Friday Night Lights: Best Drama on TV Returns, and New York Times Throws it a Celebratory English Department Cocktail Party

I've been a professional writer for a number of years, am reasonably well-educated and have a good grasp of English. I tell you this to lay the groundwork for what I am about to say: I have absolutely no idea what the following paragraph means.

Nominally about high school football but substantively about the emotional character of a small town defined by its communal joys and isolated disappointments, Friday Night Lights dismantles equations of beauty and privilege. The series takes an almost injunctive approach to our understanding of appearance, refusing us permission to settle into the comfortable mythology that a perfectly angled face is its own currency wherever it happens to reside.

Ginia Bellafante, The New York Times; October 5, 2007

It goes on like this. Ms. Bellafante acknowledges the show's "Expressionistic pleasures," argues that it elevates our understanding of melodrama "the way, as the critic Peter Brooks argued in the 1970s, Balzac and James did," and makes one truly nutty socio-geographic leap:

If Friday Night Lights hadn't been inspired by the fascination with a Southern fascination with college football, it would be easy to imagine that it had been born somewhere on the outskirts of Marseille, so committed is it to divorcing images of adolescent sexuality from standard American anxiety narratives.

To which a viewer can only reply: Um, okay, I guess. But say, did you like the part where the Panthers went to State?

I'm a fan of the show, and am grateful the Times has seen fit to devote some ink to it on the day it returns for a second, make-or-break season. It would be a shame if readers who have never seen it (and there are a lot of those) gather from the review that it's a Lit seminar dressed in shoulder pads. Its pleasures are more modest than this, but no less profound. Like the superb book by Buzz Bissinger that inspired it, it's a ground-level meditation on community, family (both nuclear and extended) and faith (both religious and secular). It works as drama. It's funny. It's sad. It stops your heart from time to time.

Whatever value there may be in divorcing images of adolescent sexuality from standard American anxiety narratives -- and man, haven't we all gone around and around on that one -- it's not the value delivered by the talented writers and actors and crew of Friday Night Lights. What the show offers above all else is the visceral kick of smart, well-crafted storytelling in a popular medium. And for Pete's sake, that's plenty.

Watch it. Tell your friends to watch it. And if, after that, you still want to kick around the semiotics of the thing, the sherry's on me.

Comments

[TucsonEd]

Don't bother watching it. In Plain English: It stinks!
I watched it because somebody wrote an article on HuffPO spouting it's greatness. It was so HO-HUMM I had to check to make sure that it really was Friday Night Lights I was watching.

[mommyatty]

Thanks for touting Friday Night Lights. I think it is the best thing on television. Please everyone, give it a chance. It remains true to Bissinger's book in that it is an outsider's view of Texas football, exposing it for all of its silliness and hypocrisy. Yet it does not mock. The details are great without turning the characters into caracatures -- e.g., as in every small southern town, the "rich" family owns The Dealership.

[Michael Giltz]

Don't feel bad about not understanding that paragraph -- I doubt the writer understood it either. Truly hilarious, unintentionaly self-parody. And she doesn't even seem to have watched the show. She insists the kids all sleep around, when in fact most of the kids don't even sleep with their boyfriend/girlfriend (ie the sexual problems of Jason Street), the main storyline of the new quarterback Saracen dating the coach's daughter but remaining chaste and Smash avoiding the girls who would sleep with him to stay faithful to his new girlfriend. Plus the writer insists the wife (Connie Britton) ans husband (Kyle Chandler) "never seem to exhange an insensitive word." Huh? If she watched even one episode, she couldn't write that ridiculous line. They exchange insensitive words all the time, almost every episode, though we never question their love for each other. He ignores her feelings and demands she do what he says about their not separating, she challenges his positions constantly and does what she wants anyway. Their marriage is not wonderful to us because it's perfect but because it's real and believable and strong. Great show (though the first new episode was weak); insanely pretentious review.

[Tiran]

thanks for the recommendation. I'm gonna TiVo it.

What are you doing reading the New York Times anyway?

[jesusquintana]

Sounds like Bellafante's working on a book. I'm reminded of that scene in Blazing Saddles where Headley Lamar (Harvey Korman) is holding forth in the bathtub about something, and a dumbfounded Taggart (Slim Pickens) responds, "gee Mr. Lamar, you use that tongue prettyer than a twenty-dollar whore."