guys who don’t ever quit; full, intelligent effort from whistle to whistle. The fact that he has a keen eye for top-level talent isn’t bad either. He knew it wouldn’t be an overnight success, but he was willing to take a patient and methodical approach to build something beautiful. At the end of the episode, Joe unveils his terrific bean arch framework to everyone. Everyone’s so happy for Joe. Gene toasts him with brandy and a heartfelt, “I’m proud of you.” We’re similarly thankful for and proud of the personnel that fills our roster, as we are of the man who did the filling: Brad Holmes. Much like Joe’s bean arch, we get to look forward to his ambitious project is yielding rewarding results.
**(Small non-football note: as stated above, Joe’s choir sings Bob Dylan’s — or Manfred Mann’s if you’re going by sales — song Mighty Quinn. The song contains a lyric right before the refrain about Quinn and refers to him by the e-word, the one that kinda rhymes with “best to know”. Although I never thought of that word having the kind of harmful legacy as some of the better-known racial epithets, I became aware some years ago that it’s now considered pretty taboo. It’s etymology is disputed, but the most plausible one has to do with it coming from the Latin excommunicati, which was basically just an improv comedy A to C way of saying “heathen savage”. My ancestors that colonized North America sure had a weird understanding of Christianity, but I blame the church’s leaders and their teaching being mostly informed by their comfortable lifestyles needing support from the emerging merchant-class political power. Anyway, since Joe and producer Marty Schousboe and the other people who worked on that show are kindly sensitive to words that give offense, they kinda have the kids in the chorus just muddle through the lyric in question with a “blah-bluh-bler”, “rhubarb rhubarb”-type of filler sound so that particular word doesn’t come through. You have to really listen for it. I think that’s a nice touch and a good example of how “wokeness” is way more often than not just being kind and taking easy, reasonable steps to try your best not to hurt anyone’s feelings. Okay. End of strange rant. Surely there are many more to come but this one’s done.)
Lions Fandom as a Singular Entity is Episode 2, “Joe Pera Takes You on a Hike” — Joe takes us on a hike up Sugarloaf Mountain in Marquette. But the more profound mountain being hiked in the episode is the metaphorical mountain of shy introversion and weariness of an outside world that punishes innocent naïveté as you age. As with Joe’s double quest episode, this season put Lions fan through several different wringers. We’ve been hiding our light under the proverbial bushel. Our team wasn’t good. We were proud that we were loyal, but the pride didn’t extend much beyond that. Years and years of real-world poor results (and, occasionally, teams that quit before December) transformed several consecutive generations of Lions fans from optimistic youths to cynical and bitter adults. We had to re-scale Cynicism Mountain this year, and we also had to be weary that we were becoming the “hot preseason pick team that has a miserable season” à la the early Kyler Cardinals or the Chargers the last few years. We wanted to feel, and express, our newfound pride in the quality of the team. We felt it was well-informed and worth putting ourselves out there, history be damned. All this was true. But still… speckles of fear proved hard to scrub away. The TV episode cleverly interposes similar scenes where Joe and Sarah are talking about “not hiding it”, the “it” presumably being their new relationship from their middle school teacher colleagues. The perceived crassness of their peers is exemplified by new addition John, a teacher whose demonstrative vulgarity is found very off-putting by Joe and seemingly few others. We learn shortly thereafter that Joe is initially talking about a different “it” he wants to hide: a compulsive tendency to run around the bases whenever he happens upon an unoccupied baseball diamond. In short, he rounded the bases once as a (terribly performing) Little Leaguer despite being called out like 20 times on the play. Just to get the thrill. He was kicked out of the league for the offense. And despite an authority telling him his innocent joy was wrong and harshly punished, the thrill and the love never left him. Despite the vastly different contexts, both Joe scenarios and the mindset of us Lions fans this year were all similar: we had this thing that we really liked and we wanted the world to know about, despite how the world can feel scary to share that kind of stuff with. If you’re perceived as weird/dumb and/or it eventually all goes horribly awry, that’s some profound egg on your face. But Joe climbs his mountains in this episode, and so did we Lions fans. We didn’t play coy. We were cautiously optimistic, and despite our incredibly futile historical attempts at greatness we showed pride. From the opener at KC to the terrible second half in Santa Clara, we felt rightly proud of our boys and we let people know about it. Joe and Sarah tell their principal about their relationship at the end of the episode and are met with positive encouragement, much like Lions fans were by the nation at large once the stakes got high. As bitter and cynical as I’ve let the past make me as a Lion fan, I have no problem admitting that the brief period where the Lions became America’s Team this season really made us feel terrific.
