Netflix released Last Chance U just two weeks after its 2016 summer breakaway hit, Stranger Things. Unsurprisingly, the documentary series was overshadowed by its near-simultaneous release with the Winona Ryder-led hit, and it also was competing with not just one, but a lot of other great summer shows. But removed from that summer glut, Last Chance U stands tall as one of Netflix’s best original series of the last few years, and with the second season debuting this week, the time has come to give it a closer look.

The six-episode first season of Last Chance U follows the 2015 football season of East Mississippi Community College (a.k.a. “Scooba Tech”); season two will focus on the same team, but with some new characters entering the mix (and some old ones leaving) this time around. Students join the program at Scooba as a last shot at a Division I football scholarship, and many of them balance on the line between passing and dropping out of school. The show is packed with heart-wrenching characters, and captures a part of the country rarely seen on TV. In that way, and many others, it’s reminiscent of another football show that was once overlooked, but over time grew to be a beloved series: Friday Night Lights.

Accordingly, maybe the biggest hurdle for potential viewers of Last Chance U is the same one Friday Night Lights had when it debuted 10 years ago: It’s a football show. But, like FNL, Last Chance U is also about so much more than that.  

Last Chance U’s real-life characters and stakes make it extremely affecting

Friday Night Lights (FNL) and Last Chance U (LCU) have a lot in common. FNL was adapted from a nonfiction book about a high school team in Odessa, Texas. A GQ article inspired LCU. Both shows are about communities with bleak circumstances and slim opportunities that revolve around the local football team. They both pulse with Southern pride, and are steeped in faith, family, and football. 

But whereas FNL was a network series with invented characters, LCU is a documentary about real people. The subjects of LCU — often struggling against poverty and unstable home lives — are even more haunting because they aren’t just characters that represent worldly truths, but real individuals, living in rural Mississippi. 

In season one, there’s the star running back, DJ Law, who’s an unstoppable force on the field and would be able to go to any Division I school he wanted, if he could just pass his classes. “Nobody in my family ever been this far,” Law says to the camera in the first episode. He says he’s playing football for his son back in Florida, but he’s also missing him growing up. He says if he can get to the NFL, then he can take care of him. 

There’s Brittany Wagner, the team’s academic adviser, who loves the players to an unequaled degree and tirelessly fights to keep them in the classroom and on the field. She’s a maternal force in their football-centric lives, a little like Connie Britton’s Tami Taylor in FNL — but again, she’s an actual person, and therefore all the more affecting. In one episode, Wagner confesses she doesn’t have much of a life outside her job and taking care of her daughter. “I think I’m a very successful single mom,” she says, “and hopefully it won’t be like this forever.”

Then there’s Ronald Ollie, a gigantic young man from a trailer park in Shubuta, Mississippi. Like many of his peers, Ollie is heartbreakingly bad at school, and seems sincerely incapable of focusing in the classroom. He also has abandonment issues: His dad murdered his mom and then killed himself when Ollie was just 5 years old. 

Leading the charge is head coach Buddy Stephens, a hard-swearing mountain of a man, who’s as sincerely invested in helping these young people improve their lives as he is in winning football games. And he does win. In the first season of LCU, EMCC is working on its third consecutive Junior College Championship. And they don’t just beat other teams — they clobber them. 

In the world of Last Chance U, football is a means of escape

LCU opens with shots of dead lawns and boarded-up buildings, and journalist Drew Jubera talks about the first time he drove across the railroad tracks into Scooba, Mississippi. He says, “You see the old downtown, and the one thing that’s operating is a Coke machine on the sidewalk. It really kind of tells you everything you need to know about the place.”  

In LCU, the characters more often express disdain than love for their town, and Scooba has as much in common with Flannery O’Connor’s dilapidated Georgia as it does with the proud Texas of FNL. There’s a sense that even if there were better times, they weren’t much better. One of the richest tensions in LCU comes from the swerve away from the more provincial mentality of FNL. Once in a while, the players talk about bringing pride back home, but more often they just talk about getting out. 

And their mentors — coaches, teachers, and fans — help them toward that end. A soft-spoken maintenance man with greying hair, Chuck Luke helps the players if they have any issues with their dorm rooms. In one scene, nearly choking up, he says “I get to watch ‘em go on up into bigger schools, and I get to watch ‘em go on up into pro. And, um … It’s just a great experience in my life.” 

But escaping from Scooba depends on winning football games. When Ollie gets put out three games with a concussion, he jeopardizes his future recruitment, which captures another poignant obsession of the show: How did football become these guys’ best shot at a better life?

“Are we really doing the best we can?” Coach Stephens says, reflecting on his players as students, thinking about how if they miss class, they should miss practice, and then miss games. “Every coach, every team in America has the same thing they have to go through. Where’s my line? When have I put winning or being successful on the field ahead of truly putting the success of the student athlete? We all do that.” 

Last Chance U doesn’t shy away from discussing the toll football takes on its players

Like FNL — and like in any reasonable conversation about football — LCU also engages with the violent sacrifices demanded by the sport. Clint Trickett, the quarterback coach for the team and a former star player, describes how he was able to hide some of his concussions in high school and college. There’s old footage of him getting hit and going limp in a series of plays. He confesses during one stretch he endured five concussions within 14 months. “I’ve had some brain problems and some trouble with that,” he says pointing at his head, “but this game’s done so much more for me than anything else could have done.” 

What’s perhaps most rich — and gut-wrenching — about the stories of the players in LCU is that, while they struggle in the classroom and their lives, they are beautiful forces on the football field. You will want something more for them; but outside of football, it’s not just that the deck is stacked against them. They don’t know any other game.

In keeping with this heartbreaking ambiguity surrounding the sport on which it turns, the first season of LCU culminates in a late-season match that doesn’t end with a win, loss, or a tie, but instead a disaster that blasts opportunities open for one player, while sweeping them away for others.

Some of them do make it out of Scooba. Some of them will continue to fight in season two. 

Season one of Last Chance U is available to stream on Netflix. Season two debuts Friday, July 21.

Night Vale — a fictional desert community located somewhere in the Southwestern United States — is most famous for its podcast.

Taking the form of a local radio show, Welcome to Night Vale is a 30-minute, twice-monthly dispatch full of nightmarish community news conveyed in a tranquil manner. Imagine a municipality that features a sinister, five-headed dragon and occasional rifts in space-time, but whose citizens are often more concerned about, say, the dry scones at the last PTA meeting, and you’ll understand why Night Vale has been described as something akin to “if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman started a game of SIMS and then just left it running forever.”

Since its launch in 2012, Welcome to Night Vale has expanded into a sprawling, frightening universe with a lot of charm. In its three-year existence, the podcast has produced 79 episodes (and counting). It’s also spawned a successful live show and, as of October, a novel that debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times best-seller list. Along the way, its creators have demonstrated their ability to comfortably shift mediums while building one of the most immense and compelling fictional “worlds” in recent memory.

The rise of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast

In the summer of 2012, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor started producing the Welcome to Night Vale podcast with a $25 USB microphone and a few friends — including Cecil Baldwin, the voice of the in-show Night Vale Community Radio. Slowly but surely the podcast found an audience, enjoying a steady first year of mild growth that saw bumps in listeners after a mention on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and a tweet from Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle. Then in the summer of 2013, it took off. The episodes Fink and Cranor put out in July amassed an impressive 2.5 million downloads. By August, that number had risen to 8.5 million. Welcome to Night Vale became the most downloaded podcast on iTunes — surpassing popular, established shows like Radiolab and This American Life.

Imagine a place that features a five-headed dragon and occasional rifts in space-time, but whose citizens are more concerned about the dry scones at the last PTA meeting

Welcome to Night Vale was refreshingly unique, compiling bizarre, mythical elements into a city bulletin of everyday news. In an early episode, for example, the host of Night Vale Community Radio reported that small animals were raining from a giant glowing cloud, noting, “Fortunately, the animals appear to be dead already,” and advising, “Just bring along a good strong umbrella capable of handling falling animals up to, say, 10 pounds.”

The podcast typically consists of micro news bits, like traffic updates and announcements from the Town Elder Council, as well as episode-spanning reports. During the town’s “poetry week” for example, the Night Vale City Council lifted its ban on writing implements and required every citizen to write poetry nonstop. In segments of anticipation, the host recalled the success of a previous year’s poetry week, when more than 800,000 poems were written by Night Vale citizens and eaten by “real live librarians who were chained to titanium posts inside double-locked steel cages.”

