Friday Night Lights Wasn’t a Hit, You Can Still Watch

Last week, the 5th and final season of the critically acclaimed drama Friday Night Lights came to a beautiful conclusion. Many of the storylines were wrapped up, important characters got their send-offs. But the particulars are not important and considering how small the audience is it would be pointless to even talk about it. What I want to explore is how can a show that combines America’s number one obsession with well-done family drama fail so miserably to find an audience? Why did a show that preached family values more than any program on CBS miss with Middle America?

Friday Night Lights was always plagued with low ratings. It never garnered more than 8 million viewers in its first season and was constantly shuffled around by NBC before finally landing, ironically, in the Friday Night Death Slot.

This was not even a case of NBC messing shit up as they have been known to do. The show was aggressively promoted online, given a cushy timeslot and a full 22 episode run to no avail.

Somehow, a TV show with a ludicrous assortment of attractive people (seriously, just stare at Taylor Kitsch for 10 seconds and see if your special parts don’t tingle) about high school football had failed to connect with anyone that would seemingly love it. The people who loved football couldn’t buy into the ridiculous game sequences (after 5 seasons I’ve lost count as to how many times a game has ended on a 50 yard Hail Mary pass); the ones who stayed for emotional drama were bored by the football. Everyone wrote it off as either a soap opera or a sports show. People punished it for doing both.

For a country that is full of rabble-rousers who bemoan the lack of “Christian, family values” they sure as hell couldn’t find FNL on the TV. But that was because Friday Night Lights didn’t pretend to be a wholesome sitcom with a fat, lazy husband and way too attractive wife and two smart-aleck kids. It defined raw emotion.

The characters wore their hearts on their sleeves, you cried and cheered and did everything in between watching them. Perhaps the raw honesty was unsettling and turned off viewers. But it never made sense to me why millions of people watch emotionally manipulative porn like Extreme House Makeover but couldn’t get invested in FNL.

A lot of TV viewers will tell you that watching a show about a happily married couple is boring, but it’s a load of shit. You won’t find a more honest portrayal of marriage than the one between Eric and Tami Taylor. There are no crazy subplots, no attempts to add any “wow” factor, just eighty episodes of two characters that love each other unconditionally and provide support during the most tumultuous of times. I guess simple and earnest just doesn’t garner a lot of interest. But the show attacked a ton of issues and did so with earnestness. Racism, teen sex, abortion, public education, feminism. You’re not watching a show about football; it’s about Dillon, Texas and the people who live there.

I’m not going to pretend the show was perfect, that each storyline hit every emotional beat and every arc came to a satisfying conclusion. That’s not true, and the second season is one of the more uneven (crappy) things I’ve subjected myself to. But to those who have never seen an episode or might have given up, I say give it another try. If you can subject yourself to Gossip Girl or One Tree Hill then watch a show that does it right.