Friday night frights: TV series about high school football critiques our society

High school football sounds and looks like this: Smash! Crunch! Wham! Ugh! Followed by cheers, screaming, music, wild stomping, then silence, gasps, eyes glazing over, mouths hanging open as a boy's broken body lies twisted on the field while a cheerleader weeps. If I had a son, I would not want him to play this sport. Friday Night Lights--the book, the film, and 11 episodes of the NBC TV series--has reinforced that judgment.

The phenomenon began with H.G. "Buzz" Bissinger's 1990 bestselling journey into the "real America," the West Texas town of Odessa (population 90,000), to chronicle the relationship between the town and the Permian Panthers, its high school football team. The author "lived" with the kids, attending every practice, game, rattlesnake hunt, church service and school day. He liked them from the beginning, and in the end he says he "adored" them. But he couldn't paint a pretty picture of the town.

Odessa had no culture, no intellectual life. The adults lived vicariously through their young. The teachers didn't teach; they coddled the athletes. The cheerleaders were the jocks' geishas. The school and team were integrated, but "nigger" was in the standard vocabulary. Several members of the rival team went to jail for armed robberies.

When they were winning, the Panthers were teen gods; when they lost, townsfolk planted "For Sale" signs on the coach's lawn and the local paper editorialized that he should get out. With few exceptions, the boys lived one dream--being recruited by a college as a step into the NFL. In reality, many ended up aimless college dropouts with lingering football injuries--candles, with flames snuffed out.

The 2004 film features Billy Bob Thornton as the coach who inspires the team saying, "Do your best with love in your hearts," and includes the character from the book, Boobie Miles, the emotionally immature black star who injures his knee and plays anyway.

The game scenes are fast action, quick-cut and punctuated with loud crunches as bodies collide.

The TV series, Killed in Texas, continues the dazzling cinematography and loud body crashes of the film, but it changes the town and school name to Dillon, with a new coach, named Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), who resembles the old one, and with the same film actress (Connie Britton) playing his wife. But it has opened up the story with new characters. It has muted, without completely cutting, the social criticism of the book.

The show's moral center is Taylor, who wants to win and keep his job, play by the rules of life, be a good husband to his wife, Tami, who is a guidance counselor at the school, and father to his daughter, Julie, who asserts herself by dating the quarterback without asking parental permission. Taylor is also a surrogate parent to his team. If their emotional lives are screwed up, they won't play well, he reasons; some are fatherless and need him.

The emotional center is Jason Street (Scott Porter), the quarterback paralyzed by a spinal injury in the first episode, who struggles, in therapy and in his wheelchair, to regain his body and his pride. His beautiful cheerleader girlfriend, Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly), dotes on him in the hospital, feeds him, lies on top of him and kisses him in various places, asking if he can feel it. In her efforts to goad Jason's surly best friend, Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitch), to get enough gumption to visit his buddy, she sleeps with him. Dillon is a small place. Word of the scandal spreads. The team, devoted to its wounded hero, delivers the ultimate punishment to teammate Tim. With their baseball bats, they destroy his car.

The girls write "slut" on Lyla's locker. Sensing something wrong, Lyla's father, Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland), the meddling car dealer who personifies the town's obsession with the team, has a fatherly chat with Lyla, who confesses that she was "unfaithful." Jason and Lyla will reconcile, but though he will recuperate enough to play wheelchair football and move home, he cannot experience an erection.

Brian "Smash" Williams, a black, fatherless, undersized whiz who sees himself as the family's "meal ticket" once he makes the pros, has a bad game with the scout watching, and determines to bulk up. To pay for his steroids, he asks his mom for $1,200 for an SAT prep course. Duped, the church takes up a collection to support his habit.

The nicest kid is Matt Saracen, the shy quarterback who cares for his senile grandmother while his father is away in Iraq, but even he is right there smashing cars with his baseball bat when the team retaliates against rivals who vandalized the Dillon locker room,.

The second TV season begins at a new time (Wednesdays at 8 EST) with two plot developments that deepen the social criticism and reach out into the world outside Texas. Counselor Tami Taylor blows the whistle on Tim Riggins, who has been handing in plagiarized term papers, and Matt's father suddenly returns from Iraq for two weeks. The father is not well. Rigid and dictatorial, he barks that we're going go stay in Iraq until we finish the job. He yells at his demented mother, puts her in a home, and orders Matt--who, disturbed by his presence, loses a big game--to move to Oklahoma and live with cousins. The scene where father and son yell at each other infront of everyone after the game--Matt tells his father, "Go back to Iraq"--should make strong men weep.