That's Nice, Coach

The Excellent 'Friday Night Lights' Delves Far Beyond High School Football

ON THE advice of numerous television critics and my perceptive sister-in-law, Mrs. SC and I are working our way through season 1 of Friday Night Lights on DVD. And we're wondering why it took us so long to give this show a shot. Based on Buzz Bissinger's well regarded nonfiction book of the same name, the series follows the fictional Panthers, the football team from Dillon High School, in Texas, where the sport approaches religion. But saying the show is about high school football is like saying The Office is about paper. Friday Night Lights is about how children navigate a world that expects them to act like adults. It's about how powerful and transcendent something as pedestrian and banal as football can be in a faded town that doesn't have much left. And it's about how spouses who both love and see flaws in each other hold a marriage together among a community that has placed them under a microscope.

There's nothing revoluationay about Friday Night Lights. It is low-concept TV, quiet and unassuming; a straight-ahead drama that eschews fireworks in favor of intimate character studies, all wrapped around the weekly orgy of hope, pride, and desperation that comprises football in the Lone Star State. The writing is solid, the performances spot-on. With few exceptions, the young actors playing the high school roles hit all the right notes, and the relationship between Dillon's coach and his wife, well played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, respectively, is rendered absolutely perfectly. Rarely has contemporary marriage been written and shot so realistically.

As far away from the silliness of Desperate Housewives and the melodrama of Grey's Anatomy as one can get, Friday Night Lights uses its small subject to explore timeless themes with extraordinary effectiveness. We can't wait to finish season 1 and dive into TiVo's store of this season's episodes.

Rating: **** (of 5)

Comments

[Tom G, ballssticksstuff.com]

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose!