I’ve lost a lot of fake friends on my walk through life. It hurts the same way as losing real friends — losing that investment of time, the building of shared experience, the history, and ultimately, my belief in them as genuine people. I don’t get that close to many people, and my loyalty is so absolute, I tend to be disappointed in others who don’t share my friendship vision. Which is why making a real, true-blue friend is such a blessed event.
During the beginning of Covid, I stumbled upon an entirely new kind of friendship: the remote TV buddy. It has enhanced my world.
I was wheedling around on Twitter one night when I ended up in a mildly flirty conversational volley with a dude whom I only knew to be another fan of the superlative Canadian comedy series, Letterkenny.
The guy, a Canadian bass player and hockey fan named Julian, suggested we watch the new season of Letterkenny together in one big binge. We learned to sync our televisions with each other over the phone, and we were off to the races.
This evolved into what we like to call The Transcontinental Cinema Club. Together, over the long boring and uncertain nights of lockdown, we started off by cruising through most of the Criterion Collection (which was educational). Then we became complete sluts about it, and started joyfully plowing our way through all our favorite TV series. (The Thick of It, The Shield, Fargo [only the first two seasons], Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, Intelligence [the best Canadian crime thriller ever], Reservation Dogs, Dark Winds, Better Call Saul, Fleabag, Game of Thrones —to name just a few, plus a host of car shows, movies, and Canadian comedy classics like Trailer Park Boys).
Neither Julian nor I know how long we’ve been talking at this point, for an average of 4 nights a week. Something like two years? The point is, that a remote TV buddy — an entirely loving but safely nonromantic relationship — turns out to be something like the best parts of marriage without all the tricky, demoralizing and deeply annoying parts of marriage. What is more comforting than sharing a long, involved TV binge experience you’re both invested in? Julian and I have elevated this into an art form that we like to call “Luxuriance.” We make sure that we are both at maximum comfort levels in ambient lighting, with organized snacks. We toast our White Claws by smacking them against our respective phones.
We regale each other with our thoughts, critiques and opinions — and also, the mundane and intimate details of our daily lives. This has evolved into one of the best, healthiest, most sustaining friendships I have ever enjoyed — despite the fact that Julian lives 2700 miles away.
Which brings me to the subject of Friday Night Lights, the current obsession of the Transcontinental Cinema Club.
There are four things that generally speaking, I absolutely hate: organized Christianity, high school, Texas, and football. FNL is about all of these, but it is also galaxies more than the sum of these parts. The writing, with few exceptions, is consistently brilliant (Season 2, while still pretty great, isn’t as strong as the rest of the seasons, probably due to the fact that the writer’s strike was in full swing.) Peter Berg in particular is almost Chekhovian in his ability to create complete, truthful personalities struggling with moral/emotional complexities. The show is really, strangely enough, all about left-wing core values like integrity, tolerance, bravery and compassion; watching FNL will make you realize you never really see these virtues represented in most media. (But it doesn’t come off as preachy).
Kyle Chandler is the perfect glowering white man as the constantly irate, high school football coach Eric Taylor, whose job becomes being the only adult male role model of many neglected young men with untenable home situations on his team. He must, through the force of his own hard-earned, family-man decency muscle, mold these unruly, distracted, hormonal teenage boys into warriors — team players, good citizens, and morally stand-up guys.
The characters are all psychologically layered and distinct; there is such care and detail in this little Texas world, you are drawn into their exhaustively imagined lives and actually care about them. (I don’t need to tell you how rare that is.) When it gets cooking It’s drama functioning at the power of drama at its best. By the time you get to season 4 episode 4, the show, with its slow, meticulous build, starts to pay off like a slot machine. You’re in it. You’re screaming at the TV. (Or at Julian. Same thing.)
The show isn’t just feel-good or funny or sad or horrific, it’s all those things, just like life, plus there is a certain will to victoriousness I at least partially attribute to the fact that the show is focused on a high school sports team.
Moment to moment, what the show really does is show you the right way to handle complex situations. Socially, the coach’s wife Tami (played by the delectable Connie Britton) is the ultimate diplomat — (she’s also the high school counselor.) She silky smooths over all of life’s awkwardness by being strong, yet humble, kind and relatable. The show is a crash course on how to be upstanding, honorable, and human. It feels, at its core, fundamentally concerned with demonstrating to its audience how to be better people — an outrageous conceit, but it actually works.
The acting, as well, is wonderful — this show was, after all, a starmaker for the great Jesse Plemons, and to some degree, the comely Minka Kelly. It was supposed to be a star turn for Taylor Kitsch, the most compelling character in the series — the ultimate brooding rebel heartthrob Tim Riggins, who is equal parts James Dean and Gary Cooper, with Abercrombie abs.
It’s absolutely incredible and terrible and a crying shame that Taylor Kitsch was never a fully realized movie star. “He was the rightful heir to Robert Redford and Brad Pitt,” says Julian, and I do agree.
He had such extraordinary brilliance in this series. (Then he made a massive Disney disaster and suddenly wasn’t on everyone’s speed dial anymore.) The character of Tim Riggins represents a mostly extinct form of masculinity — one that befits a hardcore badass, like Cool Hand Luke, but the kind of badass who will take a neglected neighbor girl pageant dress shopping.
“I’m going to tell you something, alright?” Tim drawls in an utterly bored voice to the teenaged girl crying in a dress store. “My mother never took me shopping for a pageant gown, and because of that, I never placed at Miss Texas,” he says in a low, soft voice, his eyes swimming with empathy. He makes a bridge between himself and the girl. “We’ll start with the wheels, and work our way up,” he says. You know the last thing he wants to do is go shopping for this weepy kid, but he knows it’s important to the girl.
When was this kind of kindness and sensibility lost to Americans?
While watching the country decline into the disgusting, putrid mores of Christo-fascism, this show becomes truly important. It presents a vital counterbalance to the idea that all people in Texas are absolute shit at heart. It shows that the red states and blue states — progressives and conservatives — used to disagree, but communication was still possible. (Now, of course, talking to the far Right has become impossibly toxic and dangerous. )
Season 4 also contains a teen abortion plot that should be required viewing for every woman over the age of 11. It is sharp, radical and timely now.
This is really the point of watching Friday Night Lights, now: everyone is so entirely reasonable. It shows you that there is some semblance of real humanity, enlightenment and kindness present in human beings — even if it’s only in Peter Berg’s imagination. (Now you know why he is always photographed with the hottest women in the world.)
If you’re lonely, find you a TV buddy. They don’t have to live nearby.
Way better than a pet, since you don’t have to clean up after them.
This one is for you, Baby Julian the Gangsta, my beloved TV buddy, my fake husband, my BFF. A totally decent and genuine guy. A real friend. My hoser.
IF IT ISN’T, YOU NEED TO CONTACT ME. I EDIT. CINTRAW@GMAIL.COM
Artwork: “The Epidemic,” oil on linen by Cintra Wilson, 2020
THE LUXURY OF TELEVISION: FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS