FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS

Friday Night Lights ends this summer. Actually production on the fifth season will end, and yes that means that the series Friday Night Lights will end on it's fifth season. Most people who don't use Ninjavideo or DirectTV haven't even seen the 4th season pilot episode. People who don't like change should not see that season, but let me tell you emphatically, this season is one of the most rewarding story arcs in the entire series.

Now it's time for me to tell you that if you haven't seen Friday Night Lights, you probably should. I don't push TV too often, and even when I do, I can't do it so definitively. In the case of non-comedic scripted television, it just takes too great a time commitment to match its rewards among broad an audience. So disregard me if you want, but know that Friday Night Lights is a good show whether you choose to watch it or not.

But Friday Night Lights. What a show. The TV Show, that is. Not the stupid football garbage about triumph, the human spirit, texas,and blah blah blah that Billy Bob Thorton was in. This is the case where the TV show far exceeds the scope and vision and quality of its secondary source (the movie), and even more so of its primary source (the book).And guess what, I'm totally indifferent about football! That's probably why the book and the movie don't resonate with me as much.

Well is this show one of those shows where it's supposed to be about football but is actually about something else like love, adolescence, family crisis, blah blah blah?

Well yes, it's a scripted drama.

Then why do you like it? Why is this show so special?
Hmmm... well it's about High School? In America? No, that's not it. Amer..Ameeri?

AMERICANA!

It's about Americana. This pastoral swath of America that has been idealized yet worked and reworked into an arrangement that is and has been resistant to stereotype and banalities about life. It is also very, very contemporary. Jake talks about Americana, and from his hyperlinks I get an idealized America that have less to do with America than a certain branch of cosmopolitanism that has co-opted denim as a fashion identity. When the denim comes off, and the CV's are read, you'll find that these exemplars of Americana that Jake uses are in essence: famous people who had found fame in America.   But we know better. We, the citizens of the United States, know that foreigners often times do "America" better than we do, but that similcrum of cultural identity isn't what really occurs to us under the broad swath of Americana. It is something more nuanced, sometimes more mundane, and often times more...unglamorous. Unglamorous? To be sure, America is absolutely rich with intrigue, exploit, opulence, but true to its rugged American form, it is a cultural identity riddled with moments of high aspiration and bottom gutter pleasure, uncouthness, boredom, irony, and constant overt cultural tension.

Friday Night Lights embodies all of this. It probes the banalities of high school life with an unsteady gaze shifting between realism and the outrageous in a pastoral landscape that always seems to be tinged in amber. It moves through common topics in serial dramas like: race, pregnancy, young adult life, old adult life and reintroduces them with immediacy of daily life increasing our expectations for the very same topics in a serial drama. It is surprising to find that Friday Night Lights, a likely vehicle for a drab interpretation of Americana, able to profoundly capture this sensibility in the most unlikely way.