When I was a kid I was obsessed with a book about an American girl who loved football. She was the coolest girl ever and by the end of the book she even had a boyfriend, which made her a goddess in my pre-teen eyes. Unfortunately years of hard living in front of the TV have erased the name of said book from my memory, and Google is being a cagey bitch, so you’re going to have to live forever in eternal wonder as to what it was called. Poor you.
I read that book over and over and over again, ignoring my classmates’ urgings that I jump on board the Babysitters’ Club bandwagon, stopping only occasionally to steal my older sister’s copies of Dolly magazine. And thus it came to pass that I knew everything there was to know about Gridiron, and even started following the US season. After a gruelling selection process I chose the Miami Dolphins as my team – because dolphins are rad – and went about begging my parents to buy me an official team hat. I never got one, which is still a source of tension at family dinners.
Since that time my love of Gridiron lay dormant in the dark recesses of my heart, replaced by new obsessions with shoes and Law and Order: SVU. But now a TV show has come along and reawakened the football fan within. That show is called Friday Night Lights and it is awesome. In fact it is so awesome that it won an Emmy last week for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series. And the wonderful and handsome Kyle Chandler won a much-deserved gong for Best Actor in a Drama Series. Amen.
But Friday Night Lights is not about football. Sure, it is based around the trials and tribulations of a high school football team in fictional Dillon, Texas, and thus there are a lot of scenes featuring boys in tights with huge shoulders chasing a ball around a field. But the show is about more than that – it is about life in small town America, and about contemporary American society at large. Throughout the show’s five seasons the members of the Dillon Panthers and those around them - their fiercely dedicated coach, their girlfriends, parents, classmates and neighbours – deal with issues including unemployment, alcoholism, abortion, racism, drugs, school funding and religion. And that’s just in the first season.
In short Friday Night Lights is a brilliantly written, incredibly moving show with a ridiculously talented cast and a storyline millions of Americans can no doubt relate to. Plus it features this guy:
And I’d watch a show about a cardboard box that has no special powers if he featured in it for even one second.
Yet despite all of the above factors seemingly working in its favour, Friday Night Lights failed to garner enough ratings joy to keep it going past the fifth season. And it’s a wonder it even got that far. The show battled from the outset to attract an audience away from Two and a Half Douchebags and The Real Housewives of Buttfuck Hoville. And so like many amazing but commercially unviable shows before it (Arrested Development, anyone?) Friday Night Lights and the good folk of Dillon now live only in dreams and DVD box sets.
I strongly encourage those of you who enjoy intelligent, moving and highly entertaining programming to get your hands on Friday Night Lights if you haven’t already experienced its brilliance. I’m a little teary just thinking about it.