texas forever
Given my love of (CFL) football and my deep appreciation for the all-purpose utility and evocative nature of the word "y'all," it will come as little surprise to any of you that I am a giant fan of Friday Night Lights. As a point of comparison, the only other show that I own on DVD in its entirety (and will quote without prompting) is The West Wing, and you KNOW how I feel about that.
If you haven't ever watched FNL, first off, you're too late and you're a jerk, because if you had watched it while it was in first-runs, we might still have new episodes today, but nooooooooo, it was on on a Friday and you had better things to do and you don't really like football and you don't understand small towns or Texas, and frankly, I'm not sure why we're still friends. But if you're looking to redeem yourself, you can always talk to the fine folks at Amazon and secure yourself a copy of the DVDs. Go ahead. I'll wait. (Well, I won't, but you can catch up with me when you're done Season 1. The internet's not going anywhere.)
If you have watched FNL, I can only hope that you've seen the finale by now, so you won't be all judgy when I tell you that I was at a fine pitch of angst the whole way through. It was that point of emotion where you know you're on the verge of tears, but since you can't pin the crying on any one thing, it never really happens, you know? You just get all tense and your eyes glisten and (if you're anything like me) by the end of 90 minutes you have the worst headache ever from trying to hold it all back.
The finale was everything I wanted from the show. Good football, an end to the story arcs I cared about most, and all the characters I'd loved doing what I wanted to see them do one last time (Landry giving relationship advice in his garage is the FNL version of Lucy's psychiatry booth in Peanuts, and Saracen is the eternal Charlie Brown). It was completely, utterly satisfying.
But why? Was it satisfying because I love it? Was it just good TV--the perfect end to a world I've idealized? Or did it feel right in the same way that the show has felt right all along to a football-watching girl from Saskatchewan: because it showed the real world both as it often is and as I wished it would be?
A lot of people criticize finales for wrapping everything up too neatly--in this case, for moving us through more action than the lives of these characters would ever really see. But on the other hand, there's been a dedicated core of FNL fans in my group of friends ever since we discovered the Season 1 DVDs, and if someone was to film our finale right now, we wouldn't be much different. Some characters have moved on. A new cohort has cycled in. Careers have changed and progressed. Relationships have begun and ended and evolved. We didn't murder anyone in Season 2, but we did win State this year (or the dodgeball equivalent, anyway).
And when I think about all those changes, I find myself right back on that knife's edge--not crying or needing to, but feeling right full up, y'all, because there's just so much there.
Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can't lose.
If you haven't ever watched FNL, first off, you're too late and you're a jerk, because if you had watched it while it was in first-runs, we might still have new episodes today, but nooooooooo, it was on on a Friday and you had better things to do and you don't really like football and you don't understand small towns or Texas, and frankly, I'm not sure why we're still friends. But if you're looking to redeem yourself, you can always talk to the fine folks at Amazon and secure yourself a copy of the DVDs. Go ahead. I'll wait. (Well, I won't, but you can catch up with me when you're done Season 1. The internet's not going anywhere.)
If you have watched FNL, I can only hope that you've seen the finale by now, so you won't be all judgy when I tell you that I was at a fine pitch of angst the whole way through. It was that point of emotion where you know you're on the verge of tears, but since you can't pin the crying on any one thing, it never really happens, you know? You just get all tense and your eyes glisten and (if you're anything like me) by the end of 90 minutes you have the worst headache ever from trying to hold it all back.
The finale was everything I wanted from the show. Good football, an end to the story arcs I cared about most, and all the characters I'd loved doing what I wanted to see them do one last time (Landry giving relationship advice in his garage is the FNL version of Lucy's psychiatry booth in Peanuts, and Saracen is the eternal Charlie Brown). It was completely, utterly satisfying.
But why? Was it satisfying because I love it? Was it just good TV--the perfect end to a world I've idealized? Or did it feel right in the same way that the show has felt right all along to a football-watching girl from Saskatchewan: because it showed the real world both as it often is and as I wished it would be?
A lot of people criticize finales for wrapping everything up too neatly--in this case, for moving us through more action than the lives of these characters would ever really see. But on the other hand, there's been a dedicated core of FNL fans in my group of friends ever since we discovered the Season 1 DVDs, and if someone was to film our finale right now, we wouldn't be much different. Some characters have moved on. A new cohort has cycled in. Careers have changed and progressed. Relationships have begun and ended and evolved. We didn't murder anyone in Season 2, but we did win State this year (or the dodgeball equivalent, anyway).
And when I think about all those changes, I find myself right back on that knife's edge--not crying or needing to, but feeling right full up, y'all, because there's just so much there.
Clear eyes. Full hearts. Can't lose.