Over the course of the past 25 years, the story of high schoolers playing football in a seemingly unimportant corner of the United States has unexpectedly become a beloved multi-media franchise spanning the worlds of non-fiction publishing, Hollywood motion pictures, and network TV.
In the town of Odessa, Texas, located smack dab in the middle of the dusty West Texas plains, a population learned to live and die with the success of the local high school football team. Young boys grew ups learning the importance of the team that they would one day sacrifice their bodies and maybe their souls to. And these boys did so well on the field that they made the entire state of Texas stand up and take notice. And eventually, word of the fierce and fearsome play of the Permian Panthers reached the ears of a Philadelphia newspaperman, who saw both the team and the town that created them as perfect exemplars of a certain strain of Americana, one that was manifest throughout the country but was perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Odessa. And it was then that the story of the Permian Panthers, the gridiron-obsessed fans, the depressed town, and the Friday night lights would begin to be told to the rest of the world.
TAKE ONE – THE BOOK
H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s book Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, and a Dream was released in the fall of 1990, about two years after the author moved to Odessa to begin research. As a piece of literature, it is compulsively readable. The sheer amount of information, down to the smallest detail, that Bissinger gives the reader on every sentence on every page, is rivaled only by the eminently literate way he conveys it. It’s anything but cold and clinical. Instead, Bissinger makes every chapter feel like a great short story, with evocative imagery and poetic turns of phrase that should make other journalists envious. It has even been assigned in high school English classes alongside works like The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird as an example of, if not a Great American Novel, than a Great American Literary Accomplishment, as if Boobie Miles, Brian Chavez, and the rest of the boys of the 1988 Permian High varsity football team were the vivid and lifelike creations of an imaginative mind in the vein of a Captain Ahab or a Huck Finn. Which, of course, they are, in a way. When I try to conceptualize the role a non-fiction writer plays in the “creating” of his or her “characters,” I am reminded of the famous anecdote involving Michelangelo, who, when asked how he managed to create the David, was said to have proclaimed that “I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.” A great work of journalism strips away all the extraneous information, everything that clouds the audience’s mind and prevents them from seeing the essential truth at the heart of the subject matter. Expertly, Bissinger carves out of the marble of West Texas the angels that would go on to lodge themselves in the memories of all that read the book. In his way, he has preserved the fleeting fall of 1988 for decades afterwards, and taken the experience of giving everything one had on that field and exploded it to millions of people around the planet, readers who might find themselves engrossed in the story even in places where football means something else, or nothing at all.
Friday Night Lights uses the story of a single season in Odessa, Texas as a way of looking at the town as a whole, and by extension, towns like it across America. The topics it explores are likely too many to truly do justice to here, but it particularly delves into the Reagan-era racism that was institutionalized in much of America, Southern towns in particular (a subject not commonly addressed in mass media, unlike the racism of the ’50s or ’60s); depression and unemployment brought on by the monoculture of the West Texas oil industry; and educational standards, and how they are compromised by the gratifying, and yet ultimately hollow, pursuit of athletic achievement. Each chapter of the book covers both the events in Odessa over a brief period of time (say, one week leading up to a big game), as well as another topic — something either intangible (the conservatism of small town America), sociologically specific (the cultural divisions between Odessa and its wealthier sister city Midland), or even just a biographic profile of a single player.
There is no central human protagonist of Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. The town is the sole towering figure, casting its long shadow over every personage and happening, but there are certain characters who are clearly of great interest to the author, chief among them being the young man who lends the book the name of its first chapter: 18-year-old James Miles, better known by the name “Boobie.” Boobie Miles is the star of the Panthers roster, the town’s great black hope, a running back gifted with tremendous strength, speed, and agility. Before the season begins, Boobie is set to take Permian High to its fifth state championship, and is expected to shatter school records left and right. Major college football programs across the country have their eyes on him, and his eyes are alight with daydreams of tearing down the gridiron in Austin, or College Station, or in the Rose Bowl. For Boobie, the abandoned son of heroin addicts, living with his out-of-work uncle in the predominately African-American ghetto of a depressed town, a college football scholarship might be his only chance at a future of comfort and security. Blessed with a natural physicality and having gone through years of preparation, it would seem that Boobie Miles has everything necessary for a way out. But over the course of the season, he comes to learn that his way through life will be much harder than he expected, partially due to poor planning on his part, but more so due to the racism and winners-only mentality of Odessa, and most of all, due to the random and cruel turns of chance that affect his life forever. Miles is the heart and soul of this incarnation of Friday Night Lights, and it is no surprise that Bissinger, years later, published After Friday Night Lights, a coda of sorts to the original book, one focused entirely on Miles and Bissinger’s relationship with him.
