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Friday Night Lights: What Comes First?

Jul27

I just finished watching the final episode of the final season of the TV show Friday Night Lights, and I am quite impressed with the quality and thoughtfulness of the entire series. The show’s creators and writers and actors got a lot of things right, and I enjoyed the ride.

First of all, for the most part, they got Texas right. The actors talked and acted like Texans, and it wasn’t overdone or caricatured as it is in so many Texas setting movies and television shows. A lack of Hispanic characters was a weakness in the program, since Texas is 37% Hispanic, but the characters who were there were pure Texan.

They got football right, too. Football really is King in much of Texas, especially small and medium-sized towns in Texas. A few of the situations the writers got themselves into with outlandish behavior by football fans and boosters were over the top, but they showed just how seriously many Texans take their high school football.

I was disappointed, however, by the overall take on sex and Christianity in the program. Christianity was portrayed as a Sunday thing: almost everyone went to church on Sunday, but faith didn’t inform their lives the rest of the week at all. Characters rarely prayed, except in a formulaic way before football games, and Christian moral values were not even considered as characters in the show engaged in promiscuous, casual sex with multiple partners at a young age. In fact, as the series drew to a close, Coach Taylor and his wife Tammy, a guidance counselor at the local high school, were unconcerned that their nineteen year old daughter had sex with her long-time boyfriend, quarterback Matt Saracen (played by actor Zach Gilford, one of the best actors in a series filled with good acting, by the way), but were completely appalled that Julie and Matt wanted to get married at ages nineteen and twenty respectively. “You’re too young!” No one ever mentions that it’s better to marry than burn (as Paul says) or that sex comes after marriage, not before. It’s just not an issue, and everyone is doing it. The “rules” seem to be:

Be sure you’re “ready”, emotionally and mentally prepared.
Use condoms. (One high school student gets pregnant because she and her boyfriend didn’t. Later, her mom lets the boy come back, with the admonition, “Use a condom this time or I’ll kill you!”)
Don’t have an affair with a married man or woman, and if you’re married , don’t commit adultery. It’s the last taboo.
Don’t get too involved or committed because sex is just sex, and marriage is only for old people and has nothing at all to do with sex.

I take it back: at the beginning, the first couple of season, FNL did “get religion”, at least to some extent. Then, I think the writers thought it became too limiting to the dramatic necessities of the show to have Christian characters trying to live their convictions, even though they were shown failing and trying again. This clip from the pilot episode shows that promising beginning:

Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all, at some point in our lives… fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts… that what we have is special. That it can be taken from us, and when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls. We will now all be tested. It is these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.

Mary DeMuth says Friday Night Lights taught her about community and the need for close relationships.

Friday Night Lights: the TV series

May14

I read the book by H.G. Bissinger a few weeks ago, and I devoured it because I grew up in West Texas. The Odessa Permian Panthers (Mojo) were our rivals when I was in high school. I thought the book was authentic and probably fair and factual.

So I started watching the TV series inspired by BIssinger’s book. In the TV show, the Odessa Panthers become the Dillon Panthers, and the football is joined to the romantic lives of high school students as the main focus of the story. I’ll admit that I got addicted to the show.

The first season was really good. The star quarterback, Jason Street, gets hurt in the first pre-season game, and sophomore Matt Saracen must grow into the role of #1 quarterback for the Dillon Panthers while Coach Taylor struggles to take his mostly young team all the way to the state championship in Taylor’s first year as coach. As the season progressed, and especially in the second season, I noticed that it had become a soap opera, complete with rotating (sexual) relationships, a patriarch and matriarch (Coach Taylor and his wife Tammy), and lots of angst and politics and sexual tension—not to mention murder, drunkenness, and family arguments galore. By this time the show has become something of a guilty pleasure for me, although I’m trying to find some redeeming social value other than the cute guys and my desire to find out what will happen to these characters.

Now I’ve started watching season three of the show. And I’m not a happy camper. Let me count the ways in which the writers have attempted to ruin this show:

1. One of the characters, Lyla, spent the entire second season living out her new-found commitment to Jesus. There were bumps and there was immaturity, but she seemed sincere and committed. I liked the idea that the show was exploring this aspect of West Texas life and culture, and I thought they were doing it without either idealizing evangelical Christianity or ridiculing it. As the third season began, Lyla had outgrown her Jesus phase, and she had returned to her bad-boy love, Chris Riggins. Apparently, it’s not possible for TV writers to portray an interesting, well-rounded, flawed but growing Christian character for more than one season.

