Friday Night Lights: Rundown of Parental Characters

This post will appeal to more of a niche audience than most, I would guess. That niche is fans of the TV show Friday Night Lights. The show, of course, followed the movie, which followed the journalistic book. If you're going to get into this franchise, start with the book, which is the true source material. The show, though, may just be the best show anywhere but HBO right now. (Well, sort of right now; the last episode just aired on NBC. It's on Hulu and DVD, far superior ways to watch TV anyway.) It features the most realistic marriage I've ever seen on television between the football coach and his wife. Anyway, the idea for this post has been knocking around this ol' head of mine for a while, and I'm going to finally attempt this.

I have found myself watching the show as a parent and examining the catalog of parents in the show.Warnings: 1) there will be spoilers in this post, and 2) I am vulnerable to being spoiled. I am two episodes into the final season (five). Although I'll try to organize this in season order, let's face it: it's all swimming together by now, and I won't be able to discuss these parents without using what I know from all that I've watched up to now. I won't soon give you permission to leave my blog mid-post again, but read this post later if you don't want plot lines spoiled.

Bye

Bye

Okay, just long haul FNL fans now (and people who don't care about spoilers)? Good.

After all this buildup, you may say "duh" when you read my key analytical finding on FNL parents: except for Coach and Tammy and flashes here and there, these kids have uniformly terrible parents. Or more precisely, diversely terrible parents. They fall down on the job in a whole panoply of ways.

Shall I count the ways?

I'll do that in a second, but I'll tell you that I'm going to wrap this up with my own guess as to why we don't see good parenting in this show. Also, although these are characters, I'm just going to talk about them like they're real because, well, they're real to me when I'm watching.

Jason Street - May the good Lord prevent me from ever having to face what these parents go through when Jason gets hurt. Before he gets hurt, they're relatively non-existent. He does seem to be better-raised than some other characters, and they're both present in his life. But the accident just does them in. They can't really leave it behind them, and Jason ends up finding his own way in the world in a wheel chair. Jeez, mom and dad.

Lyla Garrity - Hoo boy. In that first season, especially the early episodes, Buddy Garrity is so odious in every way. Of course, he comes to be more sympathetic, and part of that is watching him lose what he's loved. The fact is, though, that he loses it because he's a philanderer and a lout. Once Pam decides she's not putting up with it anymore, there's no forgiveness, and there's no marriage. Lyla, caught in the middle for a while, eventually becomes Buddy's life support, while the younger kids go off in the step-family. When Lila goes deep into church, she goes alone. When she starts crashing at Tim's place, she, of course, does that alone, too.

Tim Riggins - Speaking of Tim, his mother never appears, and his father only wreaks havoc when he turns up briefly. Tim and his brother Billy have only had each other for a long time, and that theme appears over and over again. Dad's an alcoholic and a con man who can be neither depended upon nor trusted. Tim, being younger than Billy, knows this less when Dad shows up, and the drunk just gets to break his heart all over again. Despite my man-crush on Tim Riggins, I have no idea what happened to mama Riggins. That doesn't stop me from seeing the Oedipal themes of his relationship with the hot mom neighbor. Compensate much?

Matt Saracen - Becoming "the man" on the football team by stepping into the starting QB role just adds to the ways that thoughtful Matt has to be the man. His father nobly fights in Iraq, which leaves Matt taking care of his demented grandmother. She dotes like crazy and anchors Matt to the house even more. The only thing worse than Dad's absence in the war turns out to be his brief time at home. Although he makes a feint at taking the caregiver burden off his high school son's shoulders, he eventually flees back to the battlefield (!) rather than take responsibility. Who does help? Matt's mom, a hairdresser who left him lo those many years ago. Of course, once we learn what a hard-assed peach of a family deserter dear ol' Dad is, we figure out why mom left. She really gives it a good try, but having not been there to raise Matt for years, she really doesn't know what to do with him. He may be uber-responsible, but he's still a high school student spreading his wings, and she's not really made of the right stuff to parent him.

Landry Clarke - I couldn't pick Landry's mom out of a lineup. Landry's dad, on the other hand, is pretty present and interested. And if you're going to sort of kill a guy sort of defending your sort of girlfriend, it would definitely behoove you to have a sheriff dad who will burn the evidence with you. Yeah, um, dad, about you catching Tyra sneaking out of my window in the morning, remember what we did with the old car down at the quarry?

Tyra Collette - We only know what we know about Tyra's dad as reflected through her mother's complaints about men. Angela's chief ambition for her daughters is that they marry well. Mindy, leaves her promising career as a stripper to marry the disappointing Billy Riggins. Tyra confounds her mother by sort of dating Landry and then wanting to go to (gasp!) college. The real tension arises for Tyra when Tammy Taylor (the only good mom around) gives her good personal advice and is there for her when she really needs her.

