In tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine Virginia Heffernan throws her weight behind “Friday Night Lights,” the ratings-maligned, critically-hailed one-hour drama on NBC. Gawker pinch hitter Greg Wasserstrom, typically of Wonkette, responds with unpithy degradation of said piece and show. But both stories are oddly bereft of context or insight. Heffernan writes in her piece:
“Viewers have to keep watching or the show might die. And to NBC’s bottom-liners, ‘Friday Night Lights’ must seem like a charity case they never should have adopted. If they cut it loose now, or after the strike ends, fans would rend garments, perhaps stage a boycott.”
But later writes:
“The fault of ‘Friday Night Lights’ is extrinsic: the program has steadfastly refused to become a franchise. It is not and will never be ‘Heroes,’ ‘Project Runway,’ ‘The Hills’ or Harry Potter. It generates no tabloid features, cartoons, trading cards, board games, action figures or vibrating brooms. There will be no ‘Friday Night Lights: Origins,’ and no ‘FNL Touchdown’ for PlayStation.
This may sound like a blessing, but in a digital age a show cannot succeed without franchising. An author’s work can no longer exist in a vacuum, independent of hardy online extensions; indeed, a vascular system that pervades the Internet. Artists must now embrace the cultural theorists’ beloved model of the rhizome and think of their work as a horizontal stem for numberless roots and shoots — as many entry and exit points as fans can devise.”
And while I admire the hypothesizing and salivate at the notion of “FNL: Origins” (I’m imagining a dewy, young Connie Britton), I can’t help but see a disconnect, near contradiction, between a post-cancellation boycott/rallying cry, and the supposed non-franchising of the show. If, in fact, the reason the show isn’t succeeding is because fans haven’t taken to scripting their own meta-“FNL” world — fan fiction, wiki sites, custom Tim Riggins beer cozies, the whole nine — then why would there be protest? While shows like “Heroes,” “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica” have drawn fervent support beyond the shows themselves, the reason for this has little to do with our rapidly changing world. It likely has more to do with those shows’ central themes: mythology, science fiction, breaching the unknown, the extraordinary. They almost demand extra attention. “Friday Night Lights” is quite the opposite. It’s heightened verité, the actual world occasionally elevated to Explosions in the Sky-aided, but never superheroic heights. Furthermore, it stands to reason that the people lifting the ratings of those shows are not the die-hards. They’re the middle ground. Does “Lost” live and die by its faux-wiki entries? Or is the middle section of the country, the average viewer uninhibited by the obsessions of TV viewers taking their fandom an inch or mile too far, the real bellweather? Seems easy enough, no? Beyond that notion, other shows in other sub-genres, particularly reality television, thrive with no such aid. “Survivor” and “Dancing With the Stars” have flourished without the aid of fan fiction (and thank goodness for that) or the like. And what of procedurals like “Law & Order” and “CSI”? Do they too need lunchboxes with William Petersen’s face embossed on tin to win viewers? Perhaps “FNL” is too complicated for the “Heroes” audience, as Heffernan initially notes, though more likely its marketing was bungled by NBC in Season One and only derailed further in the less-than-subtle Season Two.
Wasserstrom rather foolishly dismisses the show out of hand, aligning it with a photo of James Van Der Beek from the film Varsity Blues. Wasserstrom writes of Heffernan’s take: “it’s sort of like when your articulate but totally misguided friend explains why nobody’s into her fiance [sic].” The post reads as if he has never watched the show and is just posting to throw rocks at Heffernan. If he wanted to do that he could have done so with some real ammunition.
Both pieces fail to mention that a.) Season Two’s wildly soap operatic storyline has diminished the show’s grace and intensity b.) The show was moved to Friday night, historically a TV wasteland, for Season Two. Those mitigating factors combined have turned a show that began as one of the purest, smartest ensemble shows of the last decade into a middling high school drama blessed with a steely cast and a team of writers and producers who appear to be neutering themselves.