Wide Receiver Jameson Williams is Episode 3, “Joe Pera Waits With You” — Joe is waiting for Nana at the salon during her weekly appointment. Her appointment is on a Friday, so his waiting is tinged with anticipation of the fish fry that they’ll share shortly after. Fish fries, if you aren’t aware, are part of the cultural bedrock of the upper Midwest, borne from Catholic Lenten dietary tradition but since evolved into year-round dependable social gatherings. Your volunteer fire department has one every month for fundraising. The local VFW throws one on the birthday of a hometown military hero. The Knights of Columbus pride themselves on Lent being their fish-centric Oktoberfest. They all have their slight differences but every single one is delicious. It’s the exact kind of charm people evoke when they refer to Midwestern charm. The way “Small Town America” manifested in Michigan and a lot of the Midwest is a story in which fish fries play a crucial role. Fish fries and euchre. Back to the TV: even more than the other episodes, which is saying something, this episode is very fittingly titled. It’s about waiting. The good and bad parts of it, what it gives and what it can take away and, ultimately, why it only takes a little effort to perceive and experience it positively. Jameson Williams came to us with some waiting built-in. He injured himself in Alabama’s postseason loss to Georgia, a loss which may not have occurred had he played in the second half. He looked unstoppable in that game, against an absolute all-time college defense, so Brad Holmes decided to see if he was worth the wait. It appeared Holmes was correct. Williams healed well, made a very positive first impression, but then a setback: another period of waiting, this time because of violations of seemingly arbitrary and since-reconsidered NFL sport gambling policies. The waiting was starting to feel tedious, and through his comments you could sense the genuine anxiety and remorse Jameson felt for not being on the field. Waiting can be a difficult thing. Patience can be a hard thing to summon from nothing. It takes practice. The episode illustrates all these points very well. At one point during the wait, Joe explains to us that the time he spends waiting for Nana could be spent doing other things. Fun things, productive things. But he says, “I think she likes that I’m here. I do too.” He also asks Nana if waiting gets easier or harder as you get older. Her and her whole beauty parlor crew say it’s the former. Jameson Williams is proof positive of this concept, football-personnel wise. He’s entering his third league year, it feels like we’ve barely scratched his surface, and yet we still feel an effortless patience with the lad. He’s shown flashes of brilliance. He’s potentially a 5-tool wide receiver: acceleration, top speed, route running, hands, blocking; he’s got it all, not unlike a proper fish fry. And as a fish fry is to the social fabric of small towns throughout the upper Midwest, Jameson Williams will be to our (hopefully) other-worldly offense going forward. With another year of growth and maturity from lessons learned (like the child version of Joe and curse words in this episode’s terrific flashback digression), Williams should take another terrific step forward towards reaching his sizable potential. I think with Jamo, like it’s been with the Lions as a whole, the waiting will make it that much sweeter.
Head Coach Dan Campbell is Episode 4, “Joe Pera Guides You Through the Dark” — This episode tells the story of Joe’s insecurities now that him and Sarah are past the honeymoon phase; he’s worried that when the chips hit the fan, doesn’t have the substance to convince her he’s a good match and that the novelty that is his primary attraction will quickly erode, leaving little in its place. It’s a quirky take, with the story being told in part by Sarah being portrayed a an 1865 lighthouse keeper and Joe as her prospective assistant. The match between this episode and Campbell is heavily layered in thorough similarities, much like the title of the episode’s several different meanings. There’s the heavy lighthouse theme, the power’s out in the episode’s real-world setting and Joe finds himself in the emotional dark corridor of insecurity. So, at least superficially speaking, there’s the obvious metaphor of a lighthouse guiding a lost or imperiled boat being like Dan Campbell guiding our lost and imperiled football team. During Joe’s first speech to the camera, he goes on a seemingly insane digression wherein he slanders all of Great Britain because their guards wear disagreeable hats. It’s a weirdness that I would retrospectively deem “Campbell-esque”. Dan’s toned it down a little. I think he dislikes the attention on terms that aren’t his own, but Campbell in his heart has a silly side. Only a person who is truly wacky would talk about biting kneecaps. That’s such an oddly specific and specifically odd thing to think, let alone say aloud in an introductory press conference. Such is his confidence and self-assuredness that he trusts himself to spout off in little stream-of-consciousness-to-Mean-Gene-style tirades. This episode also mentions the fact that Michigan had the most female lighthouse keepers back in lighthouse heyday. The Lions’s fortunes have turned around mightily since our lighthouse keeping fell into the wise arms of women. Just sayin’. Another way Campbell and this episode compare is when the Melsky kids tackle and assault Joe — with their father’s approval — and throw an otherwise peaceful episode into hilarious chaos. That’s part of the Dan Campbell experience. You got steady hands on the offensive tiller but then Campbell will go for it on 4th and 8. You gotta be ready for some mania. It’s fun in this episode, it’s fun when Campbell goes with it. And this is part of how Campbell guided us through the dark: he’s a no bullshit dude. His whole thing at the opener wasn’t an act. It wasn’t just novelty that got him the gig, it was the genuine passion and intense desire that informed his seeming novelty that led him to the kind of results that let him keep the job. Not only has he brought us to heights unknown in the Supe era, but he’s been awesome and true while doing it. He’s endeared himself to us. They cut between lighthouse era and current era Joe and Sarah as Joe earnestly explains that there’s tangible benefit to keeping him around, but he’s quickly reminded that he doesn’t have to worry about that because he’s well-liked regardless.
Wide Receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown is Episode 5, “Joe Pera Takes You to the Grocery Store” — Beauty in simplicity and efficiency, consistent excellence that appears mundane to the preoccupied but sparks incredible wonder in the contemplative, shining examples of what can be produced through hard work: I’m describing both Amon-Ra St. Brown and the modern grocery store. This episode is about the oft-overlooked, elegant excellence of the local grocery store. After grocery store b-roll, the episode starts with Joe walking in to his store, the soulless Wal-Mart he’s eschewing deep in the background. This underscores the feeling similar to the pride we feel in the Sun God being a Lion. He’s only completed his third year but ask any Lion fan and they’ll tell you to a person: we want him to be in Honolulu Blue & Silver for life. He doesn’t feel like the Wal-Mart that crashed into town. He’s the Mom & Pop Shoppe 3rd-rounder, the local establishment, the small chain that means something uniquely appealing to the people from here. He’s the place with the name you stop seeing when you travel down the interstate. St. Brown ain’t some off-the-shelf WR with all the obvious measurables: he’s our guy. He’s the diamond Holmes found in the rough whose hard work has turned him into the best possession receiver in the league. One of Joe’s Joe-y quirks that the episode showcases is him looking at what he’s about to purchase and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” answering questions he’s asking in his head about the wisdom of a potential purchase. Amon-Ra St. Brown evokes similarly across-the-board football-related yeses as the bunch of bananas in question(s) do in this episode for Joe. Does he totally excel at football? Yes. Does he lead by hard-working example? Yes. Does he seem like a great teammate? Yes. Even in an All-Pro season where Sun God stood out almost every week, there’s almost no fear of a regression. He’s our Hines Ward, only maybe a little better. Back in the episode, Joe meets Fred, the sample man giving out tastes of German ham. Fred keeps using the word phenomenal until Joe sees the light and agrees it’s phenomenal ham. The Motor City has been Fred the past 3 seasons and this season, finally the nation at large made like Joe and agreed that our (not coincidentally half-German) ham named Amon-Ra St. Brown is phenomenal. When you consider his greatness and how we got him in the 3rd round, it’s almost too good to be true. Towards the end of the episode Joe’s mind wanders into contemplating the complexity and potential wastefulness behind the modern supermarket. Lions fans have seen incredible wastefulness in using high picks on receivers in the not-too-distant past. We’ve also seen the careers of HoFers kinda wasted because of poor team building. To see now that we’re a judicious, prudent and wise team to get Sun God’s level of play from the 3rd round is as magnificent as the player himself. And we’re not gonna be foolish in building around his greatness like we were with Barry and CalJo. At the end of the episode, after a coupon-related quirk reveals to Joe that he has just enough money remaining for some bonus ice cream, Joe very subtly and casually mentions that today is his birthday and he doesn’t like to make a fuss. That’s the Amon-Ra St. Brown experience from a fan’s side: every time he’s involved, it’s like a bonus birthday treat for us and we never had to make a fuss.
