Friday Night Lights - Pilot, 1.01

Overcast, and the first strains of First Breath After Coma transcend muted hoots and whistles and claps as cameras pan at varying distances across a grey field where a team scrimmages. Football is loud and brassy, with garish cheerleaders, mud, the muffled crack-ing of shoulder pad against helmet or abdomen or shin, torn-up grass and more mud. I don't like football. But I like Friday Night Lights.

I've raved about how much I adore overcast ("Sad is like happy for deep people," and its muted, worn tone), and that aforementioned scene is what sealed the deal for me. Brassy and garish FNL is not. Everything I hate about football is pulled inside out, and predictably I like this side better. Crowds are obviously loud, so FNL softens them. Instead of fanfare for a fight song, Explosions In the Sky provides an atmospheric backdrop for an adrenaline-packed game; there isn't a slow moment, and we don't need to be bombarded with booming declarations of Yeah! This Is Football! by way of noise or gritty close-ups. Art doesn't tell you what you already know, it shows you a different way of looking at life, at ordinary things like football culture in middle-America.

So, FNL is kind of like artsy, anti-football. Which I dig, a lot.

Thoughts:

• First Breath After Coma plays again in the hospital scene. First thought: Wow, this is awesome. Again. Second thought: Is this Grey's Anatomy?
• Love the handheld camera work. Organic. Very shaky, though. Even more so than BSG's 33, I think, which is saying a lot!
• Good use of music in TV really excites me. I freak out over this kind of thing. Usually for American shows it's the song choice and placement (like The Who on Freaks and Geeks, or Edward Sharpe on Community, or anything on Grey's Anatomy or Chuck), and on British shows it's more the way it's used dramatically (recurrence of Damien Rice's Delicate in Misfits; that subtle drone-y piece over Freddie and Cook's conversation in Skins). Not to say British shows don't choose good music, too.
• It's kind of funny how much the quality of writing on this blog has decreased. You can track the wax and wane of my writing finesse and lack thereof by checking the months I write a lot of posts, and the ones in which I don't. Yuck.