Spaghetti & Noodles

If you could sum up Friday Night Lights with one sound or motion, it might be a sigh. FNL never trafficked in good vs. evil in the way of Harry Potter, it was concerned with smaller nuances, but in the way that FNL was chiefly about good people trying to do good things in a difficult world, whether on a team or in an Order, the two were cousins. Though based on a movie and a book, there weren’t really any expectations for Friday Night Lights the way there were for old mister wizard. No the surprise of FNL wasn’t that they somehow pulled it off, it was that NBC managed to make a warm and wise and deeply human show, one that taught us things about people (and ourselves!), that was about football. Football! All-American brutality suited-up and beer soaked. And yet, in this show’s shaky and wandering lens, lovely, too. And important, in an unexpected way. You see, of course, the show isn’t really about football. Football is just the metaphor for the struggle and grunt and defeat and victory of Life Entire. And while this might seem like a beating-over-the-head kind of theme, FNL handled it with a delicate, warmly winking grace. It knew we were on to it.

The great tragedy of FNL isn’t a Potterian melange of orphans and fallen heroes and terrible sacrifices. This show’s tragedy is, of course, that nobody fucking watched it. I was once the person on the other side, rolling my eyes about all you devotees, saying “OK, OK, I get it already, now please shut up.” Of course I later came to learn the error of my ways, and I apologize deeply to everyone everywhere for this mistake, but so many tragically didn’t. But while the show’s general unpopularity — NBC dumped it on Direct TV after three seasons, but miraculously didn’t outright cancel it — was disappointing in a lot of ways, it was also kind of fun, wasn’t it? This little Texan secret, this beautiful swoosh of afternoon light and twanging wistful music that was all ours, just the happy few of us. So, like in Potter, the sad part of FNL became something pretty, too. I do wish, though, that the show’s ending was getting some small amount of the fireworks that its English cousin is getting.