celebrity gossip, academic style

Note: Today’s post takes the form of a back-and-forth between me and one of the few people I know with equal parts sports and celebrity knowledge: Peter Holter. As such, he was the perfect choice to write a column on the allure (and persistent failure) of Friday Night Lights, a show that ranks amongst both of our personal favorites. Warning — Spoilers lurk below.

Peter:

I’ve got a few celebrity stories under my belt. I stood next to Yao Ming at a baggage claim, I had dinner with Jessica Simpson, I rode a chairlift with Ralph Fiennes. I don’t get star struck, but I do usually find a way to make a fool of myself. Last summer I got a chance to add to my short list when I met Zach Gilford, who plays high school quarterback Matt Saracen on the NBC drama Friday Night Lights, at a bar in northern California. It turns out that we work for the same company in the summers.

One of the things that really bothers me about Friday Night Lights is the unrealistic nature of the football games, despite all the gritty realism that makes up the rest of the show. I hate that the Panthers will win one game 49-48 with a high-powered offense and sieve-like defense, then squeak out the next one 7-6. I hate that almost every game comes down to some last second miracle play. I really hate it when it’s fourth and a million with zero seconds left and no timeouts remaining and Coach Taylor calls a run up the middle that somehow goes for a 70-yard touchdown. And I really, really hate that the starting quarterback on a Texas 5A State Championship football team is 5’7”, 140 pound weak-armed kid that sometimes can’t remember how to throw a spiral.

With all that said, I really do like the show, because it isn’t really about football and I can overlook that stuff. So as I got introduced to Gilford I told him, “I watch your show, I like it.” It should be noted here that a) Gilford is even shorter than you think he is, and b) is surrounded by a horde of giggling girls that work for our company that swore beforehand that they were impressed by neither celebrity nor short men. As a non-celebrity, this is a maddening thing to watch - you will find yourself supremely disappointed in women as a whole if you ever get to see it. Gilford looked up at me and said, “Oh, so you’re the one.” Uproarious laughter from all of Gilford’s female hangers-on ensued, and there ended my Zach Gilford encounter.

I imagine that this wasn’t the first time his canned response had been so successful. It’s great for him because he gets to pretend to be humble despite the fact that questioner clearly knows that he’s famous. But it’s also very true: nobody watches his show. In three full seasons, Friday Night Lights’ best Nielsen rating was a 5.3 (about 8.2 million viewers), good enough to be the 52^nd ranked show that week. That was season one, and the ratings have gone down and down ever since. And yet, it keeps getting renewed. It keeps getting nominated for Emmys. Taylor Kitsch keeps getting nominated for Teen Choice Awards. [Annie interjection: And it won a Peabody Award, for goodness sakes!] So why can’t NBC make it a popular show?

The show certainly doesn’t fit the mold of today’s successful television. The most popular show of the last five years has been American Idol. Dancing With the Stars routinely cleans up in the ratings. People can’t seem to get enough of their CSI spin-offs and medical dramas, and Friday Night Lights is none of the above. In fact, Friday Night Lights is part of an exclusive club of shows in recent years that can’t seem to find commercial success until they hit the DVD racks. For examples of this, see: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Arrested Development, and Mad Men to name a few.

When I told Zach Gilford that I watched his show, I was technically lying: I watched all three seasons on DVD. Season 4 is underway and I haven’t seen an episode yet. In fact, I am actively waiting for it to come out on DVD because I can’t stand waiting a week between episodes and because I don’t like commercials. So as far as the commercial success of that show is concerned, I’m part of the problem. And that’s a problem because people like me – the type of person that is going to watch and get involved with and love Friday Night Lights – generally isn’t the type of person that makes time to watch television.

I like Friday Night Lights because it tells a good story. It has terrific characters and the acting is first rate. I started watching it because I thought it was about football, but I’ve continued to watch it because it’s really about family; football and small town America just make a great backdrop. The people who watch television, though, who dictate the ratings and perpetuate what gets made, don’t seem to want to watch family and small town America. They want to watch celebrities dancing and they want to watch outlandish crime investigations involving beautiful people and beautiful detectives. The people that are going to appreciate Friday Night Lights for it’s subtlety and nuance probably don’t watch TV; they have DVD players, Netflix subscriptions and DVRs.

My appreciation for the show came into full bloom in season three, when Landry Clarke finally put a stop to his unrequited love affair with local bombshell Tyra Collette, comparing her to the kid in Shel Silverstein’s classic The Giving Tree. I hate that kid in The Giving Tree; I’ve said for years that that that book should have been re-titled The Taking Kid and I’ve cited it in my own life on more than one occasion, so naturally I enjoyed Landry’s reference immensely. I realized later, though, that this wasn’t the only reason I liked this scene. The easy thing to do – the popular thing – would have been to finally unite the two. Popular shows tend to take that route: they sweep characters like Jason Street under the table when the audience tires of them, they let characters like Buddy Garrity remain reprehensible and one-dimensional, and they make certain that lovable doofuses like Landry Clarke always get the girl in the end. I like Friday Night Lights because it doesn’t do that, but it may also be why most of America doesn’t.

And all this isn’t even mentioning the fact that NBC clearly doesn’t want it to be successful. Who airs a good show on Friday night? I get that it’s called Friday Night Lights. I get that high school football games are played on Friday nights. But that doesn’t mean you have to air the show on Fridays. We’re talking about a show that is catered to the 18-39 demographic – a part of society that has been conditioned for years to believe that on Friday nights, you must be out of your house, dressed up and doing crazy things like buying expensive drinks and trying to hook up. This is the de facto cool, and watching Friday Night Lights as it aired on Friday would be an iron-clad alibi that you are, in fact, not cool. [Annie interjection: Or that you do not, in fact, like high school football, since you're obviously home watching the show instead of shivering on the bleachers of your local high school.]

