You can’t blame NBC for thinking that it had a winner on its hands when “Friday Night Lights” had its premiere in 2006. The football drama translated the nostalgia and longing of small-town existence into moments of surprising sweetness and grace, while embracing dramatic improvisation and documentary-style camera work that placed this naturally humble tale at the stylistic forefront of TV. And it did this in the service of its central story, which, along with dissecting the harsh continual sorting of winner from loser in American life, thoughtfully explored 1) the little triumphs and defeats of high school; 2) the perils of striving for an egalitarian marriage; 3) the trials of young love; 4) the charms and flaws of a small town; 4) the charms and flaws of people who live in small towns; and 5) the uncertain futures of young people with big (and often delusional) dreams.
What “Friday Night Lights” does, though, better than any other show, is capture the natural narcissism of teenagers. It tenderly demonstrates the rewards of connection and shows how collaboration toward a common cause ultimately holds more promise than the shallow pursuit of individual greatness. “Friday Night Lights” pulls this off largely thanks to the low-key appeal of the show’s hero, Coach Eric Taylor, played by Kyle Chandler, i.e. the only man on the face of this earth who could gruffly half-whisper the words “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!” to a room full of adolescents in football pads and still manage to cue the waterworks every time.
Yet thanks to disappointing numbers in its first two seasons, “Friday Night Lights” was farmed out by NBC to DirecTV, which showed each new season in the fall, after which they were replayed by NBC in the spring. So the fifth and final season of “Friday Night Lights” has already wrapped up on DirecTV, even as it’s now completing a zombie victory lap on the network. It’s still hard not to wonder why a show so humble and all-American has struggled so mightily to attract viewers. Where are the cheering, breathless crowds?
These days, you’ll probably find them singing along with the precocious teenagers of “Glee.” That show covers much of the same thematic ground — high school, troubled marriages, the joys of teamwork — but in a far more spectacular, flamboyant manner. The colorful musical dramedy has been a huge hit since it shoved its way onto the schedule in 2009 in a violent burst of sequins and jazz hands. If “Friday Night Lights” is as American as apple pie, then “Glee” is more like Ben & Jerry’s deep-fried caramel-apple whipped-cream-swirl ice cream (which doesn’t exist, but really should): a dense, flavorful, genre-bending extravaganza of one-upmanship, raging hormones, teary confessions and lip-glossed warbling.
And in so many ways, “Glee” is exactly the kind of oddball, underdog show that’s impossible not to root for. Tormented high-school geeks gain social traction by recreating twisted, show-choir versions of Madonna’s greatest hits, and in the end, they all learn a Big, Important Lesson. What could be better? How about gay boys who come out of the closet by singing Beyoncé? Or self-involved divas who get their comeuppance, then mournfully peruse the Barbra Streisand songbook for succor? Or a choir teacher who’s a boy-band wannabe and who falls for an obsessive-compulsive, germaphobic school counselor, even though he’s locked in a bad marriage to a controlling, chirpy sorority girl?
The “Glee” pilot was not only thoroughly modern when compared with the old-fashioned meandering of “Friday Night Lights”; it also represented an equally bold choice by its creators: Take the ups and downs of high school and marriage and ambition and translate them into tightly choreographed, slightly manic choral madness. The “Glee” premiere made “High School Musical” look like a collection of clumsy song-and-dance routines from “Happy Days.” And it made “Friday Night Lights” look like a slow, tear-stained descent into small-town hell.
But “Glee” has never quite managed to match the raw energy and pitch-perfect majesty of its premiere. If “Glee” mines the same interplay of individualism and team spirit as “Friday Night Lights,” it does so with none of the latter’s subtlety and not even a smidgeon of its humility — not to mention even the slightest effort toward consistency or restraint or slow-burning story lines or understated dialogue. Yet “Glee” is a huge hit.
The most obvious explanation for this disparity in ratings, of course, is that the show’s flashy, demanding style — a dizzying grab bag of face glitter, snide rejoinders, hip thrusts and earnest soliloquies — naturally upstages the unpretentious modesty of “Friday Night Lights,” with its muddy football fields in the rain, stuttering apologies made to girlfriends always a little too late (such realism!) and gentle bickering between married couples on a threadbare couch.
But the real difference between the two shows lies in how each one mines the conflicting forces of the individual versus society, narcissism versus selflessness, winners versus losers. This premise is utterly in step with the times, of course, and doesn’t concern only teenagers. Many have argued that narcissism is the defining affliction of our age, whether evidenced by current pop lyrics or by research on the uses of social media. But while “Friday Night Lights” and “Glee” each explores the solipsism of those formative years with feverish enthusiasm, the particulars of each show’s message could not be more different.
