Friday Night Lights, season 1, episode 1: "Pilot"

Coincident to my re-reading and -viewing of Friday Night Lights I’ve been reading a book by Michael Chabon called Manhood for Amateurs, a collection of non-fiction essays about his thoughts and experiences as an adult man, husband, father and pop culture obsessive, and a few sentences made me think about Coach Eric Taylor (played by Kyle Chandler) in the Friday Night Lights pilot episode.

In an essay called Faking It Chabon quotes a Rudyard Kipling poem (If) whose sentiment still informs at least somewhat an idea both boys and girls have of what it is to be a man: “To keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.” Chabon wonders if there really an operative difference between keeping one’s head and merely appearing to do so but concludes that the differences are probably moot: “There is also the more subtle damage that is done repeatedly to boys who grow up learning from their fathers and the men around them the tragic lesson that failure is not a human constant but a kind of aberration of gender, a flaw in a man, to be concealed.”

These lines are apropos because it’s not clear for most of this first episode of Friday Night Lights which sort of man (Kipling or Chabon) Coach Taylor is. He’s a pretty stoic, Kipling-esque guy for a lot of this episode, mostly keeping any doubts or conflicts he has pretty close. This might be because he’s pragmatic enough to recognize that the community of Dillon, Texas will accept nothing less from him. He gets not-so-subtle assessments of his readiness and declarations of expectations from both the local radio sports show and in person. At a rally hosted by booster Buddy Garrity at his newest car dealership, townspeople mince no words: we want to win championships.

He might be playing it cool because he knows, as a coach who scouts opposing teams reminds him, that when expectations are this high he has nowhere to go but down. The Dillon Panthers open the first season bearing "expectations" (a word that recurs through both the episode and the series). They're "the #1 team in Texas," per Panther Football Radio's Slammin' Sammy Meade. The local paper’s headline rhetorically asks if this year’s team is the best ever and Sports Illustrated has named the Panthers the number one high school football team in Texas.

We also learn early in the episode that Taylor has been with the Panthers for six years, and that he coached senior quarterback Jason Street in pee wee league, and has been his quarterback coach throughout Street's freshman and junior varsity years. Street is seemingly beloved by the entire town, adults and children alike, resolutely faithful to his girlfriend, unfailingly polite and possibly the best young quarterback ever scouted by Notre Dame. The only exception to the otherwise universal adoration of him is that the mayor, Lucy Rodell, thinks he’s too polite and prescribes early Black Sabbath to make him mean.

(Even Matt Saracen, sophomore, caretaker of his grandmother, and distant-second-string quarterback, and occasional holder for extra points, seems to respect the guy, though it’s not clear that football is as important to Saracen as it is to everyone else. He dutifully practices target throws in his front yard, but his best friend Landry suspects that his interest in football is more a “daddy love me thing” than anything else. The coaches don't take him very seriously, either; during a practice one sends him to dig something out of the trash.)

After it's established that Jason Street doesn't have an arrogant or unkind bone in his body, his neck is broken in a bad tackle during the first game of the season. This plot twist raises the emotional stakes of the show and signals unequivocally that this show is going to side with Chabon; that bad, difficult things are going to happen; and they will happen because difficult things, even failure, are constant. They're the normal. And that this show's measure of all its characters, but particularly its men, will not be their imperviousness to hardship, but their weathering of it. The closing minutes of the episode are set to a prayer of Coach Taylor's that may as well be the show's mission statement:

Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all at some point in our lives fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special, that it can be taken from us, and that when it is taken from us we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested.

**

Trivia/Historic Moments

• Panther Football Radio is 470 AM.
• The Westerby Mustangs are opponents in first episode
• Jason Street's pass completion rate going into the season was 72% which, per Sammy Meade, was not just the best in the state, but in the nation.
• Street breaks his neck tackling a Westerby player named “Chandler”
• Landry mentions wanting to start a Christian speed metal band
• Jason Street: 6’2", 190 lbs
• On the field, Smash wears #20, Riggins is #33, Street #6, and Saracen #7
• First use of "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose."

Notable Music

• Explosions in the Sky, "Remember Me As A Time Of Day" (used three times)
• Explosions in the Sky, "From West Texas"
• Explosions in the Sky, "Your Hand in Mine (with strings)"
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Gold Lion"

Friday Night Lights, Chapter 1: Odessa

Chapter one of the book opens on a Monday morning in mid-August, 1988, as coaches and players arrive at the Permian High School field house for the first time that season.  The bills of the coach’s hats are still stiff, the sweatbands still unstained.  The field house smells of furniture polish: “the dust and dirt of the previous season were forever wiped away.”

Wiped away, but not forgotten or ignored.  Coach Gary Gaines and his staff assemble the 55 boys that comprise the Panthers to remind them not just of their elite status in the school and community but their responsibility to the Panther legacy, though verbalizing both sentiments seems redundant.  The field house’s Permian Wall of Fame immortalizes every Panther to have been name All State; a city council proclamation honoring a state championship team hangs on another wall; the county library’s history of Panther football is longer and more detailed than that of the city.

