There is no television show more sacred in The Fix household than Friday Night Lights, the NBC series that ran for five seasons (too short!), documenting the lives of those who lived in a town in West Texas that revolved around football.
The hub of the show was the relationship between Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), the head football coach at fictional West Dillon High School (Go Panthers!), and his wife, Tami (Connie Britton), a guidance counselor at the school. Eric and Tami had the most believable marriage I have ever seen either on TV or in the movies. They bickered. They overreacted. They worried about their teenage daughter, Julie. They wrestled with how to reconcile their career ambitions with their relationship. It felt real. It was real.
(True story: At the 2009 White House Correspondents Dinner—an annual gathering where the world of political journalists invite celebrities as their guests so that we can gawk at them and wonder why we aren’t better looking—I spent virtually the entire night stalking (in a non-creepy way) Chandler and Britton. When I eventually found them together, I went all cotton-mouthed as I tried to explain what the show had meant to my wife and me. They were nice—nicer than I would have been if confronted by a stammering nerd in a tux. Eventually, I just asked if I could take their picture together. They obliged. I tweeted it within seconds and it still maintains a treasured home in my iPhoto.)
It wasn’t just the Taylors that made the show (although, without them, the show simply wouldn’t be the masterpiece it was). There was the troubled but kindhearted high school running back Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch). There was Matt Saracen, the nerdy underdog who makes good as a quarterback and takes care of his aging grandmother too. There was Buddy Garrity, a Panther great who ran a successful car dealership in town—when he wasn’t scheming about ways to make the team better. There was Jason Street, the quarterback phenom who breaks his neck and is paralyzed in the first episode of the show but goes on to become a successful sports agent.
FNL, as its loyalists call it, had it all: tremendous acting, real-life characters, and, yes, just enough football to keep things interesting. (Seriously, if you have never watched it, or never watched it in its entirety, drop this book—or ebook—and go do it. I can’t recommend it highly enough.) The idea that the show would be canceled elicited most of the twelve stages of grief in our family: we were in denial (“This must be a typo or something”), then angry (“Those sons of bitches”), then unreasonably optimistic (“They’ll bring it back once they see how many people are upset about it going away”), and then, finally, resigned. So upset were we that Friday Night Lights was ending that we waited for months to watch the series finale. It sat on our DVR list like a eulogy not yet read, and even after we did, we couldn’t bring ourselves to erase it.
The above paragraph reads like a slight—or slightly larger than slight—exaggeration. It’s not. Rather it’s a reflection of the right-on-the-verge-of-being-creepy-without-going-over devotion that certain television shows create in their viewer.
It’s a rare politician who is able to evoke that sort of passion from supporters. And that’s what makes Ron Paul, the Texas Republican congressman, so very interesting. Prior to 2008, Paul toiled in almost complete obscurity, holding a central Texas seat on and off for two decades and running a failed bid for the Senate in 1984 and a failed bid for president—as a Libertarian—in 1988. Paul was known, to the extent that he was known at all, for his opposition to any piece of legislation not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, meaning that he opposed virtually everything that Congress voted on. So resolute was Paul in objecting to what Congress did, he earned the nickname “Dr. No.”
And that looked like the end of the line for Paul. Until he decided to run for president in 2008 and, in one of the biggest surprises in modern political memory (aka as long as I can remember), emerged as something of a movement candidate.
Out of the blue, Paul’s message started to make sense. The country was sick of fighting seemingly endless (and unwinnable) wars in places they couldn’t find on a map. Paul’s isolationist foreign policy—his allies say it is more like noninterventionist—solved that. The collapse of the financial sector in late 2008 led people to wonder what the hell the masters of the universe were doing with all that money. Paul had been encouraging a healthy skepticism about monetary policy—he wants to end the Federal Reserve—for years. People hated politicians and all of their hedging of uncomfortable truths. Paul seemed to revel in the telling of uncomfortable truths.
It started slowly and, as these things tend to do, out of sight of the mainstream media, who had grown accustomed to dismissing Paul. The first signs were Paul’s surprisingly strong fund-raising totals, fueled largely by his success in collecting cash on the Internet. In 2007, Paul raised $2.4 million from April 1 to June 30 and then $5.3 million between July 1 and September 30—unheard-of sums for a candidate who received no national media attention and barely registered in polls on the race.
