Texas Watch: Friday Night Lights (Pilot)

Jamie has been along for the ride on DC's Lanterns.  Thanks to her proximity to me and my occasional, intrusive-thought driven monologues, she probably knows more about Green Lanterns than she ever bargained for in this life, so she was primed.  

But she also has been a Kyle Chandler stan since back in the day.  I get it.  

Anyway, that much Kyle Chandler reminded her of the pilot for Friday Night Lights.  

Both of us got vaccinated Friday and are slugging it out with our white blood cells, so when she put it on, I was in full support.

I'll argue two things:

1. The pilot for Friday Night Lights is maybe the best pilot of any TV show I've seen.  
2. Friday Night Lights captures Texas, at least the Texas of its era, the best of any movie or show.  

Mechanically, the pilot is excellent.  It introduces everyone, sets their status quo and their anxieties and desires.  It introduces the stakes of football in this town, and shows how football is a cultural center for the town, right down to how religion is worked in (which I know non-former-jocks don't get, but this is very real).  It also shows what it's like to be on a team, when you spend a lot of time with people you may not necessarily get along with, but form a sports-friendship.  

And it's delivered in a healthy mix of snippets of conversations in a collage of scenes that both show and tell.  

The show seems to exist entirely inside the magic hour, when teams practice, when games are set to start - I have my own memories of walking into a local stadium as the sun was setting. Paired with the dreamy music of post-rock band Explosions in the Sky, it gives the show a feeling of instant nostalgia. 

Dialogue is natural and written in the patter of Texas, as well as people who stew in sports jargon, both on the field and when talking to the press.  I think the accents work.  Texas accents are all over the place, mixes of regional from the Deep South to the Central Texas thing I get after a few cocktails, to more of the East Texas drawl.  

The people look and act like how they were 20 years ago, anyway, before the state became flooded with out-of-staters.*  I firmly believe in Coach and Mrs. Taylor as the former high school Homecoming King and Queen, now making their way well past the glory days, but steeped in the culture of sport and small town living.  

From a storytelling perspective, the pilot is tight as hello, laying all of this out, and then turning on a dime in the last fifteen minutes.  If we thought we knew what the show would be, it's just changed a lot.  The last fifteen minutes are the inciting incident that will take us through a season of TV.  

Real emotional stakes for characters that are not particularly exotic.  We're reminded - these are high schoolers, and that young man will never be the same again.

So.  Is Texas as football crazy as the book, movie and show of Friday Night Lights indicate?  

I live in a mid-sized city with a top-ranked NCAA football school.  So, high school football is out there, people care about it if they have kids of a certain age, but the focus is on University of Texas football.  And, yes, Saturdays during the season are pretty nuts if you head toward campus.  And in Houston, people care about the Texans.  A lot.  And, yeah, a local channel shows high school games on TV, but I cannot imagine the viewership is high.  It's just a fun thing to do.

Texas is not unique in its football culture.  It's an extension of what you can find in the South, and parts of the Midwest.  Ohio State is Ohio State.  I know what Bears fans are like.

But, no, grown adults do not worry about high school football where I live - outside of conversations about college recruits, etc...  But in West Texas?  I'd buy it.  There are some smaller universities out that way, but I don't know that anyone really cares.  I only know about the feelings about high school football through the book of Friday Night Lights, and then some schools in Austin are pipelines for college recruitment (certainly Westlake, which produced Drew Brees).

But the general feel of Texas is right in a way that's hard to quantify.  People do love it here even when they hate parts of living here.  There's a reason that "Texas Forever" has become an unofficial motto, thanks to that show.  It's no secret that it  often takes an outsider to come in and see a place for what it is, good and bad, and not be afraid to show it as the locals are just too close to it.  

If you watch, wondering "why the hell do all of these people care about football so much?" - welcome to my life up to age 21 or so.  I find it a feature, not a bug.  

They've named the lead of the pilot Jason Street, after legendary UT quarterback James Street.  Because they want real game footage, the Dillon Panthers wear the uniforms of the Pflugerville Panthers (Pflugerville is a bedroom community that is its own township north of Austin).  In the pilot, they play a team bedecked in the uniforms of the Westlake Chapparals, which is the rich kid public school in West Austin.  

There's the wealth disparity in plain site in the kinds of houses people live in here, to real locations around town where I've grabbed a cheeseburger or ten (EZ's was great, and I am sad it closed a few years back).  But mostly, I know these people.  I can remember high school well enough to remember the parents who went too far sometimes, the kids from less well-off situations trying to get by, mumbling their way through explanations they shouldn't have to give.  

But the reality of the situation and the tragedy that befalls the Dillon Panthers feels deeply real.  A single incident on a single play leads to lifelong consequences for Jason Street.  I absolutely knew what was coming this time, and I was still wrecked.

If there's two criticism I have, the first is that it's clearly Texas winter in the first episode, probably in January or February, not the furnace that Texas actually is when the season starts in August/ September.  The second is that Texas has a massive Hispanic population that exists in every socioeconomic bracket.  The sky is the limit here.  Yet, you only see Hispanic kids as background characters and I think zero Hispanic adults.  That's a misstep and could have easily been remedied.

Of less note is that college-bound athletes get different treatment not just at school, but they get recruited, they go to camps costing thousands.  People go into deep debt on the pipedream that Junior will be picked up and play college ball.  And that's nowhere to be seen here.  Maybe that's not happening in Permian Basin, where the book was written.  But by the 00's, it was a reality for many quarterbacks.  They're treated like horses getting ready for Churchill Downs.

Also, if football is that big of a deal, Dillon would have a much bigger stadium.  That looks like a JV or practice stadium to me.  (One does wonder what will become of the culture and those massive stadiums as Texas' government is trying to dismantle public education.)  

The cast is excellent, and if you told me that the one younger actor who would do super well out of this show, given the immense talent in place, was Jesse Plemons, I'd have just stared at you.  Not that others haven't continued on, and don't have real work.  Certainly Adrianne Palicki seems like she's everywhere, and once in a while Minka Kelly appears on my screen.  I just saw Taylor Kitsch in something on Netflix, and he was great, honestly.    

The show would eventually pivot schools and we'd get Michael B. Jordan and Jurnee Smollett.  

But the casting of Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as two very married people may be some of the best casting I've ever seen.  These two, plus Amy Teagarden as their daughter of a more literary persuasion, really do make it work.  The pilot doesn't give Britton much to do, and she hasn't broken out as a character with equal screentime here, but you can see the bits of great work that already pop up.  

Anyway, if you followed along with my blogging while the show aired, this is well-covered territory.

So, yeah, Friday Night Lights would have a stellar first season, a second season that was cut short by the writer's strike (and thank god, because some idiot tried to make it a cheesy soap opera before reverting to what made the show work), and would carry on for a few years as some top flight network TV.  I think it lasted as long as it could have/ should have.  The Taylor family went through big changes, we even changed schools rather than watch a new herd of kids coming up.  It fell prey to a few TV goofs along the way, but overall ended very well.

Twenty years later, I'm endorsing 4 of the 5 seasons of the show.

Will I rewatch it?  No.  That's like 100 hours of TV, and not even Connie Britton's perfect hair can make me do that.

*20 years ago, you could count on the people around you being from some part of Texas, often a fellow alumnus of your university.  Now, it's from all over, and that's fine.  It does mean what is *Texas* has been morphed, diluted and changed.