The town always has high expectations for its high school football, but is unusually excited about the 1988 team.  A roster of experienced players was returning.  Boosters regarded the team as the most talented in a decade and the Associated Press picked the team to win State.

The 1988 season at this point is as much a blank slate as Odessa itself was a hundred years before.  Located 350 miles east of Dallas, the city was created by a group of speculators from Ohio.  They sold the 14,000 mostly barren acres that would make up the city on pitches and promises that ranged from highly conditional to outright lies.  At least 10 families of German Methodists from Pennsylvania did settle in Odessa, but they were soon clashing with the ranchers and cowboys who were already there. In 1900, the city had 381 residents.  Ten years later there would be 1,178. By 1920 the population would be under 800 again. 

There are a lot of references this chapter to the general unpleasantness of the geography around and the difficulty of life in Odessa.  Directly quoting Bissinger:

• “...gaping land that filled the heart with far more sorrow than… encouragement”
• “virtually impossible to farm anything”
• “physically wretched”
• “lacked a fantastic amount”
• “a place that cried out daily for alcohol”

He also describes regular droughts that made ranching also almost impossible; the land being so flat that there weren’t even trees tall enough to hang cattle rustlers and horse thieves (they were shot instead); and on top of this misery, a flu epidemic in 1919 that killed so many people so quickly that there weren’t enough healthy ones to dig graves

Odessa is situated in the Permian Basin, though, and in the mid 1920s oil was discovered in West Texas.  The population boomed, and a who new set of miseries befell Odessa: wild overcrowding, lawlessness, prostitution, chronic diarrhea, bad water, and streets so thick with mud that oxen were required to transport drilling equipment through town, and an overwhelming rat infestation.

Bissinger describes the boom-and-bust cycles of the next decades as “a drug-induced euphoria followed by the lows of the bust and the realization that everything you made during the boom had had just been lost.”  Odessa became a place where people flocked when there was money to be made, but a place they got the hell away from quickly once the money dried up.  In 1987, Money magazine called it the 5^th worst place to live in the country.  The next year, the year the book takes place, Psychology Today took into account its rates of alcoholism, crime, suicide and divorce and named Odessa the country’s 7^thmost stressful city.

In the book's preface, Bissinger emphasized the universality of his story; this was not going to be a Texas story necessarily, but an American one.  He returns to that theme near the end of the first chapter.  Odessa may have invested its heart, soul and faith in high school football but it was just doing with the Permian Panthers what every other culturally or geographically isolated city does with something.  As Gaines addresses his players in the opening hours of the 1988 pre-season he knows this won’t be his team for long, in a week he’ll be sharing it with the whole town.  He also knows that a successful post-season run is the least of Odessa’s expectations. While a trip to the state championship will mean euphoria and joy, an unsuccessful regular season will bring anger and disappointment.

***

I’m not going to guess at intent on the part of the TV show’s writers and directors, but I am going to point out elements in the book that seem like the show maybe references or calls back to, even if it's obscure.  For instance, the Permian Wall of Fame in the team’s field house has an analog in the show.  In addition:

• The local oil industry’s boom and bust history, and the out-of-towners who come to exploit the former part of the cycle, gets referenced in the first season.
• The first chapter references a giant sand storm symbolic of the difficulty of life in Odessa, somewhat like the tornado that ravages Dillon in the second season and precedes conflicts between beloved characters.
• A local historical figure in the book is a doctor named J.D. Cone, whose gets an alliterative descendant in third season quarterback phenomenon J.D. McCoy.
• A discussion of the town’s very high rate of violent crime and murder can’t help but bring to mind a grisly murder in the second season.
• The image of someone flying over Odessa in a plane at night.
• The Permian Panthers are starting their season with expectations and pressure as great as those facing television’s Dillon Panthers.

Friday Night Lights: Preface

The preface to H.G. Bissinger's book pretty short, and mostly background information.  Bissinger was in his mid-thirties, married, raising two small twin boys, and working for the Philadelphia Inquirer when he set out to find a story of a high school sports team “keeping a town together.”  It was an idea, he writes, that had been with him since he was thirteen.

He doesn’t detail the process that led him to settle on the city, but in July 2008 he quit his job and moved his family to Odessa, Texas.  He describes his early impressions of Odessa and the surrounding area in pretty bleak terms: 

• “Severely depressed”
• Feeling “powerless and insignificant” driving through West Texas plains
• Rows of oil field equipment sitting unused
• Grimy hotels without customers
• Buildings belonging to banks
• Closed down movie theatres
• An abandoned JC Penny
• Some restaurants, more pawnshops

Even the nicer, more apparently affluent parts of Odessa don’t seem that comfortable. The east part of the city has shiny malls and comfortable ranch houses, though many of them have FOR SALE signs.  There is a south part of Odessa, too, populated mainly by minorities.

I’m not going to seek much information that Bissinger doesn’t provide, but in the preface he does not mention how big a city Odessa is (as of the 2010 census, it had 99,940 residents).  He does emphasize, though, that on Friday nights during football season the Permian Panthers play to crowds that exceed 20,000 in a stadium (pictured at the top of this post) that 

…rises out of nowhere, two enormous flanks of concrete with a sunken field in between.  Gazing into that stadium, looking up into those rows that can hold twenty thousand, you wonder what it must be like on a Friday night, when the lights are on and the heart and soul of the town pours out over that field, across the endless plains.

The preface closes with some disclaimers.  This town is not just about football, and these kids are not just players.  Bissinger is encountering Odessa during a bad time for the city, and he wonders what the people think about race, about education, about the economy, about the presidential election that will happen later in the year.  And he wonders what it costs for the team to hold the town on its shoulders.  Near the end of the preface, Bissinger quotes a man whose son had gone to Permian.

Athletics… ends for people.  But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don’t apply.  We build this false atmosphere.  When it’s over and the harsh reality sets in, that’s the real joke we play on people… Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that.  It’s Camelot for them, but there’s even life after it.

This notion that football can be transcendent, but that life outside of and after it is harsh and difficult will be a major theme in the television series, too, keeping its portrayal of smaller-town, prayerful southerners from getting too romantic for too long. 

Introduction: A Comprehensive Review of Friday Night Lights

Friday Night Lights, the story of a West Texas high school football team and surrounding community was originally a nonfiction book by HG Bissinger published in 1990. A film adaptation, co-written and directed by Peter Berg, followed in 2004. A television series created and executive produced by Berg, but bearing little overt resemblance to either the book or the film, began airing in 2006.

The show had one full season on NBC. The production of its second was cut short when the Writer's Guild went on strike in November 2007. When the strike resolved in February 2008, some shows which had been interrupted went back into production, though Friday Night Lights was not one of them. This made NBC's subsequent announcement that it had renewed the show for a third season, to be co-financed with DirecTV, a surprise. The satellite tv service aired the new episodes first. The third season began on NBC in January, 2009. In March, NBC announced that it and DirecTV would share the costs of a fourth and fifth season.

In retrospect, it was probably best that the show never completed that second season, because it's not very good. Even the season's defenders don't think much of the murder subplot, but I think it says a lot that the murder subplot isn't the most ridiculous thing that happens. I'll go into more detail later on, though, when I watch the season again. One of the best things the show ever did was pick up at season three as though most of season 2 hadn't happened. I don't mean that in a snarky way, because as much as I love season 1, seasons 3-5 of Friday Night Lights is the show at it's sustained best. It's a miracle of commerce that the show even got a three more seasons, but what the cast and crew did with those seasons is a creative miracle. The show isn't for all tastes (aside from all the football, it's an irony-free melodrama) but if you're on its wavelength it lands hard. The show is a delivery device for cathartic crying.

Calling Friday Night Lights a franchise requires a fair amount of qualification. For spawning a film and five-season television series, the book doesn't have much of a narrative. It follows the Permian Panthers through a football season, but most of it is devoted to describing the history and politics of its Midland-Odessa setting. The portrayal is not especially flattering, either. Apparently, threats of physical violence dissuaded Bissinger from making return trips to Odessa after the book was published. He also published a short follow-up in 2012 that focused on his relationship with one of the book's characters in the years since publication.

I recall the film as a lesson in the dangers of faithful adaptation. It uses the book's major narrative events, but it's the local anthropology that is the more memorable and defining aspect of the book. I remember the film also pulling some punches that the book does not, perhaps out of respect for its still-living, real-life characters. The television series solved both shortcomings. It fictionalized the setting and characters and is also longer and more expansive, allowing the book's more subtle and/or damning themes to be more effectively translated.

Friday Night Lights is also an improbable multimedia entertainment brand in that its themes more often have to do with failure and loss, rather than triumph. A premise of the book is that each year the high school football team carries all the hopes and dreams of a community that doesn't have much else going for it. The team's coaches and players are the local royalty when they're winning, but the consequences of loss can be brutal. For all the adoration the town has for team's players, all three versions of the story make life for ex-players seem pretty bleak.

In spite of the differences, there's still continuity between the three incarnations of Friday Night Lights, and part of this project will be to trace their common themes. I plan to cover the book, film and series. Since the show is the longest, most time consuming piece, most of the project will be devoted to that. I'll post at least brief summaries and observations about each episode, and I do the same for each chapter of the book, rather than tackle it as a whole.

I'm going to rely mainly on the broadcast versions of the show. The first season, and to lesser extents the second and third, was scored with distinctive music licensed from a lot of bands, but primarily Explosions in the Sky (who also wrote original music for the film, and three-quarters of whom are from the region of Texas where Friday Night Lights takes place). For the DVD releases, though, a lot of this music was re-recorded (a Death Cab For Cutie song prominently used in the third season was also replaced for the DVD release), and the tone and effect of some scenes is somewhat altered as a result. I'll note especially significant uses of licensed music, and may also do some spot checks with the DVDs and streaming versions to see if it was retained.