WEDNESDAY marked the season finale of the television series "Friday Night Lights." For those of us who care about the show, which recently won a Peabody Award for excellence, the cliffhanger is whether the network will bring it back. Critics love it, but ratings have been wobbly. NBC reportedly has ordered six new scripts, but there's no guarantee that the series won't be stopped at its own 20-yard line.

Never mind that it's based on the acclaimed movie (directed by Peter Berg, who also created the show) that was based on a book by H.G. Bissinger that asked trenchant questions about the all-consuming role of football in many Texas high schools. And never mind that it handles the complexities of things like marriage and adolescence with more honesty and intelligence than old bourgie favorites like "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life." A lot of relatively liberal, urban people don't seem to understand that a show about relatively conservative, rural people can be just as sophisticated as a show in which people drive Priuses and live in Restoration Hardware homes.

The Texas thing is, evidently, a big problem. Last month in the online magazine Salon, critic Heather Havrilesky wrote about the striking originality of "Friday Night Lights" and deemed it "a rare and beautiful thing." Impassioned letter writers shared her enthusiasm, but among the dissenters, a notable portion dismissed the show simply because of geography.

"The less we celebrate the so-called values of Texas, even in fictional TV shows … the better off America will be," said one writer. Another intoned that "those of us living in America since 2000 have had more than enough of a fantasy land that focuses on Texans …. I don't care if this stuff is the return of William [expletive] Shakespeare."

I doubt that antipathy toward the Bush administration is the reason the fate of "Friday Night Lights" is hanging in the balance. It's more likely that it's the show's refusal to pander to common assumptions about the rural, working class. Yes, it's set on the barren, boarded-up plains and, yes, there are plenty of pregame prayer sessions, but the issues it tackles off the football field — race, class, addiction, mental illness — have just as much relevance to those who scoff at the cult of small-town sports as those in its clutches.

"Friday Night Lights" is really about living in an America whose "opportunities" are narrower than conventional patriotic wisdom would have us believe. In fictional Dillon, Texas (the movie and book were set in real-life Odessa), high school football is not just the center of community life, it's the only ticket out of town.