Friday Night Lights
On any given Tuesday night in my family room, it’s Friday night in West Texas. And Friday night in West Texas can mean only one thing: high school football, under the lights.
Friday Night Lights began as a book by H.G. Bissinger -- a bold, broad and beloved 1990 Pulitzer-prize winner -- that not only captured a year in the life of god-fearing, financially flagging Odessa, Texas, and the fanatical high-school football culture in that town, but, it also dug deep inside the heads of the players immersed in that intense and all-enveloping culture.
Then Friday Night Lights became a movie, directed by Peter Berg (Bissinger’s cousin) and starring Billy Bob Thornton as the coach of the Permian Panthers in what Rolling Stone called “a subtle, soulful performance”. The movie did boffo box-office and was generally lauded for its urgency and bone-crunching authenticity, but gently criticized for failing to fully develop its characters.
And now, Friday Night Lights is a prime-time television drama. A very, very good television show that offers viewers a vicarious look into this fanatical God-and-football (not necessarily in that order) culture and into the hearts and heads of the players.
How good is this show?
On the day of its premiere – an episode written and directed by Berg – the august New York Times gushed: “Lord, is Friday Night Lights good. In fact, if the season is anything like the pilot, this new drama about high school football could be great – and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting.”
Lofty praise, but (thus far, with two episodes having aired) deserved. FNL has so much going for it, not the least of which are realistic action scenes and old-fashioned solid acting: Kyle Chandler, who was last seen as a bomb expert being blown to bits in Grey’s Anatomy, is superb as Coach Eric Taylor and Connie Britton, reprising her role in the movie, is excellent at the coach’s wife.
Yes, there are some clichés, but they don’t detract to the point of making viewers want to Zidane their TVs: the head cheerleader, who is impossibly pretty, is naturally dating the quarterback. The star running back is as obnoxiously boastful as Terrell Owens. And, of course, one of the star players gets badly injured in the team’s first game – because no primetime TV show is complete without a few choice hospital scenes and close-ups of someone with tubes crammed up their nose.
Admittedly, there have been moments in the initial two episodes where I, as a naïve Canadian, thought the writers-director had gone overboard with the praise-gods, with the football-is-religion, and with the players-are-gods (each starting player has a “rally girl” who bakes him something sweet before games; seriously!). But then I read reviews written by West Texas high-school footballers and cheerleaders that stated, flat-out: “They got West Texas football dead on…”
Oh, and a cheerleader-reviewer acknowledged that, yes, there are such creatures as “rally girls” and they do bake sweet things for “their man”.
It’s a whole different culture. And it’s there for the taking (or, for the tackling) every Tuesday night. Catch it while you can, sports fans, because the cynic in me says that this show is way too good and way too smart to ever last on TV…
Wednesday, November 8, 2006