2. The show has simply dropped major story lines from the first and second seasons. I understand writing characters out of the show as it continues. I understand that eventually high school students graduate and move on. But tell us what happened to them. Jason Street ended the second season with a pregnant girlfriend that he was trying to talk into having his baby. What happened? An Hispanic character was introduced in the second season, and he’s simply disappeared. If you want him out of the show, then tell us that he got arrested for drug possession or moved to Mexico or graduated early and left for Harvard or something. Lyla’s boyfriend from season two also evaporated into thin air. Did he dump her or vice-versa? Don’t just leave characters and stories hanging.

3. Coach Taylor’s wife has been promoted from high school counselor to high school principal. And she has a year old baby? Unbelievable, but I’ll go with it. However, they’re also messing with my favorite character, Matt Saracen, and trying to bring in another quarterback, a ninth grader, who according to everybody except Coach Taylor, can out-throw and outrun and out-play Saracen who is a senior with two years of experience under his belt. I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe anyone else would believe it, no matter how rich Baby Quarterback’s dad is.

4. This last is a problem that has been evident from the beginning of the series: too much sex. Every single major teen character on the show, except for one (the coach’s teenage daughter, and she’s been close at least a couple of times), has been shown in bed with somebody else. I’m not naive; I know that teens have sex, but I don’t believe they have it as often or as casually as the characters in this show do. And I think TV shows that imply that “everyone’s doing it” do a disservice to those teens who are trying to stay morally pure before marriage or who are looking for some reason to wait for marriage.

I’ll keep watching because they hooked me in the first two seasons. But I’m warning the Friday NIght Lights powers-that-be that if this third season continues to bug me and strain my credulity, I’m going to complain to a higher authority. Maybe the UIL? Or the Texas Education Agency? Or am I confusing fiction with reality?

Sunday Salon: Prequels and Sequels and Films, Oh, My!

Apr16

Frank Cottrell Boyce will be writing a trilogy based on Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: “The new story is about a family where the father has been made redundant and sets about trying to reconstruct a VW Camper Van. He unwittingly uses the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang engine for the camper van, which has its own agenda, to restore itself.”

Newbery Award winner Patricia MacLachlan has signed up with Albert Whitman & Company to write a prequel for Gertrude Chandler Warner‘s popular series, The Boxcar Children. I hope her prequel is better than the awful sequels/series extenders (over 100 of them) that were written and published starting in the 1990’s. Only the first nineteen books in the series were written by Gertrude Chandler Warner, and only those nineteen are worth the time as far as I’m concerned.

Walden Media announced that they will adapt The Magician’s Nephew next in the film adaptation of the Narnia series. I don’t know why they’re skipping over The SIlver Chair, but I would imagine that The Horse and His Boy, with its vaguely Arabic-culture villains would be way too controversial.

And Peter Jackson has finally started filming on his version of The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. I say, “Hooray for The Hobbit! Long live Bilbo Baggins!”

The King’s Speech, the account of King George VI’s stuttering problem that won the Academy Award for best picture, is coming out in a PG-13 version in April. The original was rated R because of a scene in which the struggling king uses some crude and profane language to try to overcome his stammering. I thought, despite the language which is mostly confined to that one scene, the movie was wonderful, and it would quite inspiring for Christian young people to see the persistence and character exemplified in this story.

Some tips on How to Read a Classic (Novel) at A Library Is a Hospital for the Mind. Sarah makes these suggestions in relation to reading Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, but her ideas are adaptable for most classic novels. Good stuff. Challenge yourself.

We’ve been watching mostly TV shows on Netflix here at the Semicolon household: Larkrise to Candleford and Psych. That’s an interesting combination.

LOST, the Best Lines

May26

“It’s been six days, and we’re all still waiting. Waiting for someone to come. But what if they don’t? We have to stop waiting. We need to start figuring things out. A woman died this morning just going for a swim. He tried to save her and now you’re about to crucify him. We can’t do this. Every man for himself is not going to work. It’s time to start organizing. We need to figure out how we’re going to survive here. Now I found water. Freshwater, up in the valley. I’ll take a party up there at first daylight. If you don’t want to come then find another way to contribute! Last week most of us were strangers. But we’re all here now. And God knows how long we’re going to be here. But if we can’t live together, then we’re going to die alone.” — Jack Shephard, White Rabbit

“Baby, I am tied to a tree in the jungle of mystery. I just got tortured by a d–n spinal surgeon and a genuine Iraqi. Of course I’m serious.” ~Sawyer, “Confidence Man”

