First things first about Friday Night Lights – it’s not a show about football. It’s about as much about football as The Office is about a business, as much as Lost was about an island, as much as this post is about music. It’s a show about family and community and the resilience of the American spirit by way of a small town that clings to the world of football. It’s a show about the human experience, and the truth is, it’s a show for anyone who’s ever felt anything in their lives, and its final episode aired on NBC this week.
Fans of the show feel an equal urge to share and coddle, as if it were even possible to fall into the wrong hands. There’s no high-brow concept, no serialized plots, but just a slice-of-life lens to Middle America, and more than anything, it’s honest – a quality that’s good to find in any medium. Each episode feels organic (with the exception of The Season That Shall Not Be Named), and has the gamut to go anywhere, because it built itself on telling human stories, which runs a pretty infinite spectrum. The best scenes are the ones with seemingly no purpose – that don’t move any plot forward, and usually actually slow things down – they are the quiet moments that tap into a place so remote, like driving by your old high school, or finding old knicks-knacks in your childhood home. Whether it’s underscoring the pain in the phrase “See you at Christmas” when we were off to college, wide shots of that big ol’ Texas skyline, or just brief glimpses of private interactions, there are always moments so casually beautiful that you worry breathing too hard could make them go away.
It may make me a bit of a loser to admit this, but I am genuinely sad to see these characters and world of Dillon, TX go. It’s a show at times as quotable as literature, as transformative as film, and as intimate as a play. It’s a series that the New York Times calls “great – and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee.” A show that frequented Bob Dylan and The National to score some its most memorable scenes also changed the way you hear Explosions in the Sky, forever. Tony Lucca’s version of the much-covered Daniel Johnston song “Devil Town” played a prominent role in the narrative of the show, as it capped both its first and final seasons.
The song itself is a lazy Sunday afternoon, a walk through your town’s fair, with overpriced food and mediocre art on the kind of sunny day when the streets are littered with more strollers and teenagers than you’ve seen all year. But it’s a fitting bookend for a series that holds those conflicting feelings of warm appreciation for where you came from with the bittersweet knowledge that you were gonna leave and never truly come back. It’s the unofficial anthem of one of the greatest series television has ever seen. So whether you’re waking this Sunday to your refuge from Carmageddon, opening the blinds to a Brooklyn skyline or the Parisian sun, may one idea this morning jointly stir us all – clear eyes, full hearts, and What Would Riggins Do?
