FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS: The best show that no one watches

POSTED: Thursday, April 21, 2011, 2:00 PM

Filed Under: TV

Last week began the last season of the best show that no one watches. Okay, that’s an exaggeration: those who do watch Friday Night Lights are ferociously devoted to it, and critics love it. Yet it hasn’t achieved the crowd it deserves—a crowd big enough to have kept it alive for longer. Five seasons is nothing to sniff at, but the past three have really been half-seasons, thirteen episodes each. Here’s why you should drop everything, possibly quit your job, and watch every season right this minute, in time to see the last one as it airs Friday nights on NBC.

Football holds Friday Night Lights together, but it’s not really about football itself. Instead, it’s about life in a Texas town obsessed with its high school team. That sentence may make it seem totally foreign to the average urban northeasterner; it certainly turned me off when I first heard about it. But the fact is that even to someone who lives in a very different world, the show is eminently relatable. While politics and the media constantly instruct us on the differences between “red” and “blue” states, “real” and “fake” America, Friday Night Lights aims to unite. Its ability to bridge a wide cultural gap is one of its most admirable features.

The show achieves this by showcasing individual lives in the fictional town of Dillon. At its center is coach Eric Taylor and his wife, Tami, played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, both Emmy nominees for the roles. Their portrayal of a modern couple is both realistic and optimistic. They’re utterly believable as a pair, and also as a model for a healthy relationship. While they frequently disagree, there’s a core of mutual understanding—and real friendship—at the heart of their marriage. I plan to submit any marriage in my future to the Taylor Test: Are we as good a match as these two?

That understanding gets the Taylors through trial after trial: There are plenty of them in Dillon, from the paralysis of a player who’d pinned his dreams on football to a school board shaken by a girl’s decision to have an abortion. What sets the show apart is that its conflicts aren’t just gripping—they also feel utterly real. There’s hardly a moment in the show that’s not believable, but somehow that doesn’t stop it from being exciting (warning: spoiler ahead). At the heart of season four, for example, is a school redistricting. Kids who once attended a prosperous high school are sent to a poorer neighboring school; Eric Taylor is among those making the move. Not exactly farfetched; perhaps even boring, on paper. But as it would in life, the redistricting uproots kids from the world they’ve always known, and it rattles families, including the Taylors. The viewer gets an up-close look at the experience of a few of these families—some tied to the football scene, some who aren’t part of it at all. The result is deeply moving.

The realism is aided by remarkably naturalistic acting: lines feel organic and unscripted. That’s helped by the fluidity of the writing. There are no hard-and-fast rules about sticking to the script, an executive producer has said. Instead, it’s about finding what he calls “the truth of the scene.” Meanwhile, the documentary-style filming gives the sense you’re watching a home video, as if the cameras are providing a window into real lives.

All this, and there’s a Philly connection, too: The series is based on a nonfiction book by former Inquirer writer H.G. Bissinger. As the New York Times put it after 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.” Watch it.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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