The Cult of Connie Britton

[TMC]

http://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpet...connie-britton

“It was just your run-of-the-mill orgasm! I didn’t mean to scare you!”

That’s the first thing Connie Britton said on national television, way back in 1996. It was a fitting introduction to her character, Nikki Faber, on the long-running ABC show Spin City, in which she played the sometimes raunchy, oversexed love interest to Michael J. Fox as they attempted to manage the publicity of the bumbling New York City mayor.

The character on Spin City has Britton’s face, but the rest is nearly unrecognizable: Her hair is shorter, browner, and cut in the choppy layers that anyone familiar with the ‘90s will recognize as “The Rachel.” Nikki is a classic man-eater: She alludes to threesomes, she towers her co-stars, she’s coarse and vulgar when the rest of the women in the office come off as sweet or clueless. It’s a choice role (especially for a relative newcomer), but it’s also completely at odds with the way we think of Connie Britton today.

Because Nikki Faber is no Tami Taylor. Tami Taylor — she of the “y’all” and the hair and the aviators, of the soft exterior and steely drive, of infinite wisdom and ageless beauty. No matter that Friday Night Lights was one of the lowest rated and most beleaguered network shows in recent memory: Through the magic cultural catch-up tool that is Netflix, Taylor has taken on the sort of iconic importance usually reserved for massive Hollywood stars’ roles. If Friday Night Lights and its brand of thoughtful, empathetic, addictive drama has morphed into a quasi-religion, then Tami Taylor is its patron saint, the complicated embodiment of all that made the show feel different and real and smart.

The character of Tami Taylor lived for 76 episodes and five seasons — long enough for her character to subsume the actress who played her. Even in her subsequent starring roles in American Horror Story and Nashville feel like she’s just following a different path on the Tami Taylor Choose Your Adventure novel: In one, her marriage falls apart and she ends up having sex with a man in a rubber suit; in another, she becomes a famous country singer with a complicated love life. But the center — the Tami Taylor-ified charisma, the waterfall of hair, and the “I’m concerned about you, do we need to have a talk” face — remains.

The fortitude and consistency of that center has fostered an adult cult of Connie Britton: a mass of women, mostly between the ages of 20 and 45, who view Britton not just with affection, or awe, but admiration. Every star has fans, but select few have cults. We often associate the word “cult” with mindless, manipulated masses, but the word also connotes a group whose beliefs are in some way deviant or different. If Britton had become a star during those Spin City years, there’d be nothing cultish about loving her: Like so many other sitcom stars, she was somewhere around 30, thin, white, beautiful, straight.

The narrative of Britton’s early career has been recited in the various profiles of her post-Friday Night Lights fame. She grew up fairly WASP-y in Maryland and Virginia, went to Dartmouth, majored in Asian Studies, studied abroad with (now Sen.) Kirsten Gillibrand. She’d been involved in theater in high school and, after graduating from college, moved to New York and married her college boyfriend, and while he became a finance banker, she dabbled in off-off-Broadway productions while taking part-time jobs to help pay the bills, including one as an aerobics instructor, leg warmers and all. (Britton declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Britton and the finance husband divorced in 1995, but at that point she had spent eight months shooting the film that would put her, however briefly, on the map as the frustrated wife of an adulterous man in Ed Burns’ debut feature, The Brothers McMullen, a small character study with a tiny budget that went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

McMullen didn’t make Britton a household name, but it did put her on casting directors’ radar, which is how she nearly won the Jerry Maguire role that eventually went to Renee Zellweger.

Two paths diverged in a Hollywood casting room: One star (Zellweger) became a household name, while the other went on to a string of sitcoms. The Maguire role would have made Britton into a late-‘90s It Girl, but one look at the current state of Zellweger’s career — and the current uproar over daring to age and/or her resistance to it — and you can see why Britton should be thankful to have missed the chance to make out with Tom Cruise.

Instead of Maguire, Britton found herself cast in a slew of doomed pilots and in a multi-episode stint on the original Ellen as the overbearing, clueless sister of one of Ellen’s best friends, and eventually landed the role of Nikki on Spin City, where she would win the sort of quiet following that often follows supporting sitcom characters.

But when Fox’s Parkinson’s disease forced him to leave Spin City in 2000, Britton’s character was written off the show. For the next six years, she jumped from one small role to the next, sometimes picking up a recurring gig, as she did in The West Wing, other times ending up a piece of ‘80s-costumed window dressing, as she did in the film adaptation of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights in 2004. It was an exhausting, frustrating schlep between sets and roles and disappointments.

In 2006, Peter Berg, who had produced the film version of Friday Night Lights, was working on a television adaptation for NBC that would be far more loosely based on the real-life events collected in Bissinger’s book. He asked Britton to reprise the same role she had played in the film, promising that this time, her role would be more fleshed out. “I was really, really hesitant,” Britton told Variety. “In fact, I said, ‘No. I love you and adore you, but I don’t want to.’”

Yet Berg reiterated his promise for something bigger and meatier than a meekly supportive coach’s wife — and it was that role, as guidance counselor, mother, wife, and eventually principal, that would, over the course of five seasons, turn Connie Britton into the household name that she nearly became more than a decade before. She wasn’t a buxom young starlet or the hottest new thing; she was just, quite simply and clearly, one of television’s best actresses in one of its most complicated roles.

The details of Britton’s struggle ultimately matter less than the sheer fact of a woman breaking through in Hollywood at the age of 39. But that’s just one of the qualities of Britton’s image that have made it so pervasively popular over the last eight years. For men and women alike, she exudes what feels like an amorphous, complex feminine aura. But ask any woman to tease that apart and you’ll see it’s an amalgamation of several interlocking areas: softness, maturity, progressiveness, and a particular take on “having it all.”