Brian "Smash" Williams - Dad? In the projects? No. Mom, though, does pretty well with limited resources. This relationship feels authentic to me. So many pro athletes who have come from difficult circumstances speak movingly about the sacrifices their mothers made to enable them to achieve what they have achieved, and Mama Williams humanizes that narrative. She's not perfect, but she loves her son in an appropriately fierce way that only becomes more important when his star status and clear route out gets threatened by injury.

JD McCoy - Holy Mother of Texas Football. Joe and Katie McCoy show up with an intact marriage and deep involvement in their kid's life and football career. How novel. Then, we see that that involvement is way too deep. Joe turns out to be the psycho sport parent we know about in every youth league but haven't so far seen on FNL. Katie provides another version of the strong Texas woman, albeit not as likeable a version as Tammy Taylor. In the end, Joe's too much of a bumhole for their marriage to survive (I think. I may be forgetting a quiet reunion after they split up). At any rate, JD is out of control, and it's all his parents' fault.

Vince Howard - Let's see. Saracen made it out, and we already saw Mama Williams do her thing with a star player, so let's combine grandma Saracen's incapacity with a poor, African-American star. Mom's a junky, and the lights keep getting turned off. When Vince does what a young man does to try to get some money, he's doing it to pay for Mom's rehab. The playbook is the least of this kid's worries.

Jess Merriwether - Mom is definitely absent, and Dad is so incredibly emotionally distant that he might as well be absent. The sage and stable Jess survives these two different parental removals by leaning on her aunt and being a wonderful mother figure to her little brothers. Football, of course, is the one thread that joins daughter to father. It's also the one and only thing that looks like it might melt ol' daddy's heart toward the world in general.

Luke Cafferty - This seems like a normal family on the surface. What we discover, though, is that the surface is the most important thing. Keep your problems to yourself in the Cafferty house until you can't anymore. Then your mom will go nuts and try to take away the only good thing going in any of these kids' lives: Tammy Taylor. She was only doing her job, Mrs. Cafferty. Come on. And look inside your own house for the cause of that whole issue. Right? He's a good kid, but he's far from perfect. If you look deep inside, you'll admit that none of us is perfect.

Becky Sproles - Ah yes. The other side of that little Cafferty problem. Poor Becky. You can tell that she'd make a really cool, Landry-like nerd if she could just have some support and stability at home. But no, her mom's falling for the same guys she is, and her dad's a deserting over-the-road trucker with a shrewish, addictive personality new wife. Becky ends up so incredibly needy that it's all the finally-noble Tim Riggins can do to fend her off.

Why would there be such bad parenting in this show? Why are so many of them absent from their kids' lives? Because if there were good parenting going on, the kids themselves couldn't drive the action of the show like they do. They're only in high school, but you've got to power the drama in them, and all of that hovering, talking, checking in that good parents do wouldn't leave them time to get into and out of trouble as often as they do. The ultimate extent of this that I've seen is the subtly-named Epic at East Dillon. This poor rebel can't get her foster parents to a meeting with the guidance counselor. Her feeling of being alone in this world explains all of that smoking and cutting class and hopeless mooning around.

The secondary benefit of so many parents being terrible is that we get to focus on that sturdy, capable marriage and parenting and general messianic leadership of Eric & Tammy Taylor. Their students, their schools and the whole darn town might fall apart without Eric's warm "Hey" and Tammy's cozy "babe".

You know what they say about Texas. Apparently, even the parenting mistakes are bigger there.

What to Censor

Charlie's participating in a challenge at church this summer to read a designated list of 100 essential scripture passages. The list comes with a punch-out card that's good for a little scorekeeper like him. He's around 40 with a month left of summer.

So far, he's read all Old Testament passages. One might not notice until undertaking a project like this (I'm doing it alongside C) just how many OT stories feature people having sex. In C's bible it says so-and-so had "sexual relations" with so-and-so. A lot. David and Bathsheba, Ruth and Boaz, Abraham and Sarah.

Anyway, recently when I returned a Friday Night Lights DVD to the library, Teddy recognized that it was a DVD and asked what it was. When I said it was "Friday Night Lights, a television show that I watch on DVD", Charlie piped up and said "It's about...a football team and...sexual relations."

My children do not watch FNL. It's a great show, but I do wait until they're in bed to watch it because of the themes it sometimes covers. I protested that the show is about football and relationships. Maybe it's the Old Testament exposure I should really limit, though.