Defensive End John Cominsky is Episode 6, “Joe Pera Goes to Dave Wojcek’s Bachelor Party with You” — Firstly: Cominsky/Wojcek? Might as well be eating dill pickle soup and pierogies in Hamtramck. This episode is about what’s under the surface. Joe is invited to Mike Melsky’s brother-in-law’s bachelor party. It’s Joe’s first bachelor party and Joe, being true to his Joe self, comes across as endearing but awkward to the other attendees. Weird behavior in the initial party mise-en-scène foreshadows an undercurrent of pent-up emotions inside the day-binging dudes. As any former or current day drinker will tell you: it’s a formula for either disaster or glory, nothing in between. A great time or a terrible time will be had. John Cominsky is one of the more fascinating stories on the Lions. He has an NFL career, which is obviously a terrific accomplishment, but it’s not the type of career that’ll win awards. Indeed, Cominsky is closer to a yearly roster-making “sing for your supper”-type of player than a guy who signs long deals with the assumption most of it will be honored. There’s not a ton of statistical prowess that jumps out at you. In fact, his career looks kind of underwhelming if you’re solely focused on the numbers. He was even cut from Atlanta, who’ve never exactly been a defensive juggernaut. He doesn’t start and he’s not even high up in the rotation. But he has a knack for a few big plays a season and he seems to give this team a jolt. I’ll stop beating around the bush: there’s more to Cominsky than the fans see on Sundays. Him joining the team after being cast off only to then get on the field in 30 of 34 games is something solid. I think he’s a Campbell guy; a energy-level maintainer in practices, a Rudy-like tenacity on every rep, able to knock down a pass or be in the right place to finish off a sack when we really need one. We rejoin the bachelor party when Joe returns from a solo hike (like I said, he’s endearingly awkward) in an effort to spot an Eastern milk snake. The guys, now a drunken powder keg of emotion, get sparked by Carlos’s hogging of hot dog buns and BOOM the feelings start to fly. Mike attacks Carlos but immediately admits it’s because his marriage is on the rocks. Carlos reveals his boorishness is due to anxiety over his mom’s kidney transplant wait. Groom-to-be Dave reveals his fear of his fiancée’s potential unfaithfulness. For these guys, the stuff under the surface was negative, so it felt cathartic to get it out. For John Cominsky, the surface stuff (statistics, non-pedigree) is the ostensibly negative but he plays with an undercurrent of excellence. His catharsis is that batted ball on a key 3rd down in the 4th quarter. It’s the drive-killing half-sack that ends up taking 3 points off the board. Dan Campbell recognizes it, and I’m glad we get to witness Cominsky’s instinctual effectiveness being deftly deployed.
Center Frank Ragnow is Episode 7, “Joe Pera Gives You Piano Lessons” — Relationships are hard. And I’m strictly talking interpersonal, friendly ones here. Being a good and compassionate companion to another human being requires energy, focus, creative thought and sometimes considerable time. This episodes delves into the challenges and quirks of all different kinds of relationships. Joe is giving Gene’s wife Lulu piano lessons so she can surprise Gene with a song at their 40th anniversary party. Telling each other stories about their respective partners, Joe learns from Lulu that he should stay present and enjoy what he has, not be obsessed with learning from others in an attempt to forge a perfect relationship. Frank Ragnow is our guy. He’s the anchor of our team’s greatest unit from which all our success is born: the O-Line. He’s Mr. Dependable and he’s totally excellent, amongst the (if not the) best center(s) in the league. He’s also going to cost a lot of money in the future. This is when our relationship will be tested. Not the immediate future, but a future where he might be slowly breezing past the peak of his physical abilities. It’ll likely be a difficult crossroads. He’ll be an other-worldly center (peep his work in the divisional against Vita Vea), but he’ll probably ask for ~$18-19M/yr, assuming similarly-sized cap increases and his agent being worth his salt and asking for Frank to be among the highest paid centers ever. That’s a hefty chunk. But like Joey learns from Lulu in this episode, us Lions fans aren’t going to fret over what challenges potentially lie in wait in 2027. We’re going to enjoy the now and be happy that, in Ragnow, we have an as-good-as-it-gets genius cut from a boulder at a very key position.