Other figures capture Bissinger’s imagination as well. Mike Winchell is the quarterback, nothing like the stereotypical image of a meatheaded, bullying jock. He’s sensitive, even fragile, unsure of his place in the world, hiding his modest home from his classmates in embarrassment, crying over losses and personal failures. Bissinger details Mike’s relationship (or lack thereof) with his distant older brother, and with his chronically sick mother, and heartbreaking pages are devoted to describing Winchell’s final talk with his late father, dead of cancer before Mike even started high school. In the end, Winchell’s anxiety-related privacy and shyness make him something of an enigma even to the author, and one gets the sense that while Bissinger could speculate on Winchell, he could never fully wrap his head around him, at least not to the extent of some of the other players. Don Billingsley is the son of a Permian legend, and tries to live up to that legacy on the football field every Friday night, and fails more often than either Don or his father would like to admit. The rest of the week Don is, at age seventeen, a heavy drinker, the life of weekend parties, and an chronic flirt. While beloved by his Permian classmates, Bissinger reveals the darker side of white masculinity in quoted interviews with the surprisingly candid Billingsley. In a particularly chilling passage, from a book that has no shortage of them, Don is quoted using the word “n****r” multiple times, demonstrating that the town’s prejudice is not just a relic of the past and the old generations, but also something that infects even its youth. There’s also Jerrod McDougal, an undersized tackle who knows he has no real future in football, as much as he loves it; Brian Chavez, another antidote to jock stereotypes, a top-of-his-class student aiming for an Ivy League future even while crushing his opponents on the field every week; and Ivory Christian, a highly religious young man whose peaceful Christian moralism comes into conflict with both the violence of the sport and the youthful hedonism of some of his teammates.
The reader learns of Odessa’s history, its beginnings as an Old West cattle town with an infamous reputation, its growth in the Texas oil boom, and the rise of the high school football juggernaut that would come to characterize so much of life there. Bissinger explores nooks and crannies of Odessa history that shed more light on the city, including its struggles with the Civil Rights Movement. Ultimately, the image that one is left with when they put down the book could not be called positive. Primarily, the book is a critique: a critique of a culture that teaches young boys to worship slightly older boys who are able to throw a ball well; then when those boys get older, that culture puts unbelievable amounts of pressure on them to live up to a local legacy; and when they are older still, teaches them to live in the perpetual shadow of a few brief years in their adolescence. Some reviews have even called this version of Friday Night Lights a “horror story.” This is not inaccurate, although Bissinger allows for moments of great warmth, and recognizes the joy and hope that something so inconsequential-seeming as high school football can bring a community that has little else to look forward to. Despite the critical tone, more in common with The Wire than Hoosiers, the book is dripping in sympathy for every last one of its characters, including the adults, even while finding fault in the walls they’ve built up around them.
A reader wishing to learn about the qualities — the positive, the negative, and everything in between — of America in 1988 would be hard pressed to find a work that better chronicles and understands them than H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights. But H.G. Bissinger’s Lights is not the only version of the story that is out there. In other media, through other authors, this story has reached a larger audience than even a bestseller like Bissinger’s book could achieve. These different versions of the story — the 2004 film Friday Night Lights, directed by Peter Berg, and the NBC television series of the same name created by Berg — have brought the themes to new eyes, but in doing so, take different approaches towards the characters, small town life, and high school football culture, and reveal themselves to be fundamentally separate works of art with different aims.
TAKE TWO – THE FILM
Bissinger’s book attracted interest from Hollywood filmmakers from the get-go. Directors, producers, and writers moved in and out. Originally, Alan J. Pakula was attached to direct a screenplay by David S. Ward, who was coming off the hit baseball comedy Major League. At this point, Sam Shepard, during his all-too-brief period as a bankable Hollywood leading man, was the potential star, presumably as the team’s coach. No script by Ward has ever seen the light of day, so it’s hard to know for sure what tone the film would have taken, or what elements from the book it would have focused on — the signing on of Shepard was a good sign, as he naturally projects the air of a plainspoken, intelligent man of rural America, though Ward’s output as a screenwriter does little to indicate that the film would be anything other than watchable, but shallow. Later, Richard Linklater (maybe the only independent film darling who was also a star Texas high school QB) was ready to begin filming, and even began casting and scouting locations before financing fell apart after the box office failure of his film The Newton Boys, leaving cinephiles able only to dream of the mouth-watering possibility of a Linklater-led Lights.
