Dividing all of us into town and metropolis, red and blue, genuine and fake is typically an oversimplification to protected votes, ratings or box-office revenue. But if there's one legitimate Hollywood-heartland divide in take culture, it's on the TV screens: the excellent shows of the past decade — The Sopranos, Crazy Men, The Shield, 25 Rock — have largely recently been a travelogue of seaside blue states.
Since 2006, Friday Night Lights, whose climax airs on DirecTV about Feb. 9, has been an exception. (NBC, which co-produces FNL, will certainly run the final season later this year.) Emerge small-town Dillon, Texas, this brilliantly written as well as acted drama about secondary school football — and much more — has been a moving, regionally specific but generally true portrait of America.
FNL is not a political show, except it's about those things politicians like to lay declare to: community, values, trust, the little guy, the youngsters. Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) begins the series as head coach with the Dillon Panthers, whose profitable history is the most sensible thing this working-class village has going for that. His wife Tami (Connie Britton) is any counselor, and later principal, at the school.
Like this other classic of small-town America, It's a great Life, FNL is regarding community, its benefits and it is burdens. Coach Taylor, just like George Bailey, is put upon, second-guessed and also sometimes held back simply by his town. After the third season, he loses his job in an admin power play and should go across town to restore the football program with East Dillon, the town's poor-cousin high school.
Yet when he's influenced to quit or when school-coaching opportunities come together, he's drawn back by the people who need him or her: the kids for whom football is their photo at college, the locals who hold to their team with a belief akin to theirs inside God. (Few series tend to be as matter of truth about the importance regarding religion, be it expressed in church or in the student's Christian speed-metal band.)
It's not just Coach Taylor who feels the tug of others. Story line after narrative on FNL is concerning having responsibility for somebody else. We meet players who care for a grandma with dementia or a mom with a drug habit, who have to bail out a brother in trouble with the law or overlook classes to help run a family farm.
The actual underlying theme is, we need each other. Everyone, even a teenager, is part of a web of dependence. You might see the show, in the right, as an illustration of how the best interpersonal programs are a career, a family and self-discipline; you could see it, from the actual left, as an debate for the crucial significance about an underfunded government institution, the public school. You'd be right both ways.
FNL has shown the same generosity and nuance in working with tricky social issues. A Season 4 episode when a player's estranged father passes away in Iraq was an intricate depiction of grief, blended emotions and war's impact on a small town. In which season, a student experienced an abortion, a rarity on TV since Maude's in 1972. FNL was unapologetic as well as unflinching in showing your decision and its repercussions — not merely for the girl, but also for Tami, who has to leave her job for having counseled her. FNL taken care of the story with such grace that even Andrew Breitbart's conservative website Large Hollywood praised the episode's "dignity and readiness."
FNL has pulled this off by sticking to at least one byword: respect. Dillon provides unemployment, drugs and strip clubs, but it's and a town where teenagers nevertheless say "ma'am" and "mister." Coach Taylor is value personified. Unlike Don Draper, he's a good guy, not an antihero; Chandler gives him the soft-spoken honor which today's serious drama rarely depicts. And he offers respect back, teaching his / her players the strength in which comes from unironic faithfulness, captured in the saying "Clear eyes, full minds, can't lose."
Though they could, of course. Sometimes teams lose, families lose, cities lose. What saves all of them is teamwork, which goes past the sidelines. FNL can be a football show, but one in which what matters especially is not the Hail Mary pass but the actual faces in the holders watching its arc. "When you are back out on the field," Taylor tells his staff as they trail in a big game at halftime, "those are the people I want in your minds. Those are the folks I want in the hearts."
Just as HBO's crime-drama work of art The Wire was a searing vision of wrong with America, Friday Evening Lights has been the clear-eyed, full-hearted tribute to what is right with it. Whether or not you're urban or countryside, red or blue or even purple, this show appeared for you and me personally.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2046052,00.html#ixzz1DcLmzGLx
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