Eureka!
There's an review by Christopher Kelly of "this new hit drama about high school football could be great-and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting"* Friday Night Lights in the January 2007 issue of Texas Monthly, and he finds a way to describe the show like I haven't been able to for months.
"Friday Night Lights is howlingly pretentious and excruciatingly mannered; it's a portrait of small-town Texas life filtered through a Greenwich Village art house...As for all these otherwise intelligent people so blindly falling for the hype, well, that would be plainly hilarious if it didn't also speak to a much larger cultural arrogance at work. For here is a show that allows the East and West Coast intelligentsia to think they truly "get" Texas without upsetting a single preconceived notion about that place."
The thing that most bothered me was that I had friends from Texas who talked about how the show knocked the Texas stereotype that we all ride horses. But in fact, as Kelly mentions, it just reinforces the small-town, cowboy-boot wearing, big-truck driving, football-obsessed misconception that seems to perpetuate the minds of anyone who has never set foot in the state. And I suppose it took a seasoned movie reviewer from Texas to make the observation I've been struggling to construct since the show's debut. I'm just glad someone finally did.
*review by Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times
"Friday Night Lights is howlingly pretentious and excruciatingly mannered; it's a portrait of small-town Texas life filtered through a Greenwich Village art house...As for all these otherwise intelligent people so blindly falling for the hype, well, that would be plainly hilarious if it didn't also speak to a much larger cultural arrogance at work. For here is a show that allows the East and West Coast intelligentsia to think they truly "get" Texas without upsetting a single preconceived notion about that place."
The thing that most bothered me was that I had friends from Texas who talked about how the show knocked the Texas stereotype that we all ride horses. But in fact, as Kelly mentions, it just reinforces the small-town, cowboy-boot wearing, big-truck driving, football-obsessed misconception that seems to perpetuate the minds of anyone who has never set foot in the state. And I suppose it took a seasoned movie reviewer from Texas to make the observation I've been struggling to construct since the show's debut. I'm just glad someone finally did.
*review by Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times