Oh hello

‘FNL’ is about football in the same way that Ulysses is about perambulation. Also, ‘FNL’ is about: hometowns, teens, adults, the city, the country, the rich, the poor, huddled masses, yearning, hard-core Christian rock, girls with long legs, nachos, rich farmland, and men wielding pink plastic bicycles against doofus TAs who have seduced their daughters.

One way you could put it is that ‘FNL’ is about how silly, even tragic it is to be ‘about’ something. How freeing it can be to turn your back on what you are supposed to be or to like. It points its fingers directly at self-professed ‘sophisticated’ media consumers and asks us: ‘Don’t you like things that are beautiful?’

It was never clear whether ‘Friday Night Lights’ was a teen drama or an adult saga, and I think of this as part of the show’s genius. To put the case more vulgarly, as a thirty-something viewer, I have, in turns, had the hots for both high school fullback Tim Riggins (the glow of youth!) and Coach Taylor (growly adult man-man!). Let’s not even get started on Tami Taylor and her cowboy boots.

Unlike so many television shows, ‘FNL’ was always able to hit that sweet spot where teenagers are beautiful in their raw inarticulateness and adults are, like, heartbreakingly attractive in their desire to take care.

…And this is basically what ‘Friday Night Lights’ talks to us about, how time moves so strangely, how we go from late nights drinking beer and messing around in a deserted field with our friends, our problems seemingly so huge, to late nights drinking wine with a partner, the very hair on our heads weary, our problems seemingly so huge. The thing that the show did so beautifully was refuse to belittle any of these micro-times that we all pass through during a life lived.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I started feeling like I had a past, but whenever it was, it was a sad and wonderful day. Once you have a past, you can always go back (in your mind) but you can also never go back… ‘FNL’ makes me feel the way that one LCD Soundsystem song about friends makes me feel. Like once I danced all night in a condemned loft with my friends but now I do not. Both of these things are totally okay.

—Sarah Blackwood | Generation ‘FNL’ — The Awl (via fromoneroomaway)

(via brominator)