As over a decade went by without cameras rolling on any film version of Bissinger’s book, its themes and settings were appropriated by off-brand works, like the short-lived NBC series Against the Grain, which ran for a few months in 1993 and is most notable for providing a young Ben Affleck with one of his first roles, or 1999’s film Varsity Blues, which gave the world a Hollywoodized story of a teen on a Texas team facing off against his evil, scenery chewing coach. That film was Lights with the edges sanded off, the nuances made into comic book morality. The good characters got happy endings, D1 scholarships, Ivy League acceptance letters, and rides off into the sunset while Jon Voight’s victory-seeking tyrant of a coach met his comeuppance as his career went up in flames. The state championship trophy is taken home. The boy kisses the girl. The injured players are either miraculously healed or forget their worries when they are given cushy coaching jobs. It was popular, and it was pabulum, and it was exactly the kind of movie that fans of Friday Night Lights feared would be made out of their beloved book.
It would not be until 2004 that a film version of Bissinger’s book would finally be made and released. The directorial reins fell into the hands of one Peter Berg, who, perhaps not-so-coincidentally, was the cousin of Bissinger. Berg, an actor and sometimes director with two feature film direction credits to his name, did not necessarily seem like the right man for the job, family connections aside. A New York native who attended elite East Coast prep academies far away from the overstuffed, underfunded public schools of small town Texas, and whose previous films were competent, but perhaps too-slick comedies, Berg’s assignment to Friday Night Lights might have indicated a work-for-hire hack-job. Nothing could be further from the truth. Berg’s take on Friday Night Lights was a soulful, deeply felt film, one of the most unfairly undervalued major works of the aughts, proving to be silently influential across multiple mediums and inventing or codifying devices and tropes that are widely used nowadays, but were practically unheard of even ten years ago.
As with any adaptation, the artists behind the film version of Friday Night Lights, (primarily Berg, although the final script is credited to both Berg and David Aaron Cohen, whose contributions may or may not actually appear in the final film) had to pick and choose which elements from the original source they deemed appropriate for the new incarnation of the same story. And the book Friday Night Lights would be a particular challenge to its adaptors, as its sociological vision and journalistic detours would be either unpresentable or meandering in a 2-hour long movie where everything is moving at the audience at 24 frames per second. In the finished film, just about everything is jettisoned that does not clearly have to do with the 1988 Panthers season, and the team’s key players. The history and growth of Odessa would be unexamined, its rival schools and city demographics would be unremarked upon, local team fans, civic leaders, and preachers would be seen, if at all, in the backgrounds of scenes. Some would lament that the film traded in a portrait of an American town in exchange for a typical sports movie, but Berg, in making his version of Friday Night Lights, smartly knew that the key to filmmaking lie in dramatization and visualization, and that those elements that the film was superficially cutting from the book were in fact being covertly handled through the surface elements of the film and its more streamlined storyline.
Having found the spine of their movie (the Permian Panthers’ rising and falling fortunes as they make their way through the ‘88 season), Berg and company were now tasked with identifying its protagonists. In doing so, they highlighted a figure of relatively little importance in the book, and made him one of the film’s heroes, and its star role: Coach Gary Gaines, played by a top-billed Billy Bob Thornton.
In Bissinger’s book, the focus, when it is placed on a particular person, is almost always on one of the boys on the team. Gaines gets several significant passages emphasizing him in the text, but they are dwarfed by the amount of ink spent on say, Mike Winchell, or Boobie Miles. The image that emerges of Gaines from the book is a sympathetic one. Although Bissinger clearly finds something wrong with the fact that Gaines gets paid more than the school principal, the Coach is primarily presented as something of a victim. He is the subject of negative op-eds in the local newspaper, hundreds of letters of hate mail, and cruel taunts offered by disgruntled Panthers fans who don’t agree with the way he’s been running their beloved team. With his job on the line with every win or loss, and his time almost completely taken up by handling a team of hormonal teenagers, charged with whipping them into a functional unit of world-class athletes, Gaines handles his workload with a level head and a mostly calm demeanor, giving inspirational, softly-spoken speeches to his boys, not rants or shouts. This characterization carries over to the film, but with a far greater chunk of the film than the book being taken up with Gaines’ professional and personal life. The story of the film version of Lights can be summed, somewhat incompletely, but not inaccurately, as the story of a coach dealing a football-crazed town, in a way that would be simply not true for the book. Aided by a fully-embodied performance by Thornton, coming shortly after his equally great (and greatly diverse) turns in The Man Who Wasn’t There and Bad Santa, the portrait the film presents of Gaines is that of a stoic, but not unemotional man of quiet dignity and gentle strength, the kind of hero scarcely seen in films nowadays, owing more to Gary Cooper in High Noon or Henry Fonda in any number of John Ford films, not least Young Mr. Lincoln, but more naturalistic than either of those actors usually were. And Thornton refuses to make Gaines into a cardboard saint. Gaines makes several questionable decisions over the course of the film, decisions that affect other people in negative ways. And while Gaines is acting in his role as coach, he, at times, seems to realize that he is acting more in the interests of the boosters and fans than his young charges, his eyes showing his questioning of himself, a mixture of regret and indecisiveness. Thornton’s scenes in the last act of the film, delivering the what may be the least rah-rah, but most genuinely affecting speech in sports movie history, animatedly running along the sidelines in the final game, and feeling the spirit leave his body as the refs make their final call, may rank up with the greatest performances in the American sports film genre. Sadly, it would seem that the strength of Thornton’s performance may be now overlooked in favor of Kyle Chandler’s equally great, but more attractive performance as the TV coach, but more on that in a later.
The other protagonists of the film are taken from the book. While the film shines a spotlight on several of the real-life players, including Ivory Christian, Brian Chavez, and a relatively minor character from the book, younger player Chris Comer (Jerrod McDougal is entirely removed from the film), only Boobie Miles, Mike Winchell, and to a lesser extent, Don Billingsley, can be termed true protagonists. This can be seen, subtly but clearly once noticed, in the earliest moments of the film, as Mike and Boobie both receive brief scenes before they join the rest of the team outside the stadium for the season’s first practice, Mike eating breakfast while being verbally prepped by his fragile mother, and Boobie jogging down the street while being worshipped by adoring children like a rock star. Throughout the film, Boobie and Mike’s journeys provide the film with a more emotionally connective through-line than Gaines’ more restrained storyline. Played by Derek Luke, Boobie Miles remains, as in the book, the tragic hero at the center of Friday Night Lights, although in the film version he shares his duties as heart-and-soul with Mike Winchell. Berg and Luke show the bravado and the confidence of the young running back at the beginning of the season, and even as he boasts and gloats, the viewer remains on his side, feeding off the charisma and charm of Luke’s performance. His performance becomes more complex as Boobie’s emotional toughness is tested following his pivotal knee injury, and it is here that Luke’s heartfelt performance really shines, as Boobie reacts to the greatest setback in his life with incredulousness, then anger, then deep sadness, breaking down in his car, crying his eyes out while wondering aloud to his uncle, “What am I gonna do if I can’t play football. I’m not good at nothin’!” Those who criticized the film for being too soft on the high school football culture must have stepped out for popcorn during that scene, as well as the scene where Boobie silently observes a black garbage collector with both terror and resignation, seeing, like Ebenezer Scrooge confronted with his own grave, a dark vision of his possible future. The film’s football scenes are well-choreographed and shot, but it is in these quieter scenes that Friday Night Lights really comes alive.
Likewise, Lucas Black’s interpretation of Mike Winchell is an intensely, at times uncomfortably, emotional piece of acting. While Derek Luke at least gets to strut and puff his chest as Boobie Miles, flashily showing off his acting muscles in an in-character way, Black plays one of the most low-key and unshowy leading characters in a Hollywood film in recent memory. Winchell, as in the book, is quiet and gloomily private. While the omniscience of the film camera provides the audience with a closer look at Winchell and his inner-life than the non-fiction book was able to, it still refrains from giving Mike big, out-of-character monologues or expository voice over narration. Mike’s most revealing moments in the film are a brief phone conversation with his brother that we can only hear one side of, a few short comments delivered to his teammates in the movie’s final big game, one scene that consists entirely of Winchell crying in the locker room following a loss, and, most of all, silent looks, expressions, and glances. Black is a supreme underplayer, in the best sense of the word, showing that acting is as much about reacting as it is about big moments, and that it is possible to simply exist as your character in a moment, breathing and moving as they would, drawing in the viewer with its verisimilitude. Black, in a cast full of uniformly strong performers, deserves the MVP title, and with any luck, will at some point in his career find a role that rivals his turn, at age only 21, as Mike Winchell.
