Friday Night Lights is the best soon-to-be canceled show of the season
Last week’s Friday Night Lights was quite good. This week’s Friday Night Lights was amazing. The show is able to create a vividly real and heartbreaking image of small-town life in the south. Though I feel “small-town” is a bit of a misnomer. The town represented in the series isn’t really all that rural. It’s big enough to have its own television media, commercial chains (Applebees), even a Planned Parenthood. Perhaps “small-city” would fit better. Either way, what the area doesn’t have is much in the way of opportunity. Unless, of course, you play or coach football, or you have a son or friend or boyfriend or husband who plays or coaches football.
The shaky camerawork and washed out colors give Friday Night Lights an aura of sadness — a sense that there’s only one way out of this town: football. The Wire suggests the only way out of the inner city is through either playing ball, rap, or dealing (though really neither). Friday Night Lights paints small-town USA as the inner city of the American South, a location where poor whites and poor blacks are stuck together, with the only way to a better life being right through the end-zone. Still, Friday Night Lights doesn’t seem to have the unrelenting cynicism that The Wire has, which frankly, is kind of nice.
The greatest moment in the series thus far has been a line delivered by a cheerleader at the bedside of her recently paralyzed star-QB boyfriend:
“You are Jason Street and I am Lila Garity and everything is going to work out just like we planned it.”
The way the line is delivered, you can tell Lila almost believes what she says.
October 11th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
I love that they are still using Explosions in the Sky for their soundtrack.
October 11th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
i thought i wouldn’t like this show, because i’m not a big football fan (especially now that it’s on t.v. seven or eight nights a week). i was wrong. it’s great. the most surprising thing, based solely on its general subject matter?: the strong female characters…. i just realized it’s kinda like the sopranos in that way.