I am easily influenced by my f-list...

[ratcreature]

There have been more than a handful of people talking favorably about Friday Night Lights on my f-list, and I've been kind of missing the teenage angst and drama recently in my tv line up, now that Everwood is no more. So I gave the FNL pilot a try, and well, my impression so far was mostly that they seem to pray a lot and also I'm completely lost with the American football scenes.

So now I'm kind of looking for reassurance from those of you who like the series that the pilot episode isn't representational for the series at large. I'm willing to give it one or two episodes more before making up my mind about it, but I rather dubious right now.

Comments

[shrift.livejournal.com]

Well, it's Texas. There's gonna be a lot of church and football.

I was hooked after three episodes, but honestly, I have no idea how I would watch this show without context. I grew up in a small, football-crazy town like this, so everything's really quite terrifyingly familiar to me. I think the show has interesting (and fairly accurate) things to say about teenagers, class, and race issues in America.

I'm watching it for the characters, not the football -- but football is so omnipresent in American culture that I have a lot of practice at both ignoring and putting up with it.

[ratcreature]

Well, it's not so much that I couldn't ignore the football parts. I'm good at ignoring sports too. I mean, people here are crazy about regular football, though in different ways, and I find it really weird that anyone would care at all about school sports, since that just doesn't happen here, or school sports being competitive like that at all. (Though I think that American football is rather opaque and incomprehensible, since from just encountering it in football movies I'm not even sure how the scoring works, just that they run against each other a lot.)

It's just... *flails for words* ...it didn't really feel like I got introduced to the the characters? Part of it might have been that I stared at the screen frequently and found them acting really alien, and waited for the anthropologogical documentary commentary explaining their behavior with some context so I could make sense of it. For example, why did that player (it was the quarterback? I think) talk in front of a bunch of little children? I didn't even get what he was doing there, what was happening just then. The whole thing was like that.

[shrift.livejournal.com]

I find it really weird that anyone would care at all about school sports, since that just doesn't happen here, or school sports being competitive like that at all.

High school football and other sports can be VERY competitive. For scholarships to university, and also because the games bring in revenue to the school and the community. In small towns like the one I grew up in and the one on the show, Friday night IS football night. Nothing else goes on. The entire town is at the football game, and it honestly does reflect badly on the community when they lose.

It's freaky, but true. Like American patriotism.

It's just... *flails for words* ...it didn't really feel like I got introduced to the the characters?

I say give it until episode 3. By episode 3, I could tell the characters apart and they really started to give backstory, and I was dying for the next episode. By episode 8, oh my god, the backstory is getting delicious!

Part of it might have been that I stared at the screen frequently and found them acting really alien, and waited for the anthropologogical documentary commentary explaining their behavior with some context so I could make sense of it.

I love this. Because this show is very similar to what life was like for me in high school, and I would have liked the anthropological documentary commentary to explain things to me while I was living it.