“Do you really think all this is an accident — that we, a group of strangers survived, many of us with just superficial injuries? Do you think we crashed on this place by coincidence — especially, this place? We were brought here for a purpose, for a reason, all of us. Each one of us was brought here for a reason. . . . The island brought us here. This is no ordinary place, you’ve seen that, I know you have. But the island chose you, too, Jack. It’s destiny.” ~ John Locke, “Exodus”

“See you in another life, brotha.” ~Desmond Hume, “Man of Science, Man of Faith”

“Of course, if I was one of them — these people that you seem to think are your enemies — what would I do? Well, there’d be no balloon, so I’d draw a map to a real secluded place like a cave or some underbrush. Good place for a trap — an ambush. And when your friends got there a bunch of my people would be waiting for them. Then they’d use them to trade for me. I guess it’s a good thing I’m not one of them, huh? You guys got any milk?” ~Ben Linus, “The Whole Truth”

“Well, Adam, I am the host and I do pick the book, and this is my favorite book. So I am absolutely thrilled that you can’t stand it. Silly me for sinking so low as to select something that Ben wouldn’t like. Here I am thinking that free will still actually exists on this…” ~ Juliet, A Tale of Two Cities

“Two days after I found out I had a fatal tumor on my spine, a spinal surgeon fell out of the sky… and if that’s not proof of God, I don’t know what is.” ~Ben Linus

“Look, I don’t know about you, but things have really sucked for me lately, and I could really use a victory. So let’s get one, dude! Let’s get this car started. Let’s look Death in the face and say, ‘Whatever, man!'” ~Hurley,

“All this, see all this is all variables. It’s random; it’s chaotic. Every equation needs stability, something known. It’s called a ‘constant.’ Desmond, you have no constant. When you go to the future nothing there is familiar. So if you want to stop this, then you need to find something there, something that you really, really care about, something that also exists back here in 1996.” ~Daniel Faraday, “The Constant”

“If we get any questions we don’t wanna answer, or that we can’t answer, let’s just keep our mouths shut. It’s okay, they’ll think that we’re in shock.” ~Jack Shephard, “There’s No Place Like Home”

“Time it’s like a street, all right? We can move forward on that street, we can move in reverse, but we cannot ever create a new street. If we try to do anything different, we will fail every time. Whatever happened, happened.” ~Daniel Faraday, “Because You Left”

“I heard once Winston Churchill read a book every night, even during the Blitz. He said it made him think better. It’s how I like to run things. I think. I’m sure that doesn’t mean that much to you, ’cause back when you were calling the shots, you pretty much just reacted. See, you didn’t think, Jack, and as I recall, a lot of people ended up dead.” ~Sawyer, “Namaste”

The Man in Black: “They come. They fight. They destroy. They corrupt. It always ends the same.”
Jacob: “It only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.”
“The Incident”

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Lots of LOST Thoughts; Probably More to Come

May24

Idol or icon?
LOST, Lord of the Rings, the books referenced in LOST, even the Bible itself can become idol rather than icon if we become enmeshed in the details of the stories or of the Word and never see through to the Author, to God Himself.

It is possible to find True Truth in LOST or in LOTR or in Kierkegaard or Augustine or in Matthew Henry’s commentaries, but if we look to any story or philosophical treatise or commentary as the Source of Ultimate Truth, that work of literature has become an idol rather an icon that points us to the Ultimate Truth of God in Christ Jesus. Stories and poetry, and in our culture movies and television, are powerful icons that can point us to the source—because in the end all Truth is God’s truth (which is NOT the same thing as saying all religions lead to the same Source).

Cuse and Lindelof (LOST producers) wisely refused to answer all the questions raised over the course of six seasons of LOST for at least two reasons. First of all they don’t have all the answers. LOST raised many philosophical questions for which the answers are incomplete in any story. Cuse and Lindelof and the writers of LOST are telling us, “LIFE/LOST is messy. We have faith that it does have meaning, but the whole thing is a group project. No man is an island. We live in community, whether we want to or not, and we work out our salvation in fear and in trembling and in community.”

Secondly, and related, the answers are not neat packages. Each answer leads to more questions. LOST is like life. Things happen that seem meaningless and even perverse, and only later on can we see the meaning and the reason. Other parts of life we never do understand. Perhaps those incomprehensible and seemingly random events (Jack getting pounded in Thailand, Walt’s special abilities) also have meaning, but it’s a meaning that we are unable to discern even from the vantage point of the future. Like Jack and Hurley and the rest of the LOSTies, we just have to muddle through, having faith that there is a light at the center of the universe and a place and time where all be made clear.

