celebrity gossip, academic style

I’ve mostly written the Emmy’s off. They generally favor the mainstream over the truly great, a trend best evidenced by its complete snubbing of The Wire over its five-year run.

But when Kyle Chandler won the Emmy last night for Best Actor in a Drama Series, beating out Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Steve Buscemi (Boardwalk Empire), Michael C. Hall (Dexter), Timothy Olyphant (Justified), and Hugh Laurie (House), I jumped up and did a totally ridiculous and embarrassing little dance.

Because here’s the thing: Hamm might, indeed, have deserved the award. What he did with Don Draper over this tortuous/quasi-redemptive fourth season was truly a marvel. Beschemi was so masterful at reconciling the powerful and the vulnerable in Boardwalk Empire, and Olyphant finally proved that he could act (and wear the shit out of a pair of pants). But I don’t want to think of this in terms of Chandler being “better” or “more deserving” than the others in his field.

Rather, I just want to think of this win as a celebration of and a benediction for Chandler specifically and Friday Night Lights more generally. I’ve written on Why We Watch Friday Night Lights before, and everything that I said about the first three seasons remained true over the course of the final two. In fact, everything got better. If you’re already on board, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If not, you probably think the show is about football, or about high school, or about small towns that have been forgotten. It’s about all of those things, but only obliquely. It’s really about class, and race, and a marriage, and what it’s like to live in a place where life is by turns bleak and beautiful.

But because of network bumbling and mis-marketing, it was never the hit. Or maybe because of its heart, and the way it refused (except in the first half of Season Two), to stoop to sensationalism, it never could have been a hit. Like My So-Called Life before it, it was just to beautiful to live. But by hook or by crook, FNL managed to eek out five seasons — none of which are perfect, but all of which made me feel and think more than any other show on television. It’s a quiet show, and the acting on it is equally quiet. But my hope is that this win, this awareness, might push you to let it speak to you.

So try it. The first episode of the first season is not necessarily what the rest of the season will look like. There will be football, but there will be much, much more. And then you, too, will become an FNL proselytizer, buying “Dillon Football” t-shirts (I totally own one) and unironically using phrases like “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can’t Lose.”

And for those of us who know and love Friday Night Lights — TEXAS FOREVER. My only sadness is that Mrs. Coach couldn’t have shared in Chandler’s glory.