It is unfortunate that when it comes to television programs, the shows that get the most attention are those that call the most attention to themselves -- the ones that are quirky, odd and flamboyant. With none of those qualities, "Friday Night Lights," which is now running its fourth season on Direct TV and will be returning to NBC prime time on April 30, has sort of flown under the radar.
Though it has received critical plaudits, won a Peabody Award, a Television Critics Assn. awards and an Emmy, it has never received an Emmy nomination for outstanding dramatic series and none of its cast members has been nominated. Also, its ratings have always been problematic and it has twice been on the brink of cancellation. (Hence the deal between Direct TV and NBC to share costs.)
Still, at a time when NBC is being vilified, here is one thing it has done right. Despite paltry ratings, it has continued to support what may be the best dramatic series in the history of television. That's right: history.
The provenance of "Friday Night Lights" is H.G. Bissinger's now-classic 1990 book of the same name that followed a year in the life of Odessa, Texas, and of the oil town's perennially superb high school football team, the Permian Panthers. Bissinger's Odessa was desolate -- physically and spiritually parched. It was racked by boom-and-bust oil cycles, by bigotry and racial division, by misplaced educational priorities and by a general sense of doom. What it had was the Permian Panthers to fill its existential void as they filled its 20,000-seat stadium on Friday nights during football season. As Bissinger quotes one booster, "Life really wouldn't be worth living if you didn't have a high school team to support."
The book became a 2004 movie starring Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines, directed by Bissinger's cousin, Peter Berg, and it was Berg who turned it into a series two years later because, he said, there were so many avenues the movie just couldn't pursue. The movie and the series both retained the book's sense of football as transcendent: a great barbaric yawp against the world and the town's only equalizer with people and communities that had so much more.
But Bissinger's was a work essentially of sociology. He was fascinated with the way football served not only as an escape from Odessa's travails but as a window on them. The series confronts racism, class distinctions, crime, drugs and those misplaced priorities among other things, but it is deeply personal. It is fascinated less with the community than with individuals.
Of course, high school football is still at the center of -- and even the apex of -- the fictional West Texas town of Dillon. Town life swirls around the Dillon Panthers, and the coach's job security hangs on every game. But the power of the series is that it isn't really about football or even about the way football allows these young men -- and the middle-aged fans who live vicariously through them -- to experience transcendence. Bissinger quotes one parent, "It's Camelot for them. But there's even life after it." "Friday Night Lights" shows what comes after Camelot. It is a series about surviving, not winning.
Much has been made of the series' realism, of how close it seems to get to the nub of life. In directing the pilot, Berg opted for: a hand-held camera (the early shows were so jiggly NBC asked him to pull back a bit); shooting entirely on location in Texas with largely local extras; following the actors with the cameras, rather than blocking for the camera as most series do; and letting actors improvise dialogue. That seemingly artless style has become the series' trademark. On "Friday Night Lights" you seem to be glimpsing life itself, not watching a television show. Even the show's melodrama seems honest -- the heightened reality of teenagers groping their way through life.
But its stylistic tics could be affectation if they weren't so thoroughly integrated with the show's themes. Most series, indeed most dramas, rely on clear objectives, daunting impediments and a satisfying resolution. "Friday Night Lights," like life itself, has none of these. The objectives are uncertain, the impediments nearly metaphysical and no resolutions are in the offing. Without this clarity, there is something ineffably sad and tearful about "FNL," which is why, along with those football highs, it may have the greatest emotional range of any series ever on television. It can be at turns triumphant and heartbreaking, though heartbreaking prevails.