Jahmyr “Jah” Gibbs is Episode 8, “Joe Pera Watches Internet Videos with You” — The first symmetry is the episode begins with Joe calling Sarah his “country girl” in a weird voice, which she promptly teases that she hates. I say it’s a symmetry because sometimes I wonder if Jahmyr Gibbs dislikes being called “Jah”. The only evidence I have is the fact that he doesn’t ever seem to go by “Jah”. And that seems like a name where you would if you could, y’know? It’s essentially a nickname for the Abrahamic God. You can go around calling yourself “Goddy” and you choose not to? That tells me you want the full name and not “Jah”. If he ever reads this and hates that I use Jah: sorry, Jahmyr. It’s just quicker to type and I always seem to make a mistake on the “myr” part and I have to backspace a lot. Switching gears, this episode is again aptly titled. Joe and Sarah are having a Friday night sleepover but made the mistake of having coffee bean ice cream before bed which they failed to realize was quite caffeinated. So they’re up, but they don’t have to teach the next morning. They decide to stay up and watch internet videos until they fall asleep or morning comes. We watch the videos along with them and there’s an incredible variety and great energy. It’s much like watching Jah Gibbs with the ball in his hands. I remember when I first started paying attention to Reggie Bush at USC. The way he moved made him look like a less juke-y but higher top-speed Barry Sanders. Despite a very nice career, it didn’t pan out for Reggie Bush quite the way a lot of people thought it might. But Jah Gibbs is the rare guy who actually moves in the same class as Bush and Barry. No one will ever have Barry’s elusiveness or seemingly impossible escapability, and nobody will ever have that ability to shift direction without slowing down like Reggie Bush did. But Gibbs comes pretty close to both. Both! And it’s not just those two backs from whom he’s picked up tricks to fine-tune his game. He can get low and run between the tackles without sustaining heavy damage like Emmitt Smith. He has a great patience for block development like an early career Le’Veon Bell. He can pick up a blitz like Maurice Jones-Drew. He catches out of the backfield like Westbrook. There are sudden speed bursts where the defense looks like they have the correct angle but then he’s gone like prime Adrian Peterson. His creativity and variety with the way he moves is much like the videos Joe and Sarah watch together. At the end of the episode, before an early Saturday breakfast, Joe brings Sarah out to the backyard as the sun rises. There, they both witness something terrific: Joe’s bean arch has grown to the point that the separate vines are tall enough to begin entangling with one another. Soon, the plant will bear many beans. In Detroit, we’re just as excited to witness the incredibly good young football player Jah Gibbs blossom and bear innumerable tasty football beans (highlight runs & touchdowns).
The 2nd Half of the NFC Championship Game is Episode 9, “Joe Pera Has a Surprise for You” — One of the most heartbreaking episodes of TV I’ve ever seen is, unfortunately, the only apt comparison I can make to the final game of this past Lions season. As I stated in my first Lions/Joe Pera article, Joe’s life on the show does a good job of mirroring how life goes for most of us IRL: punctuated equilibrium; everything’s normal, a big and sudden change, a period of adjustment until the changed thing becomes the new normal, rinse and repeat until the long nap. This episode, much like the Lions in what would prove to be their final game of the season, starts off with amazing promise. Joe is putting on a Rat Race-style money chase for his friends. He explains how he got the idea because his internet search results kept bringing up Rat Race due to him researching beans for his bean arch (Rowan “Mr. Bean” Atkinson is in Rat Race) and researching rat information for his Alberta rat musical. The search algorithms eventually pique his curiosity and eventually we find Joe having a viewing of Rat Race with Sarah. He likes the movie so much he’s inspired to create a less lucrative version for his friends. It’s not met with the enthusiasm he hoped, so after the only two participants leave, Joe is content to sit in his yard and talk with the local priest, the middle school janitor and his girlfriend. It’s at this moment — a moment when things in his life were going so, so well — that Joe receives a terrible phone call: his Nana is on death’s door at the hospital. She was old, but she was that genuinely vibrant kind of old that makes a death feel more shocking than actuarial statistics might suggest. I’m not suggesting that watching the Lions lose that game felt like the death of a loved one. It’s still just a sporting contest. Having the perspective to separate those two experiences by their disparate degrees of profundity isn’t difficult. Having said all that, that loss was as brutal a sporting loss as I’ve ever experienced. I stated in articles throughout the season that this Lions team was particularly likable, even for long-time Lions fans and relative to other Lions teams. The New York Post called them the New America’s Team! Everything was coming up Lions, and our hearts were full of childlike glee. I choose that word “childlike” because it speaks to the subtleties of the type of glee with which our hearts were filled: innocent, wide-eyed, about to embark on a path through a new frontier and almost unable to imagine it falling apart so completely. And my gosh were the Lions crushing that first half! They weren’t just hanging with this very good team, they were kicking serious ass! They could do no wrong. And then, even as I’ve said that it felt kind of unimaginable, catastrophe suddenly struck. It all fell apart. Pressure, momentum, awfully unlucky bounces, nerves: they amalgamated and coalesced into this force that just slowly suffocated my squad until the season was dead. To our credit, we fought like Comanches to the end and we stayed true to our identity, but it wasn’t meant to be. Thinking back to the TV show, the episode doesn’t dwell on Nana’s final moments. It instead cuts from Joe rushing to the hospital in the car he inherited his late grandpa to the aftermath: Joe and Sarah returning home at night after a day of heartbreak and pain at the hospital. In an unfortunate but macabrely funny twist, the two winners of Joe’s Rat Race come back to Joe’s house immediately after his return from the hospital. They’re full of jubilant excitement and enthusiastically suggest they enjoy their winnings on several different options for painting the town. The dichotomy between Joe’s agony and their elation creates so much tension it’s almost hard to watch. Sarah gently informs the winners of Joe’s Nana’s tragic passing and they’re immediately consolatory, and in a very kind way. But as anyone whose had to therapize themselves through bad feelings will tell you: sometimes you just have to sit with them; acknowledge them, imagine them as waves and try to shred the gnar. I’m being cheeky but that’s legit advice. Traumatic grief has to pass in its own time. Those instances where you fall to pieces at times and over things that seem unrelated and random, that’s just the grief reiterating itself. The good news is that grief’s punching power wanes over time. But you never really “get over” what caused the grief in the first place. It permanently changes you in ways big and small. It didn’t take long for Lions fans to broaden our perspective and call this season what it largely was: very successful. We’ll never forget the time we were 30 minutes and a huge blown lead away from the Super Bowl. But we blew it. We blew it. BUT… we’re still here. And even though it’ll rear its saddening head again, we’re moving past the grief. It’s just another part of the normal now. Let’s hope the next punctuation on this punctuated equilibrium timeline is a positive one.