Other characters get their moments in the sun, most notably Garret Hedlund as Don Billingsley, whose character arc revolves around his relationship with his father, Charlie (played by country music star Tim McGraw), in a role that is greater emphasized than in the book. Berg’s script makes significant additions and changes to these two characters, departures from reality that change the nature of their relationship, and the lessons learned from it. As described by Bissinger, Don’s father Charlie Billingsley is a drunken ne’er-do-well who gained a reputation as a hell-raiser while still in high school, and has been successfully living up to it since then, twenty years down the road. His relationship with his son is an irresponsible one, with Charlie staying up all night, partying and drinking with his 17-year-old son. But it is not abusive. This is where Berg makes one of his biggest changes from the book, and from real life. As played by McGraw, Charlie Billingsley crosses the line from irresponsible, to downright combative. In two scenes early on, Billingsley Sr., while intoxicated, beats his son for not living up to his expectations as a football player. Later, after the Panthers lose a crucial game to their arch-rivals Midland Lee, Charlie kicks out the windows of his sons’ car, in a scene completely constructed out of thin air by Berg and Cohen. This is likely the most irresponsible change that Berg made in adapted Friday Night Lights, linking a real man to a fabricated list of sins, and it is no surprise that H.G. Bissinger reported that both Billingsleys refused to speak to him following the release of the film. Others include Brian Chavez, played by Jay Hernandez, and drastically reduced in importance from the book, and Ivory Christian, interpreted in a near-silent performance by former Texas Longhorns linebacker Lee Jackson, in his only acting role.
But while the performances in the film are wonderful, down to the briefest extra roles and one-line bit parts essayed by Odessa natives and amateur actors, it is in Berg’s direction that Friday Night Lights proves itself exceptional. Lights, although filmed largely on the kind of handheld digital cameras most associated with increasingly popular faux-documentary style, creates a largely impressionistic mode of storytelling, aiming not for physical realism per se, but a psychological and emotional realism. The cinematography, courtesy of Tobias A. Schliessler, who for some reason has gone on to do little worth watching, is a masterwork, filming the football scenes with a tough, battle-like physicality that owes more to Saving Private Ryan than ESPN sports highlights, and the home scenes with a warm intimacy. Berg and Schliessler perfectly capture the sun-soaked sands of West Texas at dawn just as much as it captures the clear night skies hanging above the astroturf on fall’s Friday nights. Berg’s camera catches stray moments, little shots here and there than infinitely expand the world of the film beyond the main plot, such as the wordless shot of a mascot comforting a crying cheerleader after a loss, and imbues with them a Terrence Malick-esque humaneness a few years before being Malickian was in vogue. Berg knows how to let the camera linger on a single image, images like a football resting a mere inch away from the end zone, a potent, or rather, impotent reminder of the desperation of defeat.
Also key are moments humanizing the Dallas team, who oppose Permian in the state finals, moments like the team praying during halftime of the state finals and celebrating with true glee their hard-fought win, as if we were being presented with glimpses from an alternate film, a film where the Dallas Carter Cowboys were the heroes of the story, and the Panthers were the villains. It is the small touches like this that open up the film beyond the typical, cliched sports story.
In fact, the overriding mode of the film is to undercut the traditional beats and rhythms of a Hollywood sports film. Expectations of machismo are subverted as we watch the Panthers, who seem invincible on the field, try and fail to suppress their feelings, crying in the locker room as other teammates awkwardly try not to notice. There are none of the usual boilerplate romantic subplots to distract from the core story.* The big game — the state championship, promoted from real life’s state semifinals for greater impact** — features the team being badly beaten for two quarters, getting an inspirational speech from their coach, coming out for the second half, playing their best, getting down to the last play . . . and falling just short of winning. And to be clear, this isn’t a moral victory for the Panthers. They didn’t lose but learn something. Nor did they “go the distance,” showing the world that they had what it took, a la the original Rocky. No, they started the season ranked number one — hardly the typical bunch of mismatched underdogs — made it to the finals, and gave everything they had, and it just wasn’t good enough. Because sometimes you’re not good enough. And that’s what, if anything, they learn. They set out at the beginning of the season, when hope was high and the future looked bright, to “protect their town,” to provide the out-of-work, depressed citizens of Odessa something to be proud of. And they failed, and will never get a chance to redo what they failed at, because the time has passed, and their season is just as much a part of history as the dozens and dozens of unremembered, failed seasons that went before them. And when they arrive home, Boobie’s knee will still be shattered, the oil workers will still be unemployed, and the maddening craze for Panther football glory will not have ended, just pushed back one year. It’s a gut punch of an ending.
