Quality Programming

Has there ever been a better family show than Friday Night Lights? By family show I don’t mean a show that has a happy, positive message every time and where the kids in the show always make the right decision and say “yes, sir,” and “no, ma’am” all the time. Those are unrealistic if you ask me. A family show in my mind should offer something for everyone in the family and should be somewhat based in the real world.
FNL is all of those things. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the show follows the Taylor family, made up of Eric, Tammy and Julie. Eric is the father/husband and coach of the local high school football team in a football crazy town. Tammy is the mother/wife who happens to be the principal at the high school at which her husband coaches. As you can imagine, this causes some friction. Julie is the daughter who is also a student at the high school at which her dad is the coach and mom is the principal.
Tina and I both grew up watching shows like Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven. She even still likes to watch 7th Heaven. Those are all great shows will valuable lessons in making the right decisions, being nice to everybody, the power of prayer, etc. But they aren’t very realistic, in my opinion. In those shows, everything always works out in the end. Little Suzy gets healed of her mystery illness, mommy and daddy work through their problems and a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a personification of God shows up with the answer for any other issue. In the real world, every cloud does not have a silver lining.
FNL has its feet on the ground when it comes to the issues facing families today. The kids drink at their parties, have sex without the good little angel that looks a lot like Dad standing on their shoulder telling them they shouldn’t be doing it and get into all kinds of other trouble. When Buddy Garrity, the slimy football booster who is willing to do whatever it takes to make sure the Panthers win, cheated on his wife with his secretary, there was no reconciliation, only divorce. In the shows very first episode Jason Street, the school’s all-world quarterback, was paralyzed making a tackle. There was no miracle cure for him. No Michael Landon, Della Reese or Roma Downey showing up with a magic tough or miracle cure.
Matt Saracen, the backup QB who was thrust into the spotlight following Street’s injury, has more on his plate then Laura Ingalls ever could have dealt with. His father is deployed in Iraq and he has an absentee mother. While holding down a job at Tasty Freeze (television’s equivalent to Dairy Queen), managing his studies and leading his team to state, he also tends to his grandmother. He has to deal with her as she goes through the early stages of Alzheimer’s. This entails consistent bickering with the insurance company over in-home care and medication costs as well as making sure she doesn’t burn the house down or wander of in the middle of the night.
Without rehashing the entire series, let me just say that if Tina and I had kids, especially teenagers, this is the show we would want them to watch on a family night, if such things even exist anymore. It truly does offer something for everyone. For the boys, there is not only the fact that the show is written around football, but the girls in the show are all gorgeous. There is also a lot of mushy teenage relationship drama for the girls, as well as some cute boys, or so Tina says. For mom and dad, there some very realistic relationship tension between Tammy and Eric Taylor. They have to deal with money worries, juggling work and a newborn child, as well as worrying about their teenage daughter dating the team’s star QB.
On top of all that stuff, the stories do not always have a happy ending, much like life itself. I think it is important for a show that deals with the issues that FNL does to show that they don’t always end with a puppy dog and cotton candy result. I encourage anyone in search of a good family program to check out Friday Night Lights. The only problem is you may have to search for it. It has fallen victim to NBC’s time slot shuffle. Its first season it was on Tuesday nights, last season it was moved to Fridays, and this season it has been moved to Wednesdays on the Direct TV channel where it will remain until January, when it will return to NBC. Check it out.