The Launch/Debut of MichaelWritesTheLions.Com is Episode 10, “Joe Pera Helps You Write” — From a technical aspect, this comparison makes good sense. This is a small peek behind the curtain of the complex inner workings of this Lions blog, and this is also the first episode where someone who isn’t Joe (Sarah) reveals their awareness of the audience and breaks the fourth wall. Joe begins this episode by sharing his difficulty in writing Nana’s obituary for his local paper. The local paper’s space (or lack thereof) is what makes it difficult: there’s a strict word count. Joe fears he can’t properly encapsulate what made Nana so special in the 4 or 5 sentences he figures he’s allowed. If only Joe had a widely-read, almost universally-respected blog like MiWriTheLi. He loved her so much that every little detail about her life seems imperative to include. The snacks she liked, her favorite art, her hobbies, her adored cadre of friends, her special traditions with Joe; leaving any of them out feels to Joe like he’s doing a disservice to the person in the world he loved the most. That’s what this website is to the Lions. Sure, you could say that I’m only limited by bandwidth and/or traffic allowance and word counts don’t matter here, but I couldn’t include everything special I think or feel about the Lions. Nobody could have the time or inclination to read it! We try our best to cut the fat around here, word-wise, but some things are just too precious for short form. This past season’s Lions are a good example. Thank goodness I’m only limited by my seemingly way-off notions regarding how much people want to read. Joe also deals with one of the less obvious, but not necessarily less harmful parts of grief: guilt. Even if you’re an innocent victim of tragedy like Joe is, blaming oneself for shortcomings surrounding the tragedy is fairly common. He laments that he’s not dealing with funeral arrangement details with as much aplomb as his Nana would have. I felt that way when achieving good employment drastically cut into my free time and I had to stop doing running diaries so I could use Sunday evenings to mentally prepare for work. A better Lions blogger would’ve powered through and schmoozed their boss into letting any possibly sluggish Monday slide a little bit. As Joe asks questions and gains perspective about Nana’s life, he seems happy to learn the new information but it doesn’t really help him with his problem: too much love for the space allotted. He ends up turning in a tome-length obituary to the Marquette Mining Journal. It unsurprisingly gets edited for length but then a quite surprising thing happens in return: the editor of the paper visits Joe personally. Joe learns that the newspaper obit is more for notification purposes and as a “heads up” so casual acquaintances don’t accidentally send a Christmas card or whatever. He tells Joe he could feel the love coming through in Joe’s thorough writing. And although it isn’t suitable for a small-town newspaper, it’s something Nana’s friends would love to read. And that’s what this blog ultimately is. We’ll pepper in some stats and Xs and Os mundanity, but these words are chiefly about celebrating the love between a heretofore hapless football team and the fans who love them as much as any people can love a team. As the episode closes, Joe begins to eat the last meatballs ever made by Nana, symbolically accepting his grief and beginning the slow process of healing. In openly talking about how our love for the Lions can power through any catastrophe and/or heartbreak, we not only accept our grief but acknowledge there will likely be grief again in the future. But our emotional armor now has that additional layer of “love remains”.
