“Friday Night Lights” burried between ballot counting
Continuing in the age-old tradition of talking-up shows that are certain to be canceled, let me take this time to give some more props to Friday Night Lights the NBC drama people should have been talking about all along.
Last night’s episode, crammed between NBC’s election night coverage and starting twenty-minutes late, was great in the way every episode of the show is great. What specifically struck me this week was how the creators are able to take very familiar high school storylines and present them in a way that either seems more realistic than their simple-minded counterparts, or presents them with a level of intensity you wouldn’t expect.
This week, the recently promoted quarterback had to decide between gelling with his new super-cool footballer friends, or be loyal to his super-uncool unfootballer friends that he’s known for years. Pretty standard fare. If Freaks and Geeks had lasted a second season its assumed this is the direction the show would have gone with the Sam character. Its a high school story as old as high school itself. Friday Night Lights stands out because it used this trope as the backing for a story that was really about racism– a topic that isn’t easy to broach on a network television drama without coming off as preachy or disingenuous (see: Studio 60…). Instead we’re given something pretty meaty to think about while watching a story we’ve maybe seen once or twice before.
