Nimrod Nation vs. Friday Night Lights

I just finished watching Nimrod Nation, an 8-part documentary series on the Sundance Channel. The series follows a group of people from Watersmeet Township Michigan, a rural community in the western U.P. of Michigan. The primary story arc follows the boy's basketball team as they make a run at the state playoffs. But secondary storylines focus on the stark economic realities of rural America; rural cultural practices (hunting and fishing); and snow.

I found the show both interesting and refreshing. It didn't sanitize, romanticize, or infantize, the poor rural folk depicted in the story. The editing seemed to let the townspeople speak for themselves. The final episode of the series emphasized an important reality (part of life is dealing with disappointments), etc.

In contrast to my take on this show, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times argues it is a reason why we should be watching NBC's Friday Night Lights. I offer this as exhibit A demonstrating why Ms. Bellafante is an ignorant snob, out of touch with reality. Friday Night Lights is a (poor) adaptation of a (poor) movie, which itself was an adaptation of an (excellent) book. The book's storyline focuses on highschool football in the late 1980s in Odessa Texas. It followed the real working class boys who played football, some of whom hoped to use athletics as a ticket away from the oil fields of west Texas, while others played for the reasons that most of us played sports (because it's fun and it helps you meet girls). The television show adaptation (in so far as I can tell, I suffered through three episodes last year and deleted the tivo season pass. The storyline was cliche, the characters plastic, and the writing droll. In short there was little of redeeming value.

Ms. Bellafante suggests that the creator of Nimrod Nation borrows conventions from FNL so much that "it almost seems to be rampaging on intellectual property." Her examples: focusing on high school sports in rural America, and splicing radio commentary over game footage). I suppose she has not seen one of the dozen sports based documentaries produced over the last two decades.

Anyway, while I am not an ivy league trained cultural critic for the New York Times, I can wholeheartedly recommend Nimrod Nation over Friday Night Lights.