Defensive Back Brian Branch is Episode 11, “Joe Pera Shows You How to do Good Fashion” — Gene has insisted that Joe accompany him on a road trip to Milwaukee, where Gene’s sons are putting on a fashion show. Joe doesn’t have a natural inclination towards fashion (save for waterproof jackets), and Gene is mostly unfamiliar as well. Gene regrets this because he feels like understanding fashion would bring him closer to his designer sons. Gene is a Great Lakes shipping man. Clothing for him has been utilitarian. He even hints at a Seinfeld-ian desire for us all to switch to government-sanctioned and supplied uniforms. Joe posits that fashion is just the byproduct of all of our collective preferences and feelings about wanting to feel/look nice, but Gene is skeptical. He suspects fashion ins and outs are determined by a shadowy cabal of people who profit from the insecurities of the uninitiated. The inscrutability of high-stakes decision makers invites distrust even in very good circumstances. Case in point: even though he’d had a couple hits and nailed the Sewell pick, fans still weren’t completely sold on Brad Holmes before the 2023 draft. We’d tout the haul he got in return for Stafford, but it was always with the caveat, “Well now he’s gotta make the picks count or it’s all for nothing.” When he went against the heavy grain and chose a RB and LB in the first round, some people were concerned. Others were sounding the alarm bells. Conventional wisdom isn’t called conventional dumbassery. Most people take it as wisdom. So when someone contradicts it, there’s uncertainty and subsequent uncomfortability. “Is Holmes neutering the power we gained in the Stafford trade?” It was a concern. But then he traded up from 48th to 45th to get Brian Branch, which seemed like a steal from the moment they called his name. And so far he has been. His versatility and instinctually-informed ball-hawkishness could describe fashion itself (minus the ball part). This is to say that Brian Branch is all over the field so much, doing so many different things well, it feels like there’s three or four Brian Braches on the field. In the episode’s denouement, we see the fashion show put on by Gene’s sons has a finalé in which Gene and both boys embrace, their clothing mimicking the winged design of the Milwaukee Art Museum. Joe learns that fashion can, and does, come from anywhere and everywhere. The same can be said for football team greatness. There’s not a single surefire, “correct” way to build a football team. The best you can do is draft guys who have a true passion for the hard work of football and hope they mesh complementarily. Holmes took a tack that a lot of people looked at with raised eyebrows. But on that weird tack he ended up drafting one of the best-performing rookie classes in league history, of which Branch was a very impactful contributor. Breaking up the routine for the sake of breaking up the routine is dumb, but it shouldn’t make you afraid of attempting things that buck conventional wisdom and embrace strange, new perspectives.
Running Back David Montgomery is Episode 12, “Joe Pera Shows You How to Pack a Lunch” — We open with Joe and Sarah at the end of summer, preparing for the start of another school year by packing their lunches the night before the first day. Sarah is canning more of what seems to be an endless supply of green beans from the arch. Joe assembly lines two sandwiches. He seems happier, even happily referencing his late grandmother’s special sandwich making prowess by saying, “She’s with us in the mayonnaise.” Towards the end of the packing, we see Joe slip a note (unreadable to us) in Sarah’s lunch box. Is this gonna be a proposal? Joe’s recently learned painful lessons about mortality and love being essential to a happy, fulfilling life. Regardless of the new suspense, the episode’s title doesn’t lend itself to longevity and only a few minutes into the episode we’re just looking at a kitchen with a guy who’s completed the task of packing lunches. Not only has the table been proverbially set, but the whole darn mean has flashed right in front of us, completed before it had a chance to register. This is David Montgomery. Signed from the Bears, the team likes to use him as the thunder to Jah Gibbs’s lightning. But David is no plodder. Though often deployed to deliver body blows to the middle of the defense, David has the skills to turn 3-yard plunges into 8-yard gut punches. He doesn’t have Jah’s versatility, but the things he does, he does very well and then some. Kind of like this episode. It seems like it’s just setting the table for a proposal but it veers into the classical Joe Pera weird/funny. Firstly, Sarah confirms her fourth wall awareness and encourages Joe to “tell them the story”. The story begins with Joe, upon his return from Milwaukee, seeing Mike and Sue Melsky reconciled. Mike tells Joe the details of his ham-fisted but effective and heartfelt apology in his own story digression. After Mike and Sue bid Joe goodnight, he notices someone has watered his bean arch while he was away even though he forgot to plan ahead and leave instructions for anyone to do so. He surmises it was Sarah, and while calling her to explain his trip to Milwaukee and express some heartfelt feelings, he’s sprayed by a skunk. Sarah comes over to find him in his tomato-juice filled bathtub. No words are exchanged — we don’t know if it’s because they missed each other while Joe was in Milwaukee or they feel closer now that they’ve experienced tragedy and leaned on one another to get through it — but it’s implied they get intimate in the tomato juice. The Lions missed David Montgomery for a few games this season. And while he doesn’t get the ink his teammates get, you could see we weren’t as effective without the man who reliably keeps us in 2nd-and-shorts, 3rd-and-shorts. Seeing him return felt like when Joe and Sarah harvest the last of their beans, drying and saving the best ones to grow next year’s plants. If Jah is the bean arch in all its glory, David Montgomery is the dried bean from which the arch springs.
