Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream

by H G Bissinger

Return once again to the timeless account of the Permian Panthers of Odessa--the winningest high-school football team in Texas history. Odessa is not known to be a town big on dreams, but the Panthers help keep the hopes and dreams of this small, dusty town going. Socially and racially divided, its fragile economy follows the treacherous boom-bust path of the oil business. In bad times, the unemployment rate barrels out of control; in good times, its murder rate skyrockets. But every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, H. G. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires--and sometimes shatters--the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms.

• ISBN10: 0306809907
• ISBN13: 9780306809903
• Publish Date: 11 August 2000
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 21 July 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: INGRAM PUBLISHER SERVICES US
• Imprint: Da Capo Press Inc
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 416
• Language: English

Reviews

[gmcgregor]

One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Friday Night Lights. I knew there'd been a book, and then a movie, and that the show wasn't especially closely related to either except in broad strokes. But I'd always harbored a curiosity about the book, so I picked up H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights to finally experience the source material. In it, Bissinger tells the story of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas, in the late 80s. But he doesn't just tell the story of the team...like the subtitle ("A Town, A Team, And A Dream") suggests, he places them in context. He tells the story of Odessa, of the boom-and-bust oil economy in Texas with which Odessa lives and dies, the racial tensions that are ever-simmering, and the way that a community needing something to cheer for and feel good about can place so much hope and feeling into a sports team.

That enormity of public emotional investment into the team has real ramifications for the people who make it up: the coach and his family, of course, but also the players. The coach (only very vaguely reminiscent of the beloved Coach Taylor) is at least a well-compensated professional, but the players are just teenagers. You can see the loose outlines of some of the characters who would make up the core of the show: the hot-shot, big-talking running back, the reserved, wary quarterback, the trouble-making, fast-living halfback. But the players themselves are kind of inconsequential: they are merely the bodies inside the uniforms that have such symbolic meaning. It's Permian that the crowd roots for year after year, even as the names on the jerseys come and go.

Reading this after seeing the show is the opposite of the usual reaction: the screen adaptation is so rich and beautifully realized that the book has a hard time living up to the comparison. Part of that is because they're telling similar stories in two very different ways. The book is more interested in looking at the broader social picture and the way that team fits into that picture as a whole, and only then in its component parts, while the show takes the opposite storytelling tack and focuses on the people and their relationships making up the team, filling in the charged atmosphere around them but leaving it as mostly background. So by nature the book is more impersonal, more clinical and removed. The show, on the other hand, focused on realistic character development in a way that even many authors I've read could benefit from learning from. Of the two versions, I'd recommend that literally everyone watch the show, but the book is good-not-great. If you like stories about football and/or small town life, you'll likely enjoy it. If not, it's skippable.