In the end the LOST writers, the story itself, came down on the side of faith. Granted, it was faith in anything or everything, Buddha or Jesus, take your pick. But that’s our culture. That’s the part of the story that’s misleading and untrue. Still, some of the themes were truth-filled. It does take a community to work through your issues and help you to become the person you were meant to be. Human beings do have choices, and choices do matter, even when it seems as if everything is predestined and predetermined. Forgiveness is important and healing. In one sense, what happened, happened. You can’t change the past. But in another sense, nothing is irreversible. Resurrection and redemption are possible. (“Christian Shepard? Are you kidding?”)

And faith is vital. Not faith in oneself, as was implied in certain lines of dialog in the season finale, but rather faith in a God who is there and who is weaving meaning into every single event and relationship of our lives. In fact, we have a God who is so much bigger than Jacob or Jack or the Island itself. We have a Savior who by His sacrifice on the cross gave meaning to all the little mirror sacrifices that we sometimes make for each other. Jack and Desmond and Charlie and Jin and even Kate were all little Christ-figures, icons for the true story of sacrifice and servanthood that is found in the Bible. If you’ve never read it and you’re looking for a story to fill the LOST void now that LOST is over, you might try the real thing. God’s story is as mysterious and profound and beautiful and iconic as LOST, and it’s completely True. Time to go further up and further in and enter the Door that is now open into the most exciting story of all.

LOST Rehash: Across the Sea

May11

“Mom always liked you best!”–Tommy Smothers

“Expectant moms, let that be a lesson to you: always choose more than one name, just in case.” –via Twitter

“Just because you don’t understand something, that doesn’t mean it’s over your heads. It might just be gibberish.” –also via Twitter

“In Stephen King’s first novel, Carrie, the main protagonist uses her power of Telekinesis to kill her mother, after she had tried to rid Carrie of being possessed by Satan.” –Wikipedia article on matricide.

“In Babylonian legend, the supreme god Marduk slew his mother Tiamet by cutting her in half with a great sword.” –same Wikipedia article

“You want answers? Well, this is how we give answers.” –Carlton Cuse on tonight’s episode

“”Every question I answer will simply lead to another question.” –Eve Lady in tonight’s episode

The most significant things about tonight’s episode, even though I don’t know what they mean:

Jacob, the eldest twin, gets a name, but his brother apparently doesn’t. Hey, Brother.

Jacob and MIB are twin brothers.

MIB killed his mother, and she thanked him just before she died.

Jacob sort of killed or transformed or light sabered Brother, and out came Smokey.

Adam and Eve are really Cain and Eve? Or Abel and Eve? Or Esau and Rebekah? Or Marduk and Tiamet? Or none of the above?

We know that Eve says she came from her mother, and we know that Eve lies and kills to protect the Light Source of the Island.

The Light under the island is both good, life-giving and bad, deathly, and dangerous. Is this LIghtSource God, unapproachable and perilous?

I’m really just as confused as ever, but some things that had better be resolved before the end are:

What happens to Desmond, Ben, Richard, Widmore, Penny, Rose and Bernard, Aaron, Ji-what’s her name and probably someone else I’m forgetting?

And especially what happens with Hurley? They had better not kill Hurley on-island or off. They can take whomever they want, but Hurley is off-limits. (By the way, Hurley says “dude” a lot.)

It looks as if Jack will be the new Protector of the Island or of the Light or whatever, and that’s OK, I suppose. It looks like a thankless job to me. However, I repeat, nobody had better mess with Hurley!

The Sideways World is kind of creepy to me. Jack is all perfect and button-down. And Locke is stoically resigned to his fate in the wheelchair, and everybody is just too, too Hollywood with near-perfect lives, or at least better lives than they had in the original world before the plane crashed. But their lives aren’t really better because they’re just mirror images, not real. I think the Sideways World should never have happened, and I wouldn’t mind seeing it undone.

How does the MIB go about re-inhabiting dead bodies? What is the rule for that? Who’s making up the rules now?

The Cain and Abel Motif

Feb23

I’m setting these speculations to post on a Tuesday, the day that LOST airs in the U.S., but I am still on blog hiatus for Lent. My Cain and Abel thoughts may be outdated or superseded by events in the TV show by the time this post appears.

Cain and Abel were the first brothers. Cain murdered Abel out of jealousy.

Isaac and Ishmael were the sons of Abraham. Ishmael, the older but also the son of a slave-wife instead of Abraham’s true wife, Sarah, mocked his younger half-brother until things were so dysfunctional that Abraham had to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Some say the rivalry between Ishmael, the ancestor of the Arabic nations, and Isaac, the ancestor of the Jews, continues to this day.