*Some might argue that a lack of significant roles for women, beyond Connie Britton’s tiny thankless role as the coach’s supportive wife, may be a fault of the film. But this is a film set in a male driven world, about men, machismo, and masculine roles. It no more needs strong female characters than did 12 Angry Men or Lawrence of Arabia.
**Berg deftly understood that you can’t devote nearly thirty minutes of your 118 minute long film to single semi-finals game without giving away that the team aren’t making it to state.
For the entirety of Lights, Peter Berg places the watcher in the emotional headspace of its characters, feeling their pangs and losses, and the exhilaration in their victories. In order to eliminate as much possible distance between the audience and the characters as possible, Berg de-emphasizes the elements of the film’s 1988 setting that might make it too easy to view the film as a peculiar retro curio or nostalgia fest. To be sure, Berg doesn’t deny the film’s setting — Don and Boobie still sport their period-appropriate hair metal locks and hi-top fade, respectively, and the characters drive big, clunky ’80s era auto abominations — but does make certain key decision to play up the timelessness of the story. Perhaps chief among them is the decision to hire Explosions in the Sky to provide the film’s soundtrack. At the time a young up-and-coming band, Explosions in the Sky play a unique form of “post-rock”: lengthy, guitar-driven instrumentals that Berg uses to paint the landscape of the Southwest suburbs and stadiums. The more traditional methods of scoring sports films — typically a combination of soaring “inspirational” symphony orchestras or a “nostalgic” mixture of overplayed oldies — are avoiding in favor of prewritten and original songs by the Midland-based indie outfit, which ended up paving the way for a decade of athletic gear ads, NFL commercials, and other sports films*** that would be set to Explosions in the Sky, or Explosions-esque knock offs. Further amplifying the timeless feel on the soundtrack is a carefully chosen selection of anachronistic tracks that move the film away from pigeonholed ’80s cliches. Berg scores one montage to Jimmy Smith’s soulful ’60s scorcher “Got My Mojo Workin'” and other segments to ’90s-era artists like Swedish hardcore punk band Refused or guitarist Daniel Lanois, deploying them effectively and efficiently in key moments.
***For instance, Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, a film that attempts to closely replicate Friday Night Lights’ aesthetic and apply it to a Major League Baseball setting, with mixed results.
Some of the criticisms lobbed towards the movie are not entirely baseless, but they are often based on superficial readings of the film. For instance, accusations of Berg “whitewashing” the racism prevalent in the book have some basis, but only up to a point. While the word “n****r” is only used once in the movie (by a white Panther booster wife during a dinner party), visual and verbal signifiers of racism can be seen all throughout the film, reminding the audience that this story takes place in a de facto segregated society. It’s seen in the tired face and sad eyes of Grover Coulson, playing Boobie’s uncle L.V. Miles, watching his nephew’s life turn to ruin. Most white characters’ attitude towards Boobie Miles is that peculiar mixture of discomfort and begrudging admiration that originates in a world where blacks are second-class citizens, but the white majority is more-than-willing to profit from black talent. There’s a smartly written and played scene where Coach Gaines and rival Coach James, who is black and coaches an all black team, slyly dance around the race issue verbally while negotiating the location and ref staff of the state championship, a scene where Gaines wonders how many black or white stripes will be on the “zebras” at the game, implicitly showing that even the fatherly Coach Gaines is a representative and a beneficiary of a racially problematic system. Peter Berg, it is said, was able to gain the support and trust of the people of Odessa (who hated the book for years) by agreeing to downplay the racism depicted in Bissinger’s original. But truly doing so would completely neuter the impact of the film, so Berg wisely did something much more subtle, even if it seemed to confound casual critics unwilling to dig deeper into the film: making the racism subtextual but making sure it was all over the movie. This is almost certainly the best choice for the film, as a more overt and obvious portrayal of prejudice would likely drown out the rest of the themes of Friday Night Lights, making it into a film that was solely about racism, instead of a film that addressed a number of issues and elements, including racism. To be sure, though, a whole film could be made that dealt more primarily with the racial issues of Friday Night Lights, though I don’t know if it would be a film with as much power and impact as the film we have been given.