At a recent panel event at Sixth & I in Washington, DC, NPR’s Linda Holmes asked Fink and Cranor to describe their writing process; Cranor said that he tries to strike a balance between levity and gravity, explaining that he’s “always trying to make sure [episodes] land in a place that people weren’t quite expecting.”

While discussing Fink and Cranor’s success, Holmes asked, “Is it like a dog that’s chasing a squirrel, and then it finally catches it, and it’s like, ‘What do I do now?’”

“The dog chasing the squirrel implies that the dog had the purpose of catching the squirrel,” Cranor said. “[We’re] like a dog that just suddenly has a squirrel in its mouth.”

“Sounds very Night Vale,” Homes replied.

Making the transition to text opened up the Welcome to Night Vale universe in an surprisingly organic way

The cover of Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel.

Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel is both expansive and quick on its feet. In a Whitman-esque fashion, it is large. It contains multitudes.

Fink said at Sixth & I that once they had a “popular internet thing,” the Night Vale team started receiving loads of emails from companies that wanted to work with them; they were most interested in writing a book that could build on their titular town.

The resulting novel retains many touchstones from the podcast — the spooky deadpan tone, places like the Moonlite All-Nite Diner, and characters like the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home. But the book, which reframes the podcast to work as a long-form narrative, primarily follows the story of two women from Night Vale during a fraught journey to the neighboring King City.

Pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro and PTA member Diane Crayton embark on their trip when a man from Diane’s past reappears in Night Vale. Known as the Man in the Tan Jacket, he is different things to different people … as well many different literal people. One of the prevailing conflicts of the novel is that the Night Vale native has brought too much of his hometown’s weirdness to King City, where he’s currently the mayor.

I’m actually making the plot sound more straightforward than it is — and less joyfully absurd. Welcome to Night Vale the novel is like The Phantom Tollbooth in its wide-eyed pursuit of logic within a mad world. But in Night Vale, logic loses.

“Okay, yes, good. There’s the map,” read the directions to King City. “Head out on Route 800 and then turn here, and merge with this — But oops, we missed it. So we go back, maybe try cutting across on this little mountain road. You believe in mountains, right? Not everyone does. Either way, we end up miles away. None of the roads connect.”

To describe the plot of the novel in concrete terms is to pretty quickly misrepresent it. Characters change forms, distance is imperceptible, and time doesn’t seem to exist. There is story development and progress, but also the circular, existential contemplation that has become a trademark of the podcast.

Welcome to Night Vale: A Novel is easily enjoyed on its own terms — even for those who are new to the town of Night Vale — largely because the storytelling shines so brightly on the level of its individual parts. Fink and Cranor feverishly pursue the unexpected, often to comically terrifying effect.

Night Vale is compelling because it's weird — just like our own world

An illustration from the inside cover of the novel; the Man in the Tan Jacket carries a deerskin suitcase full of trained flies, in service of his occupation as a fly salesman.

Night Vale is the sort of place where unpredictable and seemingly impossible things happen constantly, and death — especially on any realistic time scale — might be waiting around any corner.

“It is just a weird place,” Fink said at Sixth & I. “The real world is weird, too, and we mostly don’t know why.”

That’s why encounters with Welcome to Night Vale — in any of its forms — often resonate. Both the podcast and the novel glow in their expert combination of the ordinary and the surreal, in their interplay between reality and nightmare. They feel like a calm stroll through an insane world, and they’re also very funny.

The absurdities of Night Vale resemble farces from our own world: A giant surveillance blimp breaks free from its military base, a television personality makes a serious run for president, evolution is in high doubt, etc. This hint of familiarity is perhaps best summarized early on in the novel, as Fink and Cranor artfully describe Night Vale’s atmosphere as a home to both monsters and the mundane:

There are things lurking in the shadows. Not the projections of a worried mind, but literal Things, lurking, literally, in shadows. Conspiracies are hidden in every storefront, under every street, and floating in helicopters above. And with all that there is still the bland tragedy of life.