For too long, television has been without Tami Taylor. Not since Friday Night Lights ended its run on DirecTV’s the 101 Network (remember that?)in 2011 have we, as a nation, been soothed into a state of comfort by Connie Britton’s Emmy-nominated Texan saint. Just imagine how the last decade of daily hell might have been made a bit easier to bear with a weekly dose of Tami’s sage advice, maternal warmth, and sharp wit.
But fear not because Tami Taylor is back—or, rather, she has been reincarnated in the form of Courteney Potter in NBC’s comedy Stumble. In the mockumentary series, which premiered November 7, Courteney (played by an outstanding Jenn Lyon) is a junior-college cheerleading coach on the brink of winning her record-breaking 15th national championship when she is fired from her job at Sammy Davis Sr. With her eye still on the prize, she sets up shop at Heådltston Junior College (as the new typing teacher) and recruits a ragtag group of gymnasts, TikTok stars, a disgraced football player, a thirtysomething car salesman, a narcoleptic, and the criminal that broke into her car to inspire, flip, and launch into the cheerleading big leagues.
The show, an absurdist comedy from creators Jeff and Liz Astrof, is not as earnest as Friday Night Lights and its embrace of football fanatics. Nor does it (yet) have the prestige that propelled Friday Night Lights to Emmy wins in one of those rare instances where the final season was the best one. But for those who lived and breathed the Dillon Panthers (and later the East Dillon Lions) when Friday Night Lights aired, watching Stumble conjures a strikingly similar feeling and serves as the first true inheritor of the Peter Berg series’ understanding that it takes hustle, humor, and heart to succeed in a small town. Plus, Stumble loves an aerial shot of a water tower standing like a sentry over a place, and nothing truly feels more like coming home to FNL than one of them and flat land for as far as the eye can see.
But beyond the water towers, the traces of Friday Night Lights here start at the top of the pyramid with Courteney, who has the same enduring optimism that made Tami Taylor a guiding light for those in her charge, be it her family or the wayward teens that always found themselves in her vicinity. Courteney operatesunder a similar principle to elevate the people around her, which she often manages to do with a smile held together with gritted teeth. Her energy is directed at lifting up others, which Tami also did for her football-coach husband Eric (Kyle Chandler) and the many students who struggled to escape the vortex of West Texas football. Here, Courteney sees cheerleading as a means of giving purpose to those who haven’t quite found their path yet. When Courteney meets her newest flyer Sally (Georgie Murphy), she immediately becomes concerned by the 18-year-old’s habit for telling one sad story after another, like being kicked out of her foster parents’ house right when they were just starting to love her. The sad moment is played for laughs, but it underlines the person Courteney is: the mama bear. She says as much in the pilot, when she is fired for being too supportive of her team. Who doesn’t want the best booty award? It’s a compliment!
But the same could have been said of Tami’s role in Friday Night Lights. When Courteney begrudgingly admits, “I’m probably going to end up adopting her” about Sally, fewer sentences have ever been truer about Tami. While Tami didn’t bring home stray kids (that often), she always had an open heart for them, managing to see the potential rather than the hurdles they haven’t yet overcome. “There is no way she is not making this team, not with that life,” Courteney says of Sally. Whether it is delivered with a laugh or a good cry, that kind of sincerity is recognizable in any genre, and Stumble has it in spades like Friday Night Lights always did. However, Courteney doesn’t lack ambition. Like Tami, she has her motivations for uplifting her team. She wants to break the national-championship record, and making her squad the best it can be is her way of getting there. Tami, similarly, longed to find purpose outside of raising her family, and it was the students’ need for guidance that gave her the means of doing that. But Courteney makes an important leap in this thinking from the beginning of the pilot to the end, one Tami would almost certainly applaud.
Her motto, “I can, I will, I must,” gets an upgrade with her new team in place to become “We can, we will, we must.” Not only is that a clear nod to the famous “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” mantra of the Dillion Panthers, it’s a rallying cry for the aspirations of this team and leader. As much as Courteney is the kind-hearted Tami whose office door was always open, she is also the ruthless empowerer of her students that Coach Taylor was to his teams.
And like the Taylors, Courteney and her football-coach husband Boone (Taran Killam) talk their problems out like a real couple. Whether it is hunched over the counter after a long day or propped up in bed before the lights go out, there is a truthful dialogue between them that made the Taylors’ marriage so heartening, even when they were struggling as any couple does. Courteney and Boone’s conversations are decidedly less serious, but the unquestioned support is still constant.
Even Courteney’s team reflects the Dillion Panthers’ roster in a few places. Dimarcus (Jarrett Austin Brown), the boisterous football player sacked by Boone for selfish behavior on the field, is clearly a nod to Smash Williams (Gaius Charles) from Friday Night Lights, whose ego nearly suffocated everyone in the locker room. And Sally has shades of Landry (Jesse Plemons), the fragile-but-working-on-it kicker in the final season.
There is also the fact that, for those of us who weren’t competitive cheerleaders in college, watching this world from the outside can feel like going to the zoo. It’s easy to make fun of their enthusiasm on display at a cheer competition, and certainly the sheer insanity of it invites criticisms. But FNL did the same for those who didn’t grow up where football was life, where the week isn’t a march to the weekend but rather a sprint to Friday night. That’s how some communities are wired. And both series encourage you to underestimate them so when the team comes together and operates in sync as a unit, you feel the high everyone in the stands is chasing.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, they say, but underneath the pom-poms, makeup, short skirts, and pep, the series understands that making fun of something isn’t good commentary in and of itself. You have to know and appreciate and love what you are skewering, and Stumble gets at what Friday Night Lights had to say about the pleasures of small-town life and big-league ambition. And if this new show can give us a Tami Taylor scion with even a fraction of the heart and soul that Britton brought to that character, then we can count ourselves lucky to have her. The only question now is: Will Stumble be bold enough to make the ultimate homage and mount an ill-advised murder plot in season two? It could, it should, it must!