I could continue to write about the craft present in each frame of this film, but to do so would be unnecessary. Once one has begun to seriously consider and admire the artistry of Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights, the film’s strengths will speak for themselves. Unfortunately it seems to this author that the majority of viewers, watching a film without a name director, with a cast of actors who were either mostly unknown or inexperienced, and in a genre that tends to make assembly-line products, were not prepared to address the film on the level it was aiming for. As for the follow-up series of the same name, it was able to soften the aesthetic and, by nature of a being a long-running TV show, endear itself more to its fan than the film was able to, despite being somewhat flawed and rather less ambitious than the film. Nevertheless, for this writer, Friday Night Lights represents a high-water mark for 21st century Hollywood filmmaking, a film that has, unlike so many films, surpluses in both technical proficiency and genuine emotion, not impassively judging its subjects, but presenting the audience with their real emotions, with no barrier between viewer and character. It’s endlessly watchable. It’s clever. It’s exciting. Most of all it’s heartbreaking. What Bissinger’s book achieves with deft journalism and a critical, analytic eye, Berg achieves with first-rate filmmaking and true empathy, creating an accomplishment more than worthy of the name and legacy of Friday Night Lights.
TAKE THREE – THE SERIES
Peter Berg, ironically, ended up like the characters of his film: dissatisfied with having to leave the world of Texas high school football. His commitment to the film and the research he did to make it led him to immerse himself in the culture of places like Odessa, and countless other towns across the state, and across the country. In the autumn of 2003, while attending an Austin-area football game, Berg saw something that moved him deeply. A 16-year-old player, David Edwards, faced a terrible collision on the field that left him paralyzed from the shoulders down, in the kind of incident that leaves an entire stadium silent.
This moment would make its way into the pilot episode of the television incarnation of Friday Night Lights. The star quarterback, a young man with all the makings of the next Peyton Manning, sustains a severe spinal injury in the opening game of his senior year, leaving him and his team thrown out into the wilderness of the unknown, with all their hopes and dreams seemingly scattered in the wind. This would be the story of the first season of Friday Night Lights, in the now-familiar world of Texas high school football, and the madness it inspires.
The series, premiering in the fall of 2006, centered itself on a small, seemingly insignificant town in Texas, a town whose sole remaining silver lining was its high school football juggernaut, the Panthers. Only this time, the town would not be Odessa, as in real life, but would instead be a fictional town called Dillon, whose beloved team, the Dillon High Panthers, hunted year-after-year for the crowning glory of high school football: the Texas state championship. While early drafts of the Lights pilot kept the name of Odessa and the Permian Panthers, series creator Berg apparently believed, rightly, that fictionalizing the locale allowed for greater variety in the kind of stories that could be told.
So the fictionalization set in. Out was Coach Gary Gaines, and in stepped Coach Eric Taylor, played excellently by Kyle Chandler, in a role that endeared him to all who watched the show. The coach was once again the central, balancing character of the story, but new changes that expanded on the story showed sides of small town life left vacant by the film. The co-lead of the series was now Connie Britton as the coach’s wife, homemaker turned guidance counselor turned school principal Tami Taylor, in a performance that was every bit the equal of her co-star Chandler. To convince Britton, who was disappointed by the brevity of her role in the film, Berg assured the actress that she would get more to do in the series that “just stand in the crowd and smile.” Over the course of the series, Friday Night Lights would be not just the story of teens navigating their way through high school, or a town caught up in football-mania, but also the story of a marriage, of its ups and downs, its confrontations and its communications, showing how the stress of a busy, high profile job could put a strain on a relationship, whether the stresses were Coach dealing with a unruly player, or Mrs. Coach dealing with protesters who loathed the way she managed the school. Because of both the tenderness and the truth of the domestic scenes, the series of Friday Night Lights more than validated its existence, and was able to provide a much needed look at a world expanded from the film’s vision.
Of course, much of the story was familiar. In the first three seasons, the football team character dynamics were essentially lifted from the film, i.e. straight from the book, i.e. straight from reality. There was a cocky, attention-seeking black running back, only this time he was he was nicknamed “Smash” instead of “Boobie,” and he was played by Gaius Charles. Smash Williams, it was clear when watching the show, was never the staff’s favorite character to write for, as they would create story arcs that felt like afterthoughts – like giving Smash a bipolar girlfriend – and then discard them when enough time had passed. The other members of the three regular football playing characters garnered more love. There was still a hard-drinking, skirt-chasing fullback, called Tim Riggins this time (played by Taylor Kitsch), and the quarterback was still quiet, shy, and neurotic (Zach Gilford’s Matt Saracen).
