Friday Night Lights
Smallville
Friday Night Lights breaks new ground in surrealist dread. But you’d never know that from looking at it. In the trendiest mock-documentary style, every single shot is jiggly and out of focus–there’s so much bobbing and weaving you’d swear somebody was trying to wrestle the camera away from the guy operating it. The action is subdued, undramatic, and inconclusive; the big expected TV moments either don’t happen at all or are shrugged away offscreen. The dialogue is punishingly inarticulate and repetitive, as though some avatar of David Mamet were stuck in hell. Here’s a representative snippet of conversation between two brothers:
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“What’s your problem with dad?”
“What is your problem with dad?”
But Friday Night Lights stacks the deck to make the town more monomaniacal than its real-life counterparts could ever be. We learn absolutely nothing about the coach except that he’s into football, and nothing about his wife except that she’s married to the coach. Their daughter is ostentatiously made into a reader of books, but the one time she’s allowed to speak of this curious hobby, she interprets Moby-Dick as an allegory about football. Still, that’s more independent thought than is allowed the town’s other teenage girls, who are all cheerleeders and “rally girls” who exist only to service the football team. The team itself is the vaguest of blurs: by my count, only five players have even been given names or lines of dialogue. And consider this: the show is set in a high school, and yet not once in the first eight episodes has there been a scene in a classroom or a word spoken by a teacher. The school consists entirely of a locker room, a corridor, and a football field.
“Son, I’ve always thought of my employees as family. Does that surprise you?”
