Slate is carrying hymns of praise to Café favorites Bull Durham, and Friday Night Lights. Perhaps it is only coincidence, but we prefer to think it is a manifestation of our vast influence over public discourse.
Sara Mosle’s piece is the best yet written on FNL, and includes this perceptive paragraph:
Friday Night Lights is also America as it’s seldom been seen. It’s astounding how few dramas depict ordinary, working-class life in the so-called red states—without, say, first giving several of the inhabitants supernatural powers. Also, on television, the country’s lower classes seem to consist entirely of prison inmates, gang members, drug dealers, and the cops who arrest them, and they all live exclusively on the coasts. Dillon, by contrast, is Thomas Frank country. No one here is enjoying the Bush-Cheney tax cuts. People live in modest homes or, if they’re particularly poor, in shotgun shacks. Most of the teenagers don’t have cars—quite a statement in rural Texas—and must work after-school jobs. They don’t have iPods or sport the latest fashions; they shop at the Salvation Army family store. When one football player lands a date with the coach’s daughter and springs for a used Members Only jacket, it quickly gets ridiculed as pretentious. Once you start noticing the absence of consumer goods, it’s a shock. Friday Night Lights may be the most radical show ever marketed to teenagers.