Well, as many of you know, my daughter Stacey was a cast member of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS on NBC for five years. It turned out to be one of the finest shows ever done on TV, and for to have a role in it was the thrill of a lifetime. The other day on Facebook, somebody asked me if I had any final thoughts now that the series has come to an official end. So… I wrote the following…
It was all so real. Maybe that’s why Friday Night Lights never got the big audience. People don’t want to sit at home and see real life. They want reality, but they want it scripted, and packaged, and with three witty judges sitting out front. The only judges we ever saw in Dillon, Texas were the people who lived there and who (thanks to incredible scripts) were judging, most often, themselves, with a Shakespearean sense of introspection most writers are incapable of providing.
Sometimes, it hurt to watch. In the very first episode, they took the handsome, stud quarterback, Jason Street, and laid him out with a spinal cord injury that would put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life and I thought, “Damn, this is not your average TV show.” And then I remembered my friend Kent Waldrep, a good ol’ Texas boy who played running back for TCU, and in a game at Alabama in 1974, took off around right end, got knocked down, and never got up again.
Sometimes, it was so real, you felt like you could walk into a scene. I’d watch Kyle Chandler as head coach Eric Taylor and think, “Damn, I’ve interviewed that guy five hundred times over the years.” He could have been Merlin Priddy from Fort Worth Arlington Heights, or any one of hundreds of other coaches I’d known. And I won’t even get into how realistic the Taylor’s marriage was.
And we had tears, and were prepared to shed them; when Tim went to prison for Billy; when Billy and Mindy took Becky back to her mother. Sometimes, the tears were from laughter. When Mindy demanded that Becky “evaluate” her. (I should add, for those who don’t know, Mindy is played by my daughter, Stacey, so I’m a little biased here.) When Tami yelled at Eric, “I think we’re in agreement here!”
Each week, each season, they never took the easy way out. In football parlance, they always left everything on the field. And for these reasons and more, I actually don’t think I’ll be able to watch FNL again, even though I do, of course, have all five seasons on DVD. I may take one out and watch some of Stacey’s scenes now and again. But I don’t think I want to go through a replay of Friday Night Lights the way I’ve replayed Foyle’s War again and again. I don’t want to see Street get hurt again. I don’t want to relive Smash’s problems with his girlfriend’s mental illness. It was all too real.
In my real life I have, since some severe problems back in the early 90’s, always tried to live by going forward. I don’t want to dwell in the past, to be one of those aging types who tell everybody how great it was “in my day.” I believe we learn from the past, but that as it is the past, it is best left behind. Whenever a theater colleague asks me what my favorite role is, I always say “The next one.” Some understand; some don’t.
I’ve also always said that I’d rather play on special teams for the Super Bowl winner than be the starting quarterback of a team that never makes the playoffs. Despite occasional bouts of obnoxious individuality, I’d always rather be part of a team. I want to be a part of something bigger than myself. And the five years spent in Dillon taught me once again how wonderful that feeling is.
I could sign off with a cliché, “Clear eyes… full hearts,” but that would be contrary to everything we got out of the show. So, I’ll sign off as “Dillon” as I can.
See y’all later. (…at www.markoristano-photographer.com)
Tags: Friday Night Lights, Mark Oristano