Special Assistant & Chairperson Chris Spielman is Episode 13, “Joe Pera Talks with You on the First Day of School” — A new school year is beginning at Little Deer Middle School, and the opening VO has Joe observing that for kids, a new school year is the start of an exciting new adventure on the next rung up the ladder. But for teachers, it’s the beginning of another iteration of a cycle that gets faster and more predictable. This can be said for a lot of parts of life. Random example: snowy weather. Viewing the aftermath a really big snow storm when you’re young seems crazy. Snow up to your waist! But as you get older and you’ve seen more crazy weather, the impression isn’t as profound. The same can be said for football and, more specifically, football fandom. New seasons feel like grand new adventures when you’re a young fan. But as you grow older, your perspective on games, seasons and even careers naturally gets broader. When the Lions brought Spielman into the front office, certain age groups didn’t see the logic. While the team seemed to be constantly insisting to the press that the failures of Lions teams past didn’t matter — that the history didn’t matter — we were bringing in a very classic Lion to have an allegedly major front office role. Spielman was an excellent player and he was a certified mainstay of what could charitably be referred to as the Lions’s glory days of the early 90s. But he was part of the history; the ignominious, let’s-get-away-it’s-icky-and-irrelevant history. But other age groups knew it was a terrific move. It made the Lions feel less like a drone-y organization, more like a sports-specific ersatz family. “The past doesn’t matter,”: when it’s said ad nauseam like it was you start to disbelieve it. This was the counter, the more genteel and familial move of “let’s take this guy who understands the attitude that informs the historically rare Lion greatness and implement him alone into our exciting new lease on life-feeling regime”. Older fans saw Spielman’s return as learning from previous cycles and improving for the next one. That’s all you can do in a cyclical system like an annually reiterating league (and life). And that lesson is what Joe learns throughout this episode. Sarah pops into the choir room to ask Joe if he’s ready. She asks if he’s gonna eat lunch in his car. He asks her if she’s gonna panic when kids crowd the hallways. They both answer no. They’re showing personal growth, using the wisdom they’ve gained from previous cycles. There’s a fun little curveball in the episode in the form of new student Gabriel, a kid who until that day had been raised in a community of international scientists in Antarctica. As he’s revealing his story to the class, Joe looks at Gabriel with an appreciative wonder that calls back to how he looked when he first heard Baba O’Riley. Gabriel is analogous to the new class of prospects from which the Lions will be drafting their newest players. It shows that even in repeating cycles that may seem like they only allow for incremental improvement, sometimes a real wild card can come along and shake things up. Spielman’s a big part of the team whose mandate is to identify this new blood. They’ve done a good job recently. One more terrific draft might put us over the top. Regardless, the point is: with the combine happening at the time of this writing and the draft coming shortly thereafter, it’s time for a new league year. For the young, it’s time for the Lions to get their feet set on this new ladder rung and reach for the next one. We got close, now it’s time to get there. For us more seasoned fans, it’s the beginning of a new cycle. And although these cycles will keep repeating faster and might eventually start to blend together, Spielman is a reminder that the past does matter if, by learning the right lessons from it, you make it valuable. This is the last episode of the season, and it ends with Joe leading his choir in Carole King and James Taylor’s Up on the Roof. The lyrics are sung by the children over shots of Joe’s dog Gus waiting for him at home, a window being replaced on an old house, static shots of Joe’s kitchen and Nana’s living room, Mike and Sue Melsky sharing a small moment of mutual appreciation of each other at work and Sarah joining and interacting with her colleagues. Oh! And we finally see the note that Joe packed for Sarah in the previous episode, the note we thought might have been a proposal. The note reads: “Good luck today! -Shaquille O’Neal”. What can I say? It’s alt comedy.
That’s all I’ve got for Part Two of The ’23-’24 Detroit Lions and Joe Pera Talks With You. I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed thinking and writing about it. The Lions endured some real heartbreak this season, but as life moves on, hope springs eternal. We (the Lions and the royal we) experience, learn, prepare and try to do better the next time around. It’s going to be different. And for the first time in a very long time, we have a feeling that those differences are going to be positive and move us in the right direction: towards glory. Thanks so much for reading, it means a lot to all of us here at michawlwritesthelions.com. Be well, friends. Auf Wiedersehen!