It’s a bit like a guy that never does anything to show his girlfriend he cares about her, and ultimately loses her because of it. If you don’t watch the show when it airs, you don’t help it’s ratings, you don’t help it bring in advertising dollars, and you may cost yourself several seasons of a great thing. If I ever get to meet Minka Kelly in a bar instead of Gilford, I’ll buy her a drink and tell her we’re all sorry.

Annie’s Response:

First off, I have to admit a lack of objectivity when it comes to this show. It documents a town and football fanaticism very close to my own high school experience: I may not have grown up in Texas, but I knew what it was like to be on the sidelines of multiple state championship games, not to mention the unique dynamics of a working class town (and its corresponding devotion to football). Friday Night Lights is also filmed in Austin, which means I’ve had first hand encounters with Matt Saracen (next to me in yoga), Coach Taylor (watching a screening of Jurassic Park with his family at the Paramount), Julie Taylor (walking past me while I was drinking gin at The Driskell), Tyra’s mom (at the RTF Department Party) and the new set of East Dillon High (a mere three blocks from my home). Apart from my emotional attachment, I absolutely agree with Peter that there’s something remarkable about this show. But I, too, have never viewed the show when it airs. So what gives?

Let’s look to NBC, which, with this show, has only further demonstrated their complete inability to properly market a show. For me, the crux of the issue isn’t so much that the majority of quotidian television viewers gravitate towards reality television and Jerry Bruckheimer-produced procedurals. Rather, the root of the problem is Friday Night Lights’ incompatibility both with NBC and network television in general.

As Peter points out above, FNL is a quiet, nuanced show, with meandering, oftentimes unexpected character development. For every “Smash gets a try-out at A&M!” there’s a “Mac sorta-kinda apologies for his intrinsic racism.” The only one-dimensional characters on the show are Joe McCoy, Saracen’s military dad, and Baby Gracie. They even give Leila’s annoying younger siblings unexpected character. Such careful characterization and narrative development is by no means unique to FNL — see The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men, Arrested Development, Pushing Daisies, The United States of Tara, and Battlestar Galactica, to name just a recent few. Importantly, you’ll note that only two of the aforementioned shows — Arrested Development and Pushing Daisies — were products of the networks. And both of those shows died early deaths: as Jason Mittell noted, Pushing Daisies was simply “too beautiful to live.”

But was it? Or was it simply “too beautiful” — or, more precisely, too idiosyncratic, with insufficient cliffhangers — to thrive on network television? As the networks continue to shed audiences to cable, video games, and Netflix, they have been forced to cater to the vast middle. That which is most appealing to the most people, such as B-level celebrities ballroom dancing — thrives. In part because it gets ratings, but also because it’s cheap to produce. And as NBC made clear with it’s decision to move Leno to 10 pm, NBC is interested in profit margins, not quality. What we now call ‘quality’ television has thus been relegated to premium cable and, increasingly, AMC, F/X, and other expanded cable options. The shows may garner smaller ratings on these channels, but they can also cultivate a solid fanbase — one that’s more likely to shell out the big bucks to pay for DVDs and box sets.

But what about Lost, you say? There’s a crazy show with idiosyncratic plot twists! That J.J. Abrams is crazy! And yes, Lost airs — and has continued to find success — on ABC. And while I concede that Lost, somewhat like 24, deviates from the network norm, cultivating narrative complexity, it also employs hyper-seriality. I don’t know if that’s a word, but the sentiment seems to come through: it addicts its viewers, almost enforcing a sustained viewership. Friday Night Lights may keep you holding your breadth as to whether or not Coach Taylor will remain at Dillon High, but it very rarely makes me count down the days until the next episode. It’s just not in the nature of the narrative — which is part of the reason that the actual football games are always contained within a single episode. The writers aren’t employing narrative trickery to sustain your attention. Unless, that is, Coach walking in on Julie and Saracen is narrative trickery, or the scene when Tyra’s mom tells Tyra that she’s always surprised her. (Even the descriptions of those scenes — each of which was wrought with emotion — reads as unengaging.)

In Season 2, we witnessed NBC’s attempt to mainstream the show, turning a show about football and family and working class Texas into one about rape, revenge, and murder. In short, they made it high melodrama. And it failed miserably. (Think too of 30 Rock‘s attempt to play the network game in Season Three, inviting a stream of guest appearances and focusing on Liz’s pregnancy desires. For me, at least, the magic went out of the show at the beginning of that season.) Part of me believes the FNL writers knew this plotline was going to fail — and felt nothing but thankful when the writer’s strike truncated the season. When the show returned for Season 3, it was if the murder/attempted rape had never occurred. Nor had Lyla’s evangelical phase. And it was AWESOME, if not wholly believable. That’s the sort of narrative elision I can get behind.

Which returns me to fate of FNL. Very few people appointment view it on NBC. But NBC seems to care little about the numbers, for the simple reason that they’re no longer footing half of the bill. NBC and DirectTV entered into a unique coproduction deal before the third season that essentially saved FNL: they’d split the production costs, DirectTV would air the shortened season (13 episodes, much like other ‘quality’ seasons on HBO, AMC, etc.) in the Fall on their DirectTV channel, then NBC would air the episodes in the Spring.

Late last year, after much hand ringing, DirectTV reupped the deal for two additional seasons, which means Friday Night Lights will be ours for the next two years. NBC can continue mis-marketing it as a sexy teen show, as they do in the picture below.

No matter. It doesn’t need to perform on traditional network levels, so it can develop as it will, continuing the trend of the absolutely remarkable third season. And judging by the first four episodes of season four, even though Coach Taylor and Landry now have to wear red, the show’s loyalties — to those who appreciate its particular style of storytelling — remain steady.