"Feed the dog...

spit in the fire, lock up your daughters, turn on the radio, sit down and shut up, 'cause it's GAME TIME people!" Just another great line of dialog from NBC's "Friday Night Lights," which the network in its infinite wisdom has decided to move to Wednesday nights at 8 pm, just so it will conflict with my regular basketball time. Oh well, I may finally have to break down and buy a TiVo. Or at least hook up my VCR....

I'm not sure why I've been enjoying this program so much. I've never really cared that much for the "jock culture" epitomized by High School football, despite having played three years worth myself when I was in High School. Well, maybe I should say I played a year's worth of ball in three years, just to be precise. This opinion wasn't really improved by the four years I spent in Midland Texas, where they take "schoolboy" football to a whole other level. The book on which the movie on which the TV series is based was written about the Odessa Permian Panthers (who were the down-the-tracks rivals of our town's football team, the Midland Lee Rebels), and was published shortly after I arrived there. Lee/Permian games were a BIG DEAL in West Texas, routinely drawing tens of thousands of spectators and tens of thousands more radio listeners. One year, when the two teams met during the World Series, the local TV station chose to show the baseball game on a tape delay so that they could broadcast the High School Football game live. No, really.

The TV series has done an excellent job of capturing that atmosphere, although if anything it sugar coats it some. All the cliches are there -- the Blue Chip prospect whose future dreams are dashed by a career-ending spinal cord injury. The sophomore back-up plunged into a situation over his head, and struggling but succeeding. The cheerleader girlfriend, the bad-boy best friend, the young black tailback juicing in hopes of a college scholarship and a chance to pull his family out of poverty. But the young actors are making their roles three-dimensional, while the writing itself is strong and the dialog fantastic. It's just a fun show to watch -- and the football sequences themselves are a joy. And then there are the boosters, the pressures on both the kids and the coaches (whose livelihoods rest in the hands of teenagers), and of course the tragic tales heard again and again in these small towns in West Texas, of men whose lives hit their highest point before their 18th birthday. It's hard to go on to working in the oilpatch when once you were worshipped like a god. And so the cycle repeats, as old men recapture the frustrated dreams of their own youth through the promising young lives of their offspring.

Anyway, I suspect the show will continue to evolve and improve, although it will be interesting to see whether it can sustain itself (like the West Wing) from season to season season after season. But I hope it finds a larger audience on Wednesdays, because the show really deserves it. Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose