Southern Realism
Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2011) and Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016) exemplified containing Christianity’s middlebrow appeal through displacement onto the cultural specificity of a realistically portrayed American South within a quality television drama. These two shows represent Christianity as both the dominant faith of their characters and as a characteristic part of Southern culture. Creatives used the milieu of an “authentic” American South to shift religion away from themselves and their quality-audience expectations, maintaining acceptability within the dominant non-Christian culture of television production. This displacement safely contained religion within the creatives’ production culture, allowing them to acknowledge Christianity’s religious content, but only within the peculiar particularity of the American South.