Books of the Aughts: Top 5 non-fiction books I read this decade, not written this decade.

With the decade coming to a close, I'll take a look back at my book database as the year ends and the new year begins to give you my recommendations in various categories.

To start off, a list in no particular order of non-fiction works I've read this decade not actually written in this decade.

How to Talk so Kids will Listen and Listen so Kids will Talk, Faber, Adele and Elaine Mazlish, 1999
My wife is really smart. I read this book "on assignment" from her, and found it to be transformative in my approach to communicating with our kids. Faber and Mazlish have been at this for over 20 years. The first edition of the book was published in 1980. They point out some of the most common and damaging ways that we relate to children and offer alternatives that can really work. They advise with a steady hand about something that's very nuanced and they pepper the book with examples to help the reader understand the principles.

Friday Night Lights, Bissinger, H.G., 1989
Before it was a decent movie and a great television series, Friday Night Lights was a superb work of non-fiction storytelling. A journalist moves to Odessa, Texas and writes about the season he spent with the Permian High School football team and its place in the life of the city of Odessa. Although I'd heard about this book from soon after it was published, I, like many, got interested in it again after a movie version was released in Fall 2004. The movie was a very condensed version, focusing on parts of the stories of the core players Bissinger focuses on in the book. The book has tons more content than was possible to put in a 2 hour movie. The phenomenon of fanatical boosterism and the decision-making process that went along with Permian's football preeminence is far too complex to reflect in a movie, the racism and unfairness suffered by minorities too ugly to get into. But Bissinger covers it all with both a journalist's eye and the fervent heart of a fan; he found the team and its Friday night games an irresistible spectacle.

Friday Night Lights made a lot of people in Odessa angry; its frankness about the fanaticism and the racism that characterized decisions around Permian cut to the quick. It was great to read Bissinger's afterword in the 10th anniversary edition, which details some helpful and hopeful things that came out of the book. It had a lasting impact, and it's an engrossing work of documentary literature.

Operating Instructions; A Journal of my Son's First Year, Lamott, Anne, 1993
This book is perfect, vintage Lamott. She tells the story of her son's birth and how he develops through his first year. Of course, a lot of the story revolves around how she adjusts to being a single mom. Her community of friends and family are an invaluable support to her, most of all, her friend Pammy. Childless herself, she spent huge blocks of time with Anne and Sam that first year. Other big players include the people at Lamott's (almost) all black church and her mother, aunt and brother. Funny, confessional and helpful preparation for the first year that awaits us.
Stolen Season; a Journey Through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues, Lamb, David, 1991
My baseball book for the 2004 season (I try to read at least one baseball book, usually in blustery March or frosty April), this book was very satisfying. My friend Katherine Stikkers gave it to me as she was paring down her household in Pittsburgh. We've shared a love of baseball and played on a softball team together. Lamb is a journalist who has had a global career. His career started with a unique assignment covering the Braves from a distant fan's perspective for the Milwaukee Journal the year they moved from Boston to Milwaukee. The unique aspect of the assignment is that he was 14 that season.

This book is the story of a summer - 1989 or 1990 - when Lamb took off in an RV across the country going to minor league games and soaking up the lifestyle and stories integral to it. Many of his stops are chosen because the teams are part of the Milwaukee Brewers minor league system. Stops in Stockton, CA, El Paso and Peoria, AZ present the relationship of minor league teams to their communities. This is a great book for baseball fans, even as it has aged. Lamb met players who have gone on to successful major league careers when they were still prospects or minor league stars. Of course, most of the players he meets never made it to the show or didn't last long enough to become household names. It's a charming book and a quick read.

A caution to wives: if your husband reads this book in spring, keep him off used RV lots.Children of Israel, Children of Palestine: Our Own True Strories, Holliday, Laurel, Ed., 1998
My friend Maria Wahrenberger, a voracious reader, lent me this collection of personal narratives by Israelis and Palestinians in 2002. In the midst of the latest chapters of strife between the two countries, it was enlightening to read stories by people (mainly under 18 or writing from their experience at a young age) who live the strife of the two populations living side by side. Although Holliday explicitly says that she tried to maintain a balance between the polar views of the situation, the book tends to paint Palestinians in a slightly more sympathetic light than Israelis. Overall, though, the most striking thing is how violence becomes the outside actor that makes peoples' lives difficult, not the actual enemy. On both sides of the conflict, people (and especially children) live in dread of unexpected eruptions of violence. Despite green pastures that they sometimes walk in, they or their loved ones are in imminent danger almost constantly. The book brings home the blessings of freedom from genocidal violence that we enjoy in the US.