Friday Night Lights

Although it is not about Odessa this time around, the fantastic new television show Friday Night Lights certainly owes its existence to Odessa and Permian High. As a consequence the area was focused last night on the debut of the Panthers' small screen debut, even if these Panthers wear blue, yellow, and white and are based in the fictive West Texas town of Dillon. The local papers have covered the story (with some of the best features apparently not on the Odessa American's website) and Odessans are responding with a blend of pride and trepidation. they have, after all, been through this before. Although I would argue that on balance it was a good thing. HG Bissinger's book roused a great deal of anger in the area, anger no less real because so much of the book rang true. The community got behind the movie in large part because the passage of time had softened some of the edges.

I thought the pilot episode, which debuted last night but will have an encore presentation tonight, was fantastic. The storylines were well handled, the cinema virite approach that worked so well in the film carries over to the small screen, and so far the show appears to want to avoid the standard cliches of television shows that revolve around high schoool life. The scene when the starting quarterback gets seriously injured was powerful and real, and by and large I bought into the characters, though around the edges the writers will have to work hard not to allow some of them (particularly the hard-partying, brooding, bruising fullback, Riggins) not to devolve into cardboard stereotypes.

Even the football scenes are passable, which is always the hardest part to carry out successfully in a sports movie or television show. But Thunderstick made a good point in an email to me this morning:

One thing bothers me and it's the same thing that bothered me about the movie, and that's the inconsistencies in the football scenes. I mean, how does an editor not realize that when a team is driving for the final score in the last minute and you show a guy run to the opponent's 20 yard line and get out of bounds that the next play should start from the 20 not the team's own 40. That happened in the movie too--you'd see a play on a drive and then the next play would be starting from nowhere near where the last play ended. And don't even get me started on that last play with a Hail Mary and the defense lets a guy get 10 yards behind it. That's just ridiculous. It's a fictional show, so have them get to the opponents 40 and huck a Hail Mary into 10 guys that their guy just happens to come down with. Stuff like that drives me nuts because you gotta figure that one of the audiences that they are hoping to reel in is the football loving audience, but anyone with half a brain about football would be driven nuts by these things.

I'd add that the backup quarterback in a program like Permian, I mean Dillon, will have been groomed since childhood to take over the starting role. There would certainly be some jitters, but his entrance into the game last night did not really ring true. A powerhouse football program in Texas is going to find opportunities for the second-string quarterback to get some snape for exactly the reason that last night's episode illustrates -- quarterbacks are vulnerable in football. They are also essential. My other real issue of presentation came when they showed the team practicing before their first game. the players all had long sleeves under their jerseys and the coaches wore sweatshirts and jackets while the condensation from their breaths was visible. What were they thiniking? the first regular season game on the Texas high school calendar is played in August. It is 100 degrees across the state in August. Hell, local teams are in their 6th or 7th week of games now, it is October and yesterday it as 95 in Odessa. Nonetheles, it is clear that the major plotlines of the season have been established -- tension between star players, the backup taking over the most important position on the field, the new coach adjusting to the pressures of the head coaching job, the priorities of a football-obsessed town, the (perceived) realities of life in West Texas.

These parenthetical perceptions are what worry me the most. My worries stem less from the show itself than from its reception. A recent article from Edward Wyatt of the New York Times will illustrate my point nicely. (Note: what follows will be a typical dcat tirade. You've been warned.)

I never thought I'd get defensive about West Texas, nor did I think that I would ever become the region's, or Odessa's, defender. But the condescending and patronizing tone of Mr. Wyatt's piece has roused an adopted pride in me and stoked my ire. I'll give an example of Wyatt's vacuous and poorly constructed piece of cultural observation:

But little about the television series closely follows the book or the 2004 film based on it. The series is set in the present, nearly two decades after the events depicted in the book, and in a fictional West Texas town called Dillon. A career-threatening injury to a significant player strikes the soft-spoken white quarterback rather than the outspoken black running back. All the football players are scrubbed and buffed, looking as if they hail from the O.C. rather than the oil patch, while the cheerleaders — even the town “bad girl” — have haircuts rarely seen west of the Hudson River, much less west of Dallas.