While the basic concepts of the characters were the same, the nature of an ongoing series meant they would spin off in different ways and end up in different places. Smash Williams, like Boobie Miles, suffers a knee injury during his senior year that threatens to derail his potential career – only to make a remarkable recovery with the help of his former coach and earn a walk-on position for a major university team. Later in the series, he’s talked about as a star college player, the pride of his hometown, far from the fate of Boobie Miles, who was abandoned by his teammates, his coach, and his “fans” when he was no longer of use to them. Tim Riggins develops from a near carbon copy of Billingsley into a near mythic character in his own right*, a forlorn, melancholic figure with a share of lost loves and a heartbreaking fourth season sacrifice, having fully made the transition from selfish loner to stoic Western hero. And Matt Saracen – the Mike Winchell doppelganger for the series – gets a whole host of personal problems, falls in love with the Coach’s daughter Julie, and dominates a classic sendoff episode, “The Son,” where actor Zach Gilford expertly captures the devastating range of emotions that come from losing someone you both love and hate in near-equal measure.
*(I recall an advertisement for the third season that showed the characters, presented in a fairly abstract setting, preparing for a rainstorm. Riggins, in this ad, was able to spread his arms and literally STOP THE RAIN.)
Just as the figure of “The Coach,” once Gaines, now Taylor, would be newly balanced by a female foil, the high school boys of Friday Night Lights had their stories run parallel to the lives of the series’ female characters, who had no counterpart in the earlier film version. Lyla (Minka Kelly) was the daughter of the town’s biggest Panther football booster, Buddy Garrity, a hotshot car dealer embodied by 2004 movie bit-player Brad Leland, and the school sweetheart of injured quarterback Jason Street. Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) was Dillon High’s resident bad girl, a bitter, angry rebel who hid a softer, more vulnerable side from the world. The Taylors’ daughter Julie was like an older, Texan Lisa Simpson, an enthusiastic, if naive liberal activist and intellectually ambitious go-getter who found herself, despite her best efforts, drawn more and more into the fortunes of the local team.
The original cast would slowly be phased out of the show, until in the final two seasons, the focus had shifted to a new generation of characters, with the exception, of course, of Coach and Mrs. Coach. Following the season 3 finale, Eric Taylor now found himself in charge of a new team, coaching for Dillon High’s underdog cousin, the East Dillon Lions. This new approach allowed the show to shed light on the racial divide and socioeconomic issues that were described in detail in Bissinger’s original book. East Dillon High was on the poor side of town, the black side of town; they didn’t have the money or the boosters that the Panthers had, and Buddy Garrity and the town’s head honchos had successfully gerrymandered the school district so that any player with talent was miraculously found to be in the Dillon High area. Now, Coach Taylor’s star player was Michael B. Jordan’s Vince Howard, an athletic juvenile delinquent who had never played football before.
The show seemingly addressed the things that went unaddressed in the movie. But in fact, the show was much cleaner and cuddlier than the 2004 film. The show was unfortunately too willing to put viewers through the wringer emotionally while still providing them a comforting happy ending. How do the Permian Panthers of the film end up? Well, they’ve lost, let down their town. Only one of them will go on to get a D1 scholarship, and we know that he still ends up as a truck driver, not a football star. Boobie Miles has had his one developed gift taken away in a cruel twist of fate, and has only his uncle L.V. to count on, no prospects, no future. The rest have it better, but are still guaranteed no happy endings. The series, on the other hand, let its affection for its characters cross over into an untrue-to-itself collection of sunny sendoffs. Smash ends up a college football star; Jason Street, a 20-year-old with a GED, gets a job as a professional sports agent in New York City; two state championships are won over five years; even the character who serves a term in prison is last seen building their dream home during a magic hour sunset.
In the end, the series of Friday Night Lights proved to be the most popular incarnation of the story – despite low ratings, the series was a critical darling and a cult favorite, beloved by its audience, for whom Tami Taylor and Matt Saracen and the like were real people. This affection for the series can be owed not just to the nature of long-form storytelling, which naturally causes a connection between subject and viewer, but also the persistent denial of darkness and creation of happy endings for characters unlikely to receive them. While genuinely heart-rending at times, the series of Friday Night Lights is most distinct from its predecessors in its blunting of the sharp edges of Bissinger’s original cutting depiction of small-time life and football culture.
