Critics love Friday Night Lights, the outgoing NBC series that is based very loosely on Buzz Bissinger's best-selling book, in part because of the marriage between the two main characters, the football coach Eric Taylor and his wife Tami. Their partnership has always seemed realistic, even, and loving. That is, until this season.
Pause: Spoilers ahead.
The story lines unfolding in recent episodes follow this path: Eric, who is a successful high school football coach in Texas -- which is, it should be noted, football country -- was offered a job at a college in Florida and turned it down. Somewhat unrealistically, Tami, who is a high school counselor, was randomly contacted by a liberal arts college near Philadelphia, clearly modeled on a school like Swarthmore. During her interview, she had some criticisms for standardized tests and college admissions tests that would seem pretty pedestrian to most progressives, but it nonetheless got her an offer -- not to be assistant dean, which was the job she thought she was going after but to actually be dean of admissions.
For the Taylor family, this would be a move from Texas to Pennsylvania. But because Tami is the one making the move, the show set up the tension very well. Her husband was grumpy while driving her to the airport because her interview, which couldn't be moved, was during the playoffs that would take his team to the state championship. When she returned, he is reluctant to talk about the offer. When he got an offer on this week's episode to return to the high school he started the series out at -- through a complicated storyline that doesn't bear repeating, he had moved from Dillon High School to the town's school on the "wrong side of the tracks," East Dillon -- she says, "I say to you what you haven't had the grace to say to me. 'Congratulations.'" As others have pointed out, Tami has always been the faithful coach's wife. She's hosted countless barbecues and been to countless games. She's moved for him; she even left a principal job at Dillon to go to East Dillon when he did, though there were other reasons.
But I think this parallels a lot of choices women make in real life, especially in the South. Coaches move around a lot and just expect their wives to get teaching jobs at new schools. Women go to college first, get a steady-paying job as a teacher, and then put their husbands through school. What never happens is that the wife gets her turn; like Tami, women see their husband's job as a joint one, and men never see the reverse as true. Eric can easily get a job as a coach in a Pennsylvania school, it just might not be as high profile as a job in Texas. But, so what? Tami will be a dean at a top-notch college. If the show remains true to life, Tami will turn down the job, Eric will still get to be the marriage's star, and she will decide to put her disappointment aside or it will slowly break their marriage apart. But I hope the show actually takes us elsewhere. In a fair and just world, Eric will go with Tami to Pennsylvania.