So it is clear that the author gets the point that the show takes place in modern-day West Texas, however fictionalized the actual setting might be. Yet throughout the article he has a tone of incredulity about things that would not have happened in 1988. I'm a historian, so maybe the following point is ingrained in me, but one would think that a journalist from the Times might get it as well: History, as much as anything, is about change over time. 1988 was 18 years ago and counting. A great deal has changed since the 1988 football season. Certainly Odessa is dramatically different in ways big and small. He acknowledges this, kind of sort of, except that he continues to return to the book and to show, hamhandedly, the disjunctions between the two generations, as if he is incredulous that the Permian Basin is not still swept up in the great wave of the 1980s.

But beyond this point, look at his implicit characterization of West Texans. Guess what, Ed -- out here in the tortilla-flat desert plains we have showers. Our kids have "product." We have Bed Bath & Beyond and the Body Shop. We have those new fangled devices known as televisions (and we all have cable -- digital even! And some people have satellite television.) so we see those ads for body scrub and shampoo that you all get out there in the cultured world of New York. The kids in the show look freshly scrubbed because -- wait for it -- most of them are! Our kids do not look like they just stepped in from the oil patch because they did not just step in from the oil patch. Many, though by no means a majority, of the parents of the high school students out here work in the oil fields. But you know why the high school students don't? Because they are high school students. You were probably surprised to note that they do not all carry side arms and wear spurs and boots that match their Texas-sized belt buckles either. The kids look like they stepped out of the O.C. largely because kids (adults too) everywhere take the same cues from pop culture. West texas kids look like the kids from Alabama in Two a Days who look like kids in Minnesota who look like kids in Massachusetts who look like kids in Ohio who look like kids in New Hampshire who look like kids in Florida. In a world of cable television and cell phones and instant messaging and MySpace and Facebook and that whole series of tubes known as the internet, believe it or not, the gap between the hipsters and the hotties and the sluts and the nerds in New York and Odessa, or Dillon, Texas is not that wide. Believe it or not, we get the same episodes of the OC that you do and even on the very same day. Why, your inane little dungheap of an article even got to me at the same time that it was available to everyone else in America. And those east-of-the-Hudson River hairstyles? Because of your article I intentionally focused on the hair -- literally not a one of those hairstyles would out of place on the university campus where I teach or in the halls of Permian High. Not one. Not even the one on the "town bad girl."

While I am debunking misconceptions, allow me to address another one: One constantly sees references to Odessa as embodying "small town" football in America. Odessa may not be a city, but it is hardly a small town. Our population is pushing 100,000. Between Midland and Odessa and the surrounding communities we have a quarter of a million people. The two cities each have two public high schools. All four of those high schools play in class 5A, the biggest school classification in Texas. Each school only has grades 10-12, and each school has some 2000 or more students. I'd hazard a guess that any one of these four high schools would be one of the ten biggest high schools in 80% of the states in the US. Permian would be the biggest high school in New Hampshire (or Vermont; or Maine; it would be one of the biggest high schools in Massachusetts or Connecticut or Rhode Island) despite the fact that Granite State high schools include 9th grade. I can say the same for almost every state in which I have lived. There is not a state in the country where Permian would not be in the big school classification. So let's dispel this myth of Odessa as a one-horse town. Our high schools play in the biggest division in the best football-playing state in the country. Odessa is more representative of America than it is an outlier. Folks like Ed Wyatt, who live east of the Hudson, don't seem to get this, but then again, if this article is any indication, folks like Ed Wyatt don't seem to get much.

By the way -- not all east coast elites miss the point. Despite the fact that he uses the "small town" appelation, the Boston Globe's Matthew Gilbert's
assessment of the show reveals him to be much less of a snooty, chardonnay-sipping, brie-eating (note: Odessa has several places where one can find both good wine and good cheese -- imagine that. Of course we all have to take off our ten gallon hats, tie up Silver at the hitchin' post, slap the dust and grit from our chaps and conquer our befuddlement to master the automatic doors of our fine establishments to do so -- just ask Ed Wyatt) than his colleague at the Times.