OF A GOLDEN AGE

Daniel Lanois’s beautiful, expressive “Sonho Dourado” (português for “golden dream”) elevates the 2004 soundtrack Friday Night Lights. All but two of the tracks are by postrock outfit Explosions in the Sky, to whom I was introduced by a fleeting college friend from the band’s homestate of Texas. I listened to the album for a long time before it occurred to me to see the movie, which a friend and I rented pretty much at my insistence one quiet weekday night at school.

In case you were wondering, the movie is terrific. It is especially resonant if you are from a small town with high-school football culture.

NBC began airing a television series based on the movie and the original book (link is to Wikipedia’s disambiguation page on the whole FNL complex) and I heard good things but was skeptical. The movie surprised me, though, so the show deserved a fair shake.

It is, in turn, a terrific show. Again, it spoke to things in me I’d long forgotten. This Pajiba guide (from their list of the 15 best television seasons of the last 20 years) does a good job describing the feeling, especially when he describes how humbling and expansive it is to realize that the golden boys of rural America have lives as complicated and messy as anyone’s.

Of course, there are flaws. Much like every show with an ensemble cast, the characters run into each other in unlikely ways that feel disingenuous sometimes. I would never, never have spontaneously spent a day with the popular kids who were mean to me, or even the ones I just didn’t think were very smart or interesting; this holds true even moreso for the kids further marginalized by sports culture. I also feel very strongly that the show puts a liberal spin into a small town where it very likely did not exist. The book’s author came in from the outside to study the town and its team culture, which gave him the distance to describe in depth a small town’s deep-seated attitudes. That distance is critical. In my own small town, I can only imagine the ostracization a student, teacher, or parent would experience if he or she stood up to the racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and xenophobic climate.

But . . . I don’t know, this almost makes me love the show more. It’s like counseling in hindsight — an attitude adjustment when I am, clearly, as intolerant of my popular classmates as they were of others who were different. There was certainly much more to each of their stories than I ever saw.

As a side note, this show has more blatant, consistent product placement than I’ve ever seen. Endorsers include Applebees, Chevrolet, and Dell. Ahhh, the American way.

You can watch every episode of Friday Night Lights on NBC’s website.

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