Friday Night Lights captures all that is America

Friday Night Lights isn't just a book, a movie, a TV series, and recently the focus of a captivating 25th-year anniversary article in Sports Illustrated (an excerpt from a full book) by author Buzz Bissinger.

It is an experience, an entire way of life. I think the reason it remains such a force in our culture is that just about everyone who grew up in the U.S. can identify, and it all forces us to reflect upon our high-school and post-high-school years, for better or worse.

Friday Night Lights isn't a story about high-school football. I mean, it is, but it's much more about friendships, youthful pettiness, leadership, love, race, alcoholism, hopelessness, hope, and the rare successful mix of comedy and drama.

In undergrad at Southern Illinois University, my sports-journalism professor, the formidable and legendary Bill Ward, assigned the book to us. And I loved it, even if I didn't realize at the time what a modern classic it would become. In fact, it still sells about 5,000 copies every month.

I certainly hyper-identified because these real-life kids (reality programming when it was still good) at Permian High in West Texas, like me, went to high school in the late 80s and experiencing growing up in the Midwest.

And it wasn't like I spent every Friday night at our football games. We had good teams, but to my mind, the soccer games (in which I was a player) under the lights on any night but Friday were every bit as entertaining, other than the fact that they didn't hold that Friday-night hope of an entire wild weekend ahead of us.

That's the feeling Friday Night Lights truly gives us. There was the excitement of the inevitable house-party that would happen over the weekend. Or one out on one of the big farms north of town. This after hanging out in McDonald's parking lot or cruising around for hours waiting to get the word of where everyone was that night.

There could be love or alcohol or fights or interesting conversations or dumb pranks or hiding something in a cabinet that the host's parents would eventually find and wonder about.

Everyone can identify with one of the main characters. Take the near-perfect TV series, which ran for five seasons and would clock in as my fifth-favorite show of all time, right behind Mad Men, Seinfeld, Saturday Night Live, and All in the Family.

With Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), the rebel drinker with hidden talents but more troubles than a kid can be expected to handle. With Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the quiet quarterback who was idolized for his athleticism when he was probably just as talented at art, something not considered when it comes to high-school popularity. With Brian "Smash" Williams (Gaius Charles) and Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan), the black superstars who were golden gods on the field but had endless worries off-field living in a place with deep-seated racism and inescapably hopeless environs. With Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) and Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), the worshipped, wealthy cheerleader and the restless but smart trailer-trash girl.

Then there's Coach Eric Taylor, played by Kyle Chandler, and his wife Tami (Connie Britton). Almost every line Coach says throughout the series is mesmerizing or flat-out hilarious. Armed with amazing scripts, Chandler gives a performance that is every bit as nuanced and worthy of respect as Jon Hamm (Mad Men), Carroll O'Connor (All in the Family), or Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad).

I now have the final piece of the Friday Night Lights puzzle queued up on my DVR to watch. It will be a miracle is Billy Bob Thornton's performance as the coach can compete with Chandler's.

Meanwhile, every time I encounter Friday Night Lights, I reflect on a different experience from high school. That is a powerful reminder of how pop culture mixes with and affects the way we make it through this weird and wonderful little amount of time we spend existing.

Placing the Microscope on Our High-School Years with Curtis Sittenfeld

There are those moments during your high-school years when things seem so lucid, so crystal clear, so in-the-moment.

Your friends are five minutes late to pick you up to go to a party and each second seems to drip by in agony and longing. Your eyes constantly search for the girl you would move mountains for, even though she barely knows you exist or, at the very least, is too preoccupied with much older boys.

Curtis Sittenfeld, in her debut novel Prep, is a master at articulating, with such precision (and how difficult it must have been to remember so many details about adolescence?), the way we were growing up. Towards the end, a couple of lines sum up what the book is about:

"I've never paid as close attention to my life or anyone else's as I did then. I remember myself as often unhappy at Ault, and yet my unhappiness was so alert and expectant; really, it was, in its energy, not that different from happiness."

Those words are uttered by Prep's protagonist, Lee Fiora, who leaves home in South Bend, Indiana for the prestigious boarding school, Ault, near Boston, which is no doubt helped shaped by the author's years of teaching at Washington D.C.'s St. Alban's preparatory academy.

Lee mostly stands in the background during her four years at the school, observing others and mostly bouncing idea after idea and thought after thought around in her own very unsure, unformed mind. In that sense, it's a true coming-of-age story, reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye or Ethan Canin's novels, but with an even sharper microscope.

****1/2 out of ***** stars

Mind Bending Among the High-School Cheerleaders

Being a reader of lots of classics and most recently a somber tale of laborious life in North Korea, it's necessary to break it up with some good old-fashioned trash every once in a while.

Dare Me by Megan Abbott is actually relatively high-minded writing and in many ways a psychological tour de force. Because it's billed as "Lord of the Flies cheerleader-style," it also qualifies as a trashy novel about high-school life.

The common-sense-stoked person in the video above describes the story well. I particularly like how she notes that Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl-fame recommends the book and that fans of the classic 80s movie "The Heathers" (ha) will approve.

I'll contribute: Addy and Beth are leaders of the cheerleading squad and their BFF status comes under pressure when Beth becomes jealous of Addy's relationship with their young new coach named Colette. A very bad thing happens (actually, lots of bad things happen, soccer and tennis were never this interesting) that nearly unravels the team and certainly unravels the ties between Addy and Beth. The tables get turned again and again and Abbott (pictured) does a good job of keeping the reader on edge, uncomfortable, and in suspense of what will happen next throughout the nearly 300 pages of the novel.

There is a lot of cheerleading lingo and action that could be trimmed from the story, although Abbott is clearly using it to metaphorical effect and to describe the shifting mindset of the squad girls over the course of the novel. I'm not sure if this book would have been as brilliant without that lingo, but either way, this one is a keeper that will be tough to beat for "best cheerleader book, like, evah."

On a rating, I agree with the reviewer above: **** out of ***** stars