That something—no one, including Paul, really knew what—was happening was clear. And it was during that time when I had my first experience with the PaulPeople. The moment was the 2007 Ames straw poll, when Paul was regarded as a pleasant sideshow at best and not regarded at all at worst. (Remember, the opposite of love is not hate but indifference.) From the second I stepped out of my car on the campus of Iowa State University, however, the atmosphere felt like nothing I had ever experienced at a political event. Old Volkswagen buses and motorcycles bearing homemade RON PAUL FOR PRESIDENT signs lined the walk into the Ames straw poll. And once you got into the event itself, it felt more like a Phish concert—without the Glow Sticks—than a Republican political event. Groups of Paul supporters danced in conga lines through the Ames site, banging tambourines, drums, and whatever else they could find and chanting “RON PAUL! RON PAUL! RON PAUL!” On the outskirts of the straw poll grounds was a tent packed to the gills with Paul-ites, all waiting for the chance to glimpse their candidate.
The incongruity between the youth and energy of the crowd and Ron Paul is, literally, impossible to quantify in words. Paul has all the look of your grandfather crossed with Montgomery Burns. His stooped stature, too big suit jackets, and relatively soft-spoken nature make him an unlikely rebel or head of a movement. But his ideas—and the clear-eyed belief with which he holds them—had somehow transformed this lifetime backbencher in Congress into just that. And Paul was loving every minute of it.
There was talk among the reporter class as the votes were tallied at Ames that Paul might be the surprise of the day. Talk of a second-place finish behind the incredibly well-organized and well-financed Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was not ruled out. Those predictions—like many predictions made by the professional journalist class (of which I am an unapologetic member) proved grossly misguided. Paul received just 1,305 votes, finishing a distant fifth.
He went on to raise millions more for his campaign—a whopping $28 million by the end of 2007—but was unable to win (or come close to winning) a single primary or caucus in 2008. The conclusion most people drew was that Paul, and the people who wildly supported him, didn’t matter, that there had simply been a temporary rip in the “way we know how politics works” fabric that was quickly repaired.
But that misses the point. It wasn’t that Paul and his supporters didn’t represent something real. They did. They represented the Libertarian wing within the Republican Party, the people in the party who wanted to be left the hell alone by their government and, in turn, leave the rest of the world the hell alone.
The problem for Paul was that there just weren’t enough people who thought like him within the Republican Party. No one’s support ran deeper than Paul’s, but no one’s was as narrow either. If you loved Ron Paul, you really, really loved him. Loved him enough to change your middle name to “RonPaul”—this really happened—or to harangue anyone, anywhere on the Internet who dared to write a negative word about him. (Based on personal experience, I can tell you that the Paul-ites are the most organized ferreters-out of negative—or anything close to it—analysis related to their guy.)
It’s like me and Mrs. Fix with Friday Night Lights. If people I knew bad-mouthed the show or said they didn’t watch it, my opinion of them was immediately affected—and not in a good way. For Christmas, birthday, Valentine’s Day, and anniversary, I looked for FNL-related merchandise to buy Mrs. Fix. I proselytized about the show to anyone who showed even a passing interest in it.
The problem for me and Ron Paul? They’re just aren’t enough people who think like us out there. Every year there was chatter that Friday Night Lights would be canceled because of its less than stellar ratings. (An important aside: after way too much thinking about it, I have concluded that the show was doomed from the start because of a totally wrongheaded marketing campaign to initially introduce it to the American public. It was regarded first and foremost as a football show, which, well, it wasn’t. Casting it as a show that revolved around football turned off a lot of people who could have/would have been loyal viewers of a show that, yes, had a football theme but was fundamentally about growing up and growing old in a small town. By the time the show started to win critical acclaim and even awards, it was too late. The collective American attention span had already categorized FNL as a sports show. And there was no looking back.) The show held on for five seasons by its fingernails and the actors involved acknowledged they were happy to have lasted that long.
So too Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. While in 2012, Paul expanded his universe of dedicated Paul-ites—he got two and a half times as many votes in the 2012 Iowa caucuses as he had four years earlier—it still wasn’t anywhere close to a majority (or even a plurality) of Republicans voting in early states. Paul finished third in Iowa, a distant second in New Hampshire, fourth in South Carolina, and fourth in Florida. In Idaho’s caucuses, where he had received 24 percent in 2008, he got just 14 percent this time around. Alaska, where Paul’s distrust-of-government message seemingly would find fertile soil, handed him a distant third-place finish behind both Romney and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum.
Privately, Paul advisers acknowledged that his limitations—most of which stemmed from his foreign policy views—meant he would never be a majority (or even close to it) candidate for the Republican Party. It was, in fact, his greatest strength and biggest weakness. The people who loved Paul were drawn to his calls to return troops to America and stop acting like the policeman of the world. If Paul backed away from that viewpoint—or hedged it in any way—many of those Paul-ites would have turned their backs on him. Paul’s refusal to do so endeared him forever to his fans but simultaneously ensured he would never grow into anything other than a niche candidate.
Ron Paul and Friday Night Lights will be remembered similarly by those that loved them. They were too ahead of their time for mass consumption, fundamentally misunderstood by those who could have liked them, and recalled with fierce devotion by those who loved them.