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Bibliotech: We Are Friday Night Lights, And Friday Night Lights Is Us
Spotlight Series posted 2/6/2008 from ballhype.com
Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. Jay Busbee is the creator of the Southern sports blog Sports Gone South and the Atlanta sports blog Right Down Peachtree. (He was more Landry than Riggins in high school, but then, weren’t we all?) His essay is on the effects of Hollywood on Friday Night Lights, The Book. Enjoy.
It began, as the best stories do, with something both simple and universal: high school football.
In 1988, sportswriter H.G. Bissinger packed up his family and moved from Philadelphia, where he’d worked for the Inquirer, to the tiny West Texas town of Odessa. There, Bissinger found a town mad with passion for high school football, a town that could pack a twenty-thousand-seat stadium to capacity, a town that hoisted all its hopes and dreams onto the shoulders of seventeen-year-old kids.
The resulting book, Friday Night Lights, is a singular achievement that transcends the narrow genre limitations of a “football book.” It’s got about as much in common with Just Give Me The Damn Ball as “L.A. Confidential” has with “Big Momma’s House 2,” and it’s hands-down one of the best works of journalism of the last quarter-century.
Bissinger understood that there are universal truths in even the most mundane of worlds, and it would be tough to get more mundane than Odessa. There, however, Bissinger witnessed America in miniature; racial strife, misplaced educational priorities, and paper-thin dreams dominated the story.
“Odessa is the setting for this book,” Bissinger wrote, “but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness.”
Bissinger observed Gary Gaines, the coach who’d come home to “For Sale” signs on his lawn following a loss; Boobie Miles, the promising running back cast aside after a crippling injury; and all the rest of the Permian High School Panthers. He followed the Panthers from their first days of summer practice to the state playoffs, where…well, let’s not spoil things, but Permian’s story is the proverbial too-unbelievable-for-Hollywood tale.
Which is ironic, because Hollywood is exactly where the story picked up next. Permian High School begat Friday Night Lights the book, which begat Friday Night Lights the movie, which begat Friday Night Lights the TV series. Each version grew farther from the original, "real" story, but—in what qualifies as a minor miracle—each version maintains an essential integrity, even though TV series characters like Jason Street and Matt Saracen weren't even "born" when the events of the book took place. (ESPN.com followed up with the book’s subjects ten years after the book’s events, and documented the drastic changes that the book wrought on Odessa.)
But even as the quality remains stellar, the FNL story has suffered diminishing popular returns. The book was a bestseller, the movie a moderate success. The TV series has clung to life since inception in 2006. Despite almost universal critical acclaim, The New York Times has deemed Friday Night Lights a postmillennial failure as a television program because it hasn’t yet spawned a horde of product tie-ins (apparently missing the entire NBC store dedicated to the show, as well as the choice “What Would Riggins Do?” clothing line). But that assessment misses the point. TV shows franchise themselves out in order to appeal to as many different audiences as possible on the consumer’s terms.
Friday Night Lights doesn’t need to do that; it already exists in a place every single one of us knows (or understands) intimately. It embodies the hopes, fears, dreams and ambitions of anyone older than baby Grace, and not in some hokey wish-fulfillment 24/Sex and the City way. If we lived in Odessa (or, in the TV series, Dillon), we know right where we’d slot in—and maybe that’s the problem. Maybe it’s a little too real for us to take as entertainment.
Friday Night Lights has passed from the realm of story straight into mythology. Like the Western or the Mafia tale, the high school football saga is now an indelible element of Americana.
And like John Wayne and Al Pacino, while Bissinger didn't create the high school football story, he established its parameters. These stories take place in small towns, not suburbs or inner cities. Nobody's a stereotype; the quarterback, cheerleader, head coach, and geek all have shades to their characters. Everyone’s heart’s a little too close to the surface…and no one knows what the hell they’re going to do when football season’s over.
“At times, Odessa had the feel of lingering sadness that many isolated places have, a sense of the world orbiting around it at dizzying speed while it stood stuck in time,” Bissinger wrote. “But Odessa also evoked the kind of America…where anybody could be somebody, a place still clinging to all the tenets of the American Dream, however wobbly they had become.”
As long as there are high schools and football, there’ll be Friday Night Lights. Maybe the Tim Riggins and Boobie Miles of 2058 will be playing on a moonbase, but we’ll recognize them all the same.
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