Jacob and Esau were the twin sons of Isaac and his wife Rebekah. Their rivalry started in the womb and continued into adulthood. Romans 9:10-16:

10 This son was our ancestor Isaac. When he married Rebekah, she gave birth to twins. 11 But before they were born, before they had done anything good or bad, she received a message from God. (This message shows that God chooses people according to his own purposes; 12 he calls people, but not according to their good or bad works.) She was told, “Your older son will serve your younger son.” 13 In the words of the Scriptures, “I loved Jacob, but I rejected Esau.”[h]

14 Are we saying, then, that God was unfair? Of course not! 15 For God said to Moses,

“I will show mercy to anyone I choose,
and I will show compassion to anyone I choose.”[i]

16 So it is God who decides to show mercy. We can neither choose it nor work for it.

Of course, Joseph and his brothers are full of jealousy and rivalry, and as the story goes Joseph, the younger brother, becomes the most powerful man in Egypt and saves his entire family from extinction. Again, God chooses whom He will bless and how.

Then, there was at least some rivalry and bad feeling between Moses and his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam. When Moses went up Mr. Sinai to meet with God and receive the commandments, Aaron was persuaded by his long absence and by the people’s need for guidance to build them a golden calf to worship. Later, Aaron and Miriam began to speak against Moses because he had a foreign wife, and they attempted what sounds like a coup. But God thwarted their rebellion by giving Miriam a temporary case of leprosy.

I noticed something interesting as I was thinking about the Cain/Abel motif in LOST. Not many of the guys on LOST have brothers. Sayid may have had a brother, or maybe it was a cousin? No brother for Jack or Sawyer or Ben or Locke or Miles or Faraday or Richard or Boone or Walt or . . . Hurley had a married brother, I think. Mostly the rest are only children or they have one sister or half-sister.

Mr. Eko had a brother, Yemi, and in their relationship the Cain and Abel motif comes through loud and clear. Yemi is the good and chosen younger brother; Mr. Eko is locked outside of society and the grace of God. Then Yemi dies as a result of Mr. Eko’s actions, and Mr. Eko must take on the role of his Good Brother, become a priest, and later a spiritual leader on the island.

Charlie had a brother, too, and the two of them play out not so much the story of Cain and Abel as Jesus’s parable of the Prodigal Son and the Elder Brother. Charlie is the good brother at first, the one who stays off drugs, who goes straight, who goes to confession, and his brother Liam is as wild and prodigal as the prodigal in the parable. But as Liam comes to his senses, Charlie loses his. Then, Charlie wonders why Liam receives grace and a family while Charlie is shut out from everything good by his addiction and his chasing after fame and fortune. It’s not fair. God’s grace and forgiveness are never fair; that’s why we who deserve justice and the wages of sin (death) receive grace with thanksgiving.

Now as last season ended and in this final season we have another set of (maybe) brothers on LOST: Jacob and, let’s call him Esau. There is a definite rivalry between the two who have differing ideas about how the Island should be run. “Cain” has “Abel” killed, but the two come back to fight another day.

Is one of these brothers or rivals the son of blessing and the other the cursed one? Whose sons are they?

Many Happy Returns: February 16th

Feb16

Henry Adams, b. 1838. He was the grandson of one president and the great-grandson of another. Numbered among his many friends were Lincoln’s private secretary John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, geologist Clarence King, Senators Lucius Lamar and James Cameron, artist John La Farge, and writer Edith Wharton. His most famous work was an autobiography written in third person, The Education of Henry Adams. (online here) He also wrote and published many books about his extensive travels and about history.

The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.

LeVar Burton, b. 1957. Star and executive producer of the PBS series Reading Rainbow. We used to watch a lot of Reading Rainbow, and I still have quite a few episodes on videotape. Mr. Burton also starred as Geordie in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he got his start as Kunta Kinte in the mini-series Roots, based on the book by the same name. How many of you read Roots when it was a best-seller, about thirty years ago? I remember it as a good story, and it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976. However, in 1978 Mr. Haley was sued for plagiarizing several passages in his book from a book called The African by Harold Courlander. Haley admitted that he did copy Courlander’s work “unintentionally,” and the suit was settled out of court for $650,000.
It was still a good story, and Mr. Burton started a fine career with it. Thanks to Roots and its success as a TV-miniseries, we have Reading Rainbow, a good deal if you ask me.
“But you don’t have to take my word for it.”
Reading Rainbow Official website.
On January 29, 2007, LeVar Burton announced that he had made his last episode of Reading Rainbowand that he was retiring, citing a difference in vision with the new owners of the show. “Their vision was not in alignment with what I stand for,” he said.