Despite Coach Taylor’s inspiring talk of victory for those who fight together, “Friday Night Lights” is essentially a show about losing. In fact, aside from “The Wire,” no show on television has painted quite so vivid a picture of the agony of defeat. In its pilot episode, the star quarterback, Jason Street (Scott Porter), suffers a career-ending injury that lands him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Over the course of the first three seasons, the smack-talking hotshot running back Brian (Smash) Williams (Gaius Charles) goes from dreaming of a full college scholarship and glory in the N.F.L. to accepting a walk-on position at Texas A&M, where his pro-football ambitions seem likely to fade. Even our hero, Coach Taylor, finds himself marginalized at the run-down, underfinanced East Dillon High after mixed success at Dillon High. For the denizens of Dillon, trading in big dreams for lives of quiet compromise amounts to just another local rite of passage, as common as breaking out or getting braces.
“Glee,” by contrast, pays lip service to teamwork, but the unintended moral of its story is the opposite — that you’re really not much of a star until you’re the Star. For all of the deaf children singing poignant arrangements of “Imagine,” for all of the lovable antics of the wheelchair-bound Artie (Kevin McHale), the show choir’s leader, Rachel Berry (Lea Michele), is placed front and center, over and over again.
Never mind the fact that, unless you’re Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra or Barbra Streisand, does anyone genuinely want to hear you perform week after week? (Let alone perform ballads from the Barbra Streisand songbook so often.) “Glee” fans, like “American Idol” fans before them, are highly tolerant of repetition in support of stardom. And Rachel simply must be placed in the glittering spotlight each episode, so that all of her little letdowns in love and life add up to something — specifically, something that involves blinking her wet, saucer eyes up at the spotlights, fluttering her gigantic eyelashes and then forming the same Michael Bolton-inspired Fist of Passion: Reach high with jazz hand, pause, then close eyes while pulling hand down into devastating clenched fist.
Sure, the plucky chorus geeks of “Glee” offer a steady flow of heartfelt (and unrelenting, and tedious) talk of supporting one another and giving voice to the voiceless, typically in a speech to the whole school, in which we are told, at the speech’s conclusion, “This song sums up exactly how I feel.” (As if we didn’t just suffer through the painful details of how you feel already.) Their outsize verbosity and precociousness is like a freakish clown-show version of the subdued mumbling of the teenagers on “Friday Night Lights.”
Above all, the “Glee” kids know, in their heart of hearts, that once you wriggle your way into the spotlight, you can never, ever let anyone shove you out again — a survival-of-the-fittest grab for fame that’s echoed on “American Idol,” “The Voice” and every other talent competition on the small screen. (Including, soon, “The Glee Project,” on which singers compete to appear on “Glee.” These kids clearly intend to do whatever it takes to be big, bright, shining stars forever and ever, amen.
“Friday Night Lights” also offers rousing speeches about teamwork, but they’re disjointed and self-conscious and muttered in smelly locker rooms or dank hallways or in that awkward space between a squeaky, ripped screen door and the threshold of a run-down living room. Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the scrappy-dork quarterback equivalent of Rachel Berry, gets his shot at the big time, leads the team to a state championship and is later unceremoniously pushed out of his first-string position by a young, arrogant rival. Saracen falters, recovers and then stutters his way out of town, to art school in Chicago. Not only doesn’t the kid rise to football glory after high school; he doesn’t even hold onto his position while he’s in high school.
And — perhaps most incredibly of all— rather than looming around Dillon forever, the lead characters of each season of “Friday Night Lights” have, one by one, moved away from town and been replaced by younger kids. If there has ever been a clearer stand against solipsism and center-of-the-universe thinking on television, I can’t think of it.
The real message of “Friday Night Lights” is a message about the joy of little things: the awkward thrills of a first kiss; the strange blessing of an unexpected rainstorm on a lonely walk home from a rough football practice; the startling surge of nostalgia incited by the illumination of football-stadium lights just as the autumn sun is setting; the rush of gratitude, in an otherwise mundane moment, that comes from realizing that this (admittedly flawed) human being that you’re squabbling with intends to have your back for the rest of your life. If “Glee” is about expressing yourself, believing in yourself and loving yourself all the way to a moment of pure adrenaline-fueled glory, then “Friday Night Lights” is about breathing in and appreciating the small, somewhat-imperfect moments that make up an average life.
It’s not hard to see why “Glee” would be more popular right now, but its moment, like the moment of glory it celebrates, feels likely to come and go. Recognizing the impermanence of such moments, “Friday Night Lights” embraces the rough edges, the fumbling, the understated beauty and uncertainty of the everyday. It’s rare for a TV show to acknowledge that happiness is a fragile, transient thing. Although the tenure of “Friday Night Lights” may have proved just as fleeting, its exquisite snapshots of ordinary life won’t fade from our memories so quickly.
source: nytimes.com
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