I’ve been around the south of the US enough to have seen the importance of football: little burgs where the high-school football field has stands that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two soccer club in the UK. Friday Night Lights, which was first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in the most fervent edges of that world, smalltown Texas, where what happens under the floodlights at the end of the working week defines the mood of the place for days to come. Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one such town, Temple.
I didn’t really think about it until many years later, but you really risked being beaten [up]. Not just harassed, but beaten. Everywhere you went, you really had to look over your shoulder.
If you were at the mall, if you were at the parking lot, if you were at a party – people really wanted to fight.” That was the world into which the Pulitzer-winning reporter HG “Buzz” Bissinger inserted himself. In 1988, he moved to Odessa with his family to write a book about smalltown football. He expected something folksier than he ended up with, which was a portrait of young men being simultaneously revved up like boxers and told to be gentle like priests, all the while burdened with the expectations of their whole community and the pressure to win college scholarships.
It was also a portrait of a town riven with racism, where football sucked precious resources from classroom budgets, and where evidence was everywhere that football was a broken dream, especially in the former golden boys, with their state championship rings, still hanging around Odessa rather than lighting up the NFL. The book came out in 1990 and was acclaimed everywhere except Odessa. In 1993, it inspired a TV series, Against the Grain, that lasted a single series, and propelled the young Ben Affleck nowhere.
There was a 2004 movie that stuck more closely to the book, and was pretty good. And then there was the 2006 series – created by the director of the movie, Peter Berg – which used the book as a starting point for something wonderful: Friday Night Lights. Odessa became Dillon, home of the Dillon Panthers.
In came characters, some clearly based on their counterparts in the book, others entirely new. Out went some of Bissinger’s more troubling reporting, but the thrust of his discomfort with much of life in Odessa was reflected in Dillon. Friday Night Lights ended up being so good that it transcended difficulties, some of its own making, that might have killed it.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
