Friday Night Lights: remembering Texas
More from the Giant Backlog Of Stuff To Post...
When I started watching Friday Night Lights last November, I discovered almost immediately that the show pushes buttons I didn't know I still had. What follows is only tangentially about the show (though there are some S2 spoilers) and much more about my relationship with the show.
This show captures so much about my adolescence with an accuracy that rips me up inside a little bit. I grew up in Texas, and I hated it. In fact, I grew up in central Texas, which is where the show is shot (though not where it's set, which is further west), so that even the landscape is eerily familiar to me - and then add to that the way the houses look, the way people sound... Many of the characters remind me of people I knew in high school; they're not exact matches, but there's enough resemblance to sucker-punch me. Tim and Landry, in particular, startle me a little bit with how much they remind me of specific guys who were within a year or two of me in school.
And then of course the football thing. I was never in that milieu, never went to a game the whole time I was in high school; and yet football was a big part of my life, an immutable social given from elementary school on, because that's just how the town was. The team in uniform every Friday, cheerleaders and drill team girls (what the show calls "rally girls") all dressed up, mums at Homecoming, yard signs with names and numbers, three-quarters of the town closed and the other quarter deserted on Friday night... I know that world, I spent ten long years in that world. I was only ever on the margins of it; the closest analogue to me in the show is Landry - or not even Landry, the guys who are in a band with Landry. So watching the show is very much not like looking in a mirror, but it's a lot like being back in my parents' house: I become fourteen and fragile all over again.
Which maybe explains why the pilot ep made me cry the first time I watched it, which I really didn't expect going into it. It's true that well-done TV is more likely than almost anything else to move me to tears, but it's also true that from its very first moments the show put me in a weird and volatile emotional place. It is almost impossible for me to maintain emotional distance from this show. And I'm not sure I'd want to, really - but it can make it difficult to watch sometimes, or difficult to do anything else for a while after I've watched.
Eric and Tami Taylor are especially weird/awesome for me, because of the role they play in the show. Watching them try to help these kids, I find myself watching with double vision, seeing in them both my two favorite high school teachers, who rescued me from one crisis after another, and myself now, trying to help my own students to the best of my abilities and trying at the same time to preserve some boundaries, to create some time and space for myself outside of my students' inevitable ongoing dramas.
The writers have made some fairly serious missteps, I think, in terms of plotting the show; I'm thinking particularly of the Tyra/Landry MURDER OH NOES storyline, which I think was a pretty eye-rollingly bad idea in the abstract, although in practice it didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected it to (and believe me, nobody's more surprised about that than I am).
But in terms of character stuff? This show is amazing. I am perhaps most impressed with the dialogue, the naturalism of the writing and the delivery, and also with the writers' restraint: there's so much that the characters don't say, or can't. They don't talk about what they need to talk about, and not usually in a "these characters must keep each other in the dark for the plot to work" kind of way - they just really don't know how to say they stuff they need to say. And so the writers earn the moments where characters say "I love you" or try to explain to each other, sometimes incoherently, what they need or how they feel. Those moments are breakthroughs, the way saying those things is almost always a breakthrough in real life; the show refuses to make communication feel easy. I love that.
As viewers, we know so much more than any single character; we see how much the kids can't say to the adults in their lives. And that's what makes it so heroic and heartwarming when Eric and Tami manage to do or say the right thing, to guess what the right thing is for a particular kid at a particular moment.
Oh, show.
So. Yeah. Looking forward to the new season, and to finding or making time to vid the show.
When I started watching Friday Night Lights last November, I discovered almost immediately that the show pushes buttons I didn't know I still had. What follows is only tangentially about the show (though there are some S2 spoilers) and much more about my relationship with the show.
This show captures so much about my adolescence with an accuracy that rips me up inside a little bit. I grew up in Texas, and I hated it. In fact, I grew up in central Texas, which is where the show is shot (though not where it's set, which is further west), so that even the landscape is eerily familiar to me - and then add to that the way the houses look, the way people sound... Many of the characters remind me of people I knew in high school; they're not exact matches, but there's enough resemblance to sucker-punch me. Tim and Landry, in particular, startle me a little bit with how much they remind me of specific guys who were within a year or two of me in school.
And then of course the football thing. I was never in that milieu, never went to a game the whole time I was in high school; and yet football was a big part of my life, an immutable social given from elementary school on, because that's just how the town was. The team in uniform every Friday, cheerleaders and drill team girls (what the show calls "rally girls") all dressed up, mums at Homecoming, yard signs with names and numbers, three-quarters of the town closed and the other quarter deserted on Friday night... I know that world, I spent ten long years in that world. I was only ever on the margins of it; the closest analogue to me in the show is Landry - or not even Landry, the guys who are in a band with Landry. So watching the show is very much not like looking in a mirror, but it's a lot like being back in my parents' house: I become fourteen and fragile all over again.
Which maybe explains why the pilot ep made me cry the first time I watched it, which I really didn't expect going into it. It's true that well-done TV is more likely than almost anything else to move me to tears, but it's also true that from its very first moments the show put me in a weird and volatile emotional place. It is almost impossible for me to maintain emotional distance from this show. And I'm not sure I'd want to, really - but it can make it difficult to watch sometimes, or difficult to do anything else for a while after I've watched.
Eric and Tami Taylor are especially weird/awesome for me, because of the role they play in the show. Watching them try to help these kids, I find myself watching with double vision, seeing in them both my two favorite high school teachers, who rescued me from one crisis after another, and myself now, trying to help my own students to the best of my abilities and trying at the same time to preserve some boundaries, to create some time and space for myself outside of my students' inevitable ongoing dramas.
The writers have made some fairly serious missteps, I think, in terms of plotting the show; I'm thinking particularly of the Tyra/Landry MURDER OH NOES storyline, which I think was a pretty eye-rollingly bad idea in the abstract, although in practice it didn't bother me nearly as much as I expected it to (and believe me, nobody's more surprised about that than I am).
But in terms of character stuff? This show is amazing. I am perhaps most impressed with the dialogue, the naturalism of the writing and the delivery, and also with the writers' restraint: there's so much that the characters don't say, or can't. They don't talk about what they need to talk about, and not usually in a "these characters must keep each other in the dark for the plot to work" kind of way - they just really don't know how to say they stuff they need to say. And so the writers earn the moments where characters say "I love you" or try to explain to each other, sometimes incoherently, what they need or how they feel. Those moments are breakthroughs, the way saying those things is almost always a breakthrough in real life; the show refuses to make communication feel easy. I love that.
As viewers, we know so much more than any single character; we see how much the kids can't say to the adults in their lives. And that's what makes it so heroic and heartwarming when Eric and Tami manage to do or say the right thing, to guess what the right thing is for a particular kid at a particular moment.
Oh, show.
So. Yeah. Looking forward to the new season, and to finding or making time to vid the show.