Franchising Friday Night Lights

Defining complex realism

1. They have complex, multi-threaded plots yet primarily use a linear mode of storytelling. Jason Mittell delves deeper into Johnson's concept of narrative complexity, defining the term as nonlinear, partially obscured diegesis. For Mittell, narrative complexity does more than blend episodic and serial forms; truly narratively complex shows increasingly engage in "narrative special effects," such as untrustworthy flashbacks, genre mixing, bold plot twists that "reboot" a narrative, or Rashomon-esque shifts in perspective. However, complex realistic shows such as Friday Night Lights do not regularly engage in this kind of narrative spectacle, primarily choosing to relay stories in an overlapping but linear fashion.

2. Despite their use of multi-threaded plots and complex character webs, these shows do not embrace the elements of mystery and melodrama found in niche genre entertainment. Instead, they aggressively adhere to codes of classical realism. John Fiske argues that television is an essentially realistic medium due to its tradition of presenting itself as reality and "its ability to carry a socially convincing sense of the real" (21). Realism, for Fiske, concerns not only content but form; television invokes "the essence of realism" by following basic laws of cause and effect and establishing clear and logical links between story elements. However, this definition of television realism actually admits fantasy: A show like The Six Million Dollar Man (ABC, 1974), for example, qualifies as realism because the main character's superhuman abilities still "conform to the laws of cause and effect [and] are related logically to other elements of the narrative" (24) Shows such as Friday Night Lights exhibit realism in the classical sense: they depict a fictional world and the characters that inhabit it with a high level of verisimilitude, and they infuse that depiction with professional or geographic details that can be confirmed in the real world.

It is telling that Friday Night Lights (like Homicide: Life on the Street [NBC, 1993] another program in this category) was inspired by a piece of literary non-fiction. In his discussion of how readers reconcile fictional worlds with the real one, Umberto Eco notes, "One of the basic fictional agreements of every historical novel is that however many imaginary characters are introduced in the story, everything else has to more or less correspond to what happened in that era in the real world" (107). In their efforts to depict a specific time and place, complex realist shows function as historical texts and demand the same level of verisimilitude. These programs are wholly realistic in content as well as in form.

Complex realism is gaining a noticeable foothold in contemporary television, especially in the wake of The Sopranos, a show that dramatically changed what level of realistic detail was both watchable and acceptable. The qualities that indicate complex realism, however, may be precisely what has made these shows so resistant to the form of transmedia storytelling that took root in genre entertainment. A linear narrative reduces negative capability to some degree, and a high level of classical realism necessarily constricts a show's metaverse – the fictional world that can normally be endlessly expanded. In order to digitally extend the narrative of a complex realistic television show, we must approach transmedia storytelling in a more tightly focused way.