When Friday Night Lights premiered in the fall of 2006, I had just turned 16. That made me the exact same age as Matt Saracen, the awkward, harried, good-hearted, ultimately rawhide-tough sophomore quarterback of the Dillon Panthers. Let’s just say, as a teenager eager to leave my own dusty little hometown in the American West, I wasn’t ready to appreciate the adventures of a bunch of Texas oil-town jocks.
A lot of people have asked me whether, growing up in red-blooded Real America, we had big lights on Friday nights. Laramie High School has had a couple of golden ages as a football school, but the mid-oughts were not one of them. We couldn’t even fill our sad little stadium, with its single row of concrete bleachers. I think I went to two games during my entire high school career, both times with the goal of sardonically cheering for a friend who played tight end. The Laramie Plainsmen lost both times, as they almost always did. Afterwards, we did what we almost always did on weekend nights—drove around an empty high-desert town talking about the future.
I didn’t care about high school football, in the way I resolutely didn’t care about anything that wouldn’t get me where I wanted to go.
The deepest charm of Friday Night Lights, now that I’m finally revisiting it, is how damn much everyone cares about, well, everything. But especially about football. The show is sprawling. This is old school network TV, which meant you had to churn out the storylines once a week for about half the year. None of this softass eight-episode prestige miniseries shit, son. Give me ten wind-sprints, Pizzolatto! A football playbook is complex and arcane, but it’s also reducible to simple things that you learn to do because someone screams at you until it becomes ingrained in you that that’s just what you have to do.
One of the most influential tweets ever reads, “Everything happens so much.” That describes the Dillon Panthers and their friends and families. They fall in and out of love, decide to befriend or hate each other, articulate moral codes and commit dastardly transgressions, and suffer star-crossed misfortunes at a rate that begins to defy not only narrative logic but basic physics. And yet you always have that one thing at the center of it all, drawing all the other events and arcs and selves toward it with ineluctable gravity: Football.
Friday Night Lights famously begins by challenging the premise that football is worth caring about. Star quarterback Jason Street gets paralyzed in the very first episode. Everyone agrees that it’s a tragedy, but they also agree with Coach Taylor when he says, in so many words, these things happen in football. It’s tempting to read utilitarian callousness into the way the other characters naturalize Jason Street’s life-altering injury.
Yet of course the centrality of the game in these characters’ lives comes to seem anything but callous, because they care about it for the same array of emotionally laden reasons we come to care about them. They care about football because it’s a way out or a way in, or because it’s fun to hit people and they need to hit someone. Or they hate it because everyone else cares too much, which is to become the disaffected Dr. Jekyll to Dillon’s many earnest Mr. Pighides. This may all sound trite, but Friday Night Lights is pedal-to-the-floor Americana melodrama. Archetypes fortified with cheap beer and unleashed on the open highway is just what this is, and you’re either along for the ride or you’re not.
All of this has been said about Friday Night Lights before. It’s a show that loves its cliches and invites more cliches. It took some risks, by the standards of its time, but that time has passed. Just like the time of the West Texas oilfields has pa—there I go again.
A show about teenagers inevitably makes you reflect on your teen self, which is why I wasn’t ready for these stories as a teen. I didn’t want to reflect—that could come later, and it did. One thing I have in common with my teen self, and with these characters, is that I’ve always cared too damn much about something that’s easy to dismiss.
I’ve always been an earnest sap about Becoming A Novelist, in exactly the melodramatic, over-narrated way that Smash Williams cares about becoming a star football player. When the long slog to getting a first novel out there sucks—and it often does—I find myself falling back on the simplicity of sports metaphors. One of my hot takes is that more aspiring artists should try competitive sports, because they teach you discipline, resiliency, and other traits that are invaluable in the arts but which we too often leave to the jocks. Sometimes I have to conjure a spectral opponent that I tell myself I’m going to beat, even though there’s more or less no such thing for a novelist. So there you go: I’m corny as hell, just like this show.
If corny works, don’t just lean into it. Push it in front of you like a tackling sled. Right now, perhaps more intensely and for more people than at any point in my lifetime, it’s tempting to throw out innocent hopes and embroidered myths. There aren’t even any sports on TV. It feels like a time for confronting hard truths. And maybe it is, but it’s also a good time to remind yourself why you care about your own inward melodrama. There was a reason you loved the stupid shit you loved at 16, and if you’re lucky, you can still find a way to care about at least some of it.
Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
I promise we’ll eventually get to Calvinball. But to be even truer to the spirit of the above essaylet, here’s some football:
The sight gag that opens this lush Sunday strip is one of Watterson’s unapologetic Dad Jokes. It also doesn’t fit with the narrative arc that comes immediately afterward, unless it does—either Hobbes is saying no to something we see him doing two panels later, or there’s a backstory involving the literal pigskin that we’re not privy to. I guess it’s more fun to go with the latter, so we’ll roll with that.
Speaking of rolling with the punches, this improvised, lawless, heavily narrated parody of football presages the chaos of Calvinball. Calvinball has only one rule: You make up the rules as you go along. What Calvin and Hobbes are doing here is a bit different. They’re trying to imitate what they’ve seen elsewhere, presumably on TV.
That drive to imitate is what made it almost disturbing to go back to this strip and be reminded that Calvin threatens to “cripple” Hobbes with a face-mask tackle. As Friday Night Lights reminds us, we used to tolerate and indeed celebrate a level of violence on the gridiron that we now feel guilty about. I don’t blame Calvin or Watterson for making note of that, but it does send me back to places I didn’t expect to go.
Other fun things
—My buddy Kurt Schiller is getting ready to launch a new publication called Blood Knife. In its own words: “Blood Knife is an online magazine about imagined futures, alternate histories, blood, cyborgs, and radical left politics. We want to explore the collision of the soon-to-be, the never-was, and the now.” Watch that space, and consider pitching them if any of that interests you…
—Rafia Zakaria brings the heat in a review of the latest offering from would-be novelist-provocateur Lionel Shriver
—It’s been a chaotic week in which I haven’t read many things, so forgive me for settling for once again plugging an episode of my pod. I was psyched to finally get to talk to Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of National Book Award-finalist Sabrina and Corina
A poem
Donald Hall remembers football games
"One of my hot takes is that more aspiring artists should try competitive sports, because they teach you discipline, resiliency, and other traits that are invaluable in the arts but which we too often leave to the jocks."
This goes both ways. I never let them specialize me, but most kids grow up with hopelessly unrounded parents who preach equal measure of either malice or obsession with sports.
Most non sports people say they hate sports but i think they mostly hate sucking with such objective hierarchy. They would be surprised by how many kids play from 6-16, secretly hate it, but feel social or parental pressure to participate. There are a wide array of values to be learned from sports and music and the visual arts that I would argue packs more bang for your buck than disintegrated "academics" and I have been in schools every year since 1988.