The Representation of Modern Professional Life in Football #2

On my mind: Why, if football is a self-replicating drama which presents in microcosm a society's ideals regarding professional life at large, why is Friday Night Lights so entertaining? Shouldn't Sundays on the couch be sufficient and beyond improvement? Why is such an arcane form as the hour-long television serial drama necessary to integrate football with the personal life of small town middle-class teenagers?

The subject has not been well-defined. Is it professional or amateur football that I'm considering? Doesn't professional football imply amateur football? Do we mean by football the rules, written or unwritten, that serve to structure the drama that plays out on the field during what we recognize as a football game? To what extent does the success of football as a sport depend on societal conventions? Did I miss out on living out a dream by not trying out for running back in 8th grade?

We must begin with the easy stuff. I don't know what the easy stuff is. For the sake of working my blog-writing research into the weekly schedule of German vocabulary and Hulu, I submit that Friday Night Lights is the easy stuff. Also, I've been trained as a literary critic at the same institution where the president-elect once taught constitutional law. We will need to investigate, firstly, the means of Matt Saracen's charm offensive on all the Julie Taylor's of the world.