For Senior-Year Reality, Try Netflix

By Linda Perlstein, EWA public editor
As I paid months of attention earlier this year to the evolving aspirations of a Texan teenager named Tyra Collette, I realized I was witnessing something far more relevant and compelling than 90 percent of what I read in the media about high school seniors and college. No offense to those of you who write about the agony of being waitlisted by Princeton, or the imperative of applying to all eight Ivies if you hope to get into just one. I get why you write those pieces, and why readers read them. But the tale of Tyra’s hardscrabble life and numerous obstacles is far more representative of the typical American teen’s relationship with college prep.

You see, for me, the best reality TV this past season came on an NBC football drama. Tyra Collette is not a real person but a character on “Friday Night Lights.” Watching her and her classmates throughout the show’s third season, I kept wishing that I’d read these kinds of stories in the press.

Many graduated seniors in your coverage area will spend the summer Facebooking their future college roommates and stocking up on storage bins and duvet covers at Target, satisfied in the knowledge they’re headed for a college they chose. Those are the easy stories to find. But they are not the only stories, and they are not necessarily the most important. I’d venture to guess that for every kid headed to the state flagship, there’s one who was not accepted anywhere she applied, or applied nowhere. There are terrific stories to be written about the students who got off track, or were never on track, or whose track never led to college.

Each episode of “Friday Night Lights” this season gave the viewer so many things to think about in regards to high school seniors’ futures. Through Tyra, the naughty, lost daughter of a wayward mother and the sister of a stripper, you saw the importance of having one person—just one—pushing you in the right direction. (For Tyra, it was her guidance counselor, who becomes the principal.) You saw the way one bad college interview or one distracting romantic relationship could shoot a teenager off course.

The show’s other story arcs gave great perspective as well, and I’m sure reflect what goes on at schools far different from the one portrayed here. I don’t know much about the relationship between college sports and schooling, beyond the stories I heard from my brother, a former TA at a Big Ten university, about being pressured to give a horrifically undeserving football star a passing grade. But the degree to which the academic futures of Smash Williams and Tim Riggins were utterly reliant on their wavering athletic performance felt authentic to me. Two narratives illustrated the precarious link between family and choices: Lyla’s Vanderbilt dreams falling victim to her father’s financial mess, and the way, absent his parents, Matt Saracen alone took care of his demented grandmother, which pulls his attention away from college.

 And then there was the ambivalence of Riggins—slacker, outsider, alcoholic—about going to college, which said as much about the boys crisis as a Richard Whitmire op-ed.

Spoiler alert: The plausibility I loved so much about college admissions in “Friday Night Lights” fell apart by the end of the season. If you watch the show, you know that Tyra storming the admissions office and getting into UT—based on a senior-year academic push and one year as volleyball player and class president—was about as realistic as her deigning to date Landry. Likewise, after picking up a pencil to draw maybe once the whole series and opening his notebook to show doodles worthy of a bored seventh-grade anime fan, Matt Saracen was accepted to the Art Institute of Chicago.

But Landry coaching Tyra about her college essay, a draft of which read “like a five-page needlepoint pillow”? And the powerful scene in which Tyra read her final version, a poignant list of her longings? By then I didn’t care what was realistic and what wasn’t. Her essay was cheesy, but it made me cry, and I knew immediately a lot of real-life applicants would copy it. Because they have been in Tyra’s shoes: far from the Ivy League, but worthy of A1.