Friday Night Lights

NBC flop could be a hit -- on HBO
Football drama 'Friday Night Lights' suffered partly because its Texas didn't sit well with viewers. (LA Times) April 14, 2007

Meghan Daum:

Wednesday marked the season finale of the television series "Friday Night Lights." For those of us who care about the show, which recently won a Peabody Award for excellence, the cliffhanger is whether the network will bring it back. Critics love it, but ratings have been wobbly. NBC reportedly has ordered six new scripts, but there's no guarantee that the series won't be stopped at its own 20-yard line.

It has battled merciless time slots — it was up against "Dancing With the Stars," then "American Idol" — and there's no getting around the fact that "Friday Night Lights" transports you into a milieu that many would-be viewers can't get excited about: high school football in small-town Texas.

Never mind that it's based on the acclaimed movie (directed by Peter Berg, who also created the show) that was based on a book by H.G. Bissinger that asked trenchant questions about the all-consuming role of football in many Texas high schools. And never mind that it handles the complexities of things like marriage and adolescence with more honesty and intelligence than old bourgie favorites like "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life." A lot of relatively liberal, urban people don't seem to understand that a show about relatively conservative, rural people can be just as sophisticated as a show in which people drive Priuses and live in Restoration Hardware homes.

The Texas thing is, evidently, a big problem. Last month in the online magazine Salon, critic Heather Havrilesky wrote about the striking originality of "Friday Night Lights" and deemed it "a rare and beautiful thing." Impassioned letter writers shared her enthusiasm, but among the dissenters, a notable portion dismissed the show simply because of geography.

"The less we celebrate the so-called values of Texas, even in fictional TV shows … the better off America will be," said one writer. Another intoned that "those of us living in America since 2000 have had more than enough of a fantasy land that focuses on Texans …. I don't care if this stuff is the return of William [expletive] Shakespeare."

I doubt that antipathy toward the Bush administration is the reason the fate of "Friday Night Lights" is hanging in the balance. It's more likely that it's the show's refusal to pander to common assumptions about the rural, working class. Yes, it's set on the barren, boarded-up plains and, yes, there are plenty of pregame prayer sessions, but the issues it tackles off the football field — race, class, addiction, mental illness — have just as much relevance to those who scoff at the cult of small-town sports as those in its clutches.

"Friday Night Lights" is really about living in an America whose "opportunities" are narrower than conventional patriotic wisdom would have us believe. In fictional Dillon, Texas (the movie and book were set in real-life Odessa), high school football is not just the center of community life, it's the only ticket out of town.

You won't find a lot of SAT prep courses or Kurt Cobain wannabes here. Instead, boys and their parents pin their hopes on capricious college recruiters, girls try to attach themselves to star players on the chance they can marry their way to better lives, and the coach copes with the fact that the morale of an entire town rests on his shoulders.

I'm not suggesting that gritty, realistic shows about economically and culturally disadvantaged communities can't find an audience. The success of series such as HBO's "The Wire" proves they can. But the urban underclasses, with their trappings of rap-influenced glamour and gangster bravado, have always made for hipper entertainment than stories about the rural working class. For all its edginess (and even though it's shot in ultra-cool Austin), "Friday Night Lights" isn't exactly hip. It doesn't feature cameo appearances by pop stars, and no one's haircut is going to set off a national craze.

This is just a guess, but if "Friday Night Lights" were on HBO or Showtime rather than NBC, I suspect the cachet of premium cable (and a dose of nudity and swearing) would cancel out the Texas jock stigma, and we'd be looking at a major cultural touchstone and probably even a hit. But to dismiss an extraordinary show just because it's on an ordinary network is as much a cop-out as refusing to watch it out of blue- state piety or on account of hating football. To its viewers, what's important is the nuance with which the show captures the universal experience of struggling to keep your act together.

You can say that about other TV shows, but in Dillon, the struggle doesn't come with an affluent sheen. Kids work menial after-school jobs, siblings dance in strip clubs and parents get deployed to Iraq. Is that "a fantasy land that focuses on Texans"? Only if you're living in another fantasy land altogether.

Well said!