“You know it's kinda like this drug. When you're out of it,
you see it for what it really is. But when you're in it, it seems like there's
no other possible reality.” - Tyra
To paraphrase the great tv critic Dan Fienberg, while my
brain might tell me that other shows are better, my heart tells me that Friday Night Lights is simply a tier in
quality above them.
The show may have been clichéd at times (even pretty bad
during its 2nd season, which the less we speak of the better), but
the series had an emotional clarity and honesty that was unlike anything else
on television.
Its documentary-like quality and improvisational nature allowed for actors to be completely natural and play scenes with an openness that many other shows might shy away from. Friday Night Lights didn’t just do emotional material, it made you feel as if you knew exactly what its characters were experiencing and feeling, as if you were experiencing events right along with them. That rawness and emotional intensity, many times, had the series putting you through the ringer. To put it another way, if you weren’t tearing up just a little bit at various points during an episode, you might not have a soul.
Its documentary-like quality and improvisational nature allowed for actors to be completely natural and play scenes with an openness that many other shows might shy away from. Friday Night Lights didn’t just do emotional material, it made you feel as if you knew exactly what its characters were experiencing and feeling, as if you were experiencing events right along with them. That rawness and emotional intensity, many times, had the series putting you through the ringer. To put it another way, if you weren’t tearing up just a little bit at various points during an episode, you might not have a soul.
This emotional honesty often left the series high and dry
when it came to ratings. The show was always on the verge of cancellation, and
miraculously got to live on for 5 seasons due to a deal NBC struck with
DirectTV. The other factor in this was that the series was primarily, but not
always, about a high school football coach and his team. However, that short sells
the series, which in truth was about so much more. The show wasn’t just about
football, but small town politics, family, race, class, and community. The show
used football as a lens through which we could glimpse the town and the people that
inhabited it. To put it more succinctly, it was about what football does to a
football crazed town.
So though the series was at times clichéd, it was to the
credit of everyone involved that its execution elevated it above this. When
Julie is thinking about having sex with her boyfriend Matt, the series refuses
to go into after school special territory. Her mother sits down and has a
conversation with her about having sex. But Mrs. Coach doesn’t tell her “SEX
BEFORE MARRIAGE IS BAD. RAWRR!!” Instead, we see her be sad that her daughter
is growing up, concerned for her getting hurt, and let her know that no matter
what she does, she’ll always love her. Take the race question of the first season;
after assistant coach Mackey makes an unintended racist comment, running back “Smash”
Williams decides the African American players should no longer play. The series
is balancing a tight wire throughout, but it is worth it for how all the black
players walk off the field in unison at the end of the episode. Jason Street’s sendoff
in the 3rd season stretches credulity, as he receives a sports agent
position he’s massively under-qualified for. However, it’s all worth it to see
him beg his baby mamma to let him stay with her. And it’s to the credit of
Scott Porter that we’re as sold on his proposal as she is.
The series was always about a married couple at its heart.
The other major characters were teens that eventually left the town, but rather
than focus on their journeys outside of Dillon, Texas; the show continued to
stay and add new characters that Coach Taylor and his wife Tami had to deal with.
Married couples in dramas seem to be a terribly difficult territory for tv
shows to portray. Series tend to act as if it’s hard to create interesting
conflict for individuals that are married. Even really believable fictional
marriages such as the Cohens on The O.C.
dealt with affairs and other crazy
things that a stable, happy marriage had no right to be confronting. Jason
Katims and company avoided this pratfall by scaling down conflicts. Worrying
about sending their kid off to daycare, being sad over sending their kid off to
college, wanting to buy a house they can’t afford, etc. Coach and Mrs. Coach
actually fought a surprising amount but it was always realistic complications,
and it always ended with them having an honest discussion where they worked it
out. In the hands of Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, the Taylors were a realistic
married couple that was fun to watch and who you never doubted for a moment
loved eachother.
The series was all about the small scale. Small dramas in a
small town. This was its bread and butter. This never was more stark than the
show’s very bad 2nd Season which distanced itself both from football
and from the small, everyday things of a small town in Texas. Instead, we got
weird stories such as Landry killing a rapist and him and Tyra trying to cover
it up, Matt having an illegal affair with his much older Latina in-home nurse, and
a sort of threeway in Mexico between Tim, Jason, and Lyla. It was the sort of
material that made the series feel like it was completely different from the 1st
season that had made it so great in the first place. At times it felt like 6
different, unconnected stories that just happened to take place in the same
town. Thankfully the 3rd season reestablished its roots and we got
four more really great, but sadly shortened, seasons.
The shows quiet, pragmatic optimism, its shaping of
characters into good but flawed people, and its emotional depth and sincerity
made Friday Night Lights into a
pleasure to watch.
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