Recently my wife Ginny has been watching DVD collections of the first few seasons of the television show Friday Night Lights. I tried to watch the damn thing but could not maintain interest in what is really a soap opera masquerading behind a sports show. Every week this little town has a bucket load of crap land on it with more than half of the story lines involving relationships and other material that has nothing to do with sports. Unlike a good soap opera however, this show touches on major topics but then throws them out after the week is up. The issue of steroids pops up one week but then never rears its ugly head again. So too racism. And where are the linemen? No room for them. Silly.
In the midst of my wife's marathon viewing of FNL I happened to see the movie Jim Thorpe-All American for the first time in a long time. Now it is difficult to compare a movie made in the 1940s with a television show produced today, but it is easy to see that the then 30-something Burt Lancaster would be selected first overall in a pickup game of members of both casts. It was not easy to play one of the greatest athletes in history and only Lancaster could do the role justice. The little guys populating the cast of Friday Night Lights? They do not look any tougher than Minka Kelly (although in fairness to them she looks about a dozen years older). Thorpe/Lancaster would have had the pleasure of speeding by them, when not bowling them over. The movie was not only more enjoyable to watch, it properly handles plenty of tough material. Thorpe's life had plenty of rough moments and the film presents them with only a little gloss. You will get much more out of the 107 minutes of the Thorpe bio than hours and hours of the television show.
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