But when demand slackened or supply become too great, oil prices cratered, and the bubbles in West Texas and other oil regions popped, causing great economic hardship for many, including the characters in Friday Night Lights.īissinger’s Friday Night Lights is best judged alongside other sports books of the twentieth century, especially those that, like FNL, are of literary merit: well-written, in-depth, and unwilling to settle for the clichés of victory and defeat. When oil was expensive-when prices set by OPEC in the Middle East favored the US-communities like Odessa thrived. The oil industry, as Bissinger points out, was up and down in the 1980s, following its historical boom-bust cycle. Reagan, who was initially famous as a Hollywood actor, was a gifted speaker and phrasemaker, and his Presidency combined with booms in some parts of the US economy, including the banking and financial sectors. The election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, bolstered the spirits of those on the political right, who felt that America had drifted away from its roots, as a independent, tough-minded country of hard-working people. The Vietnam War’s messy end-effectively a defeat for the US-combined with a sluggish economy and rising prices, caused some Americans to fear that the “American Dream” was no longer viable. In the late 1970s, the US was coming out of what many felt to be a period of national “malaise” (the word was mistakenly ascribed to a speech Jimmy Carter made). Friday Night Lights is set against the backdrop of the social, political, and economic upheaval of the 1980s, in Texas and in the US at large.

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