Friday Night Lights: Still the Best Show You Missed
For five seasons, Friday Night Lights was one of the most admired dramas on American television and one of the least watched, and it is still waiting for many viewers to discover it.
The series has an unusual lineage. It began as H.G. Bissinger’s 1990 non-fiction book about a season of high-school football in Odessa, Texas, which became a 2004 feature film directed by Peter Berg. Berg then developed the television version, which premiered on NBC in 2006 and moved the action to the fictional town of Dillon, where the local Panthers carry the hopes, and the frustrations, of an entire community.
Not really a football show
The great misunderstanding about Friday Night Lights, and part of the reason its audience stayed small, is that it looked like a sports drama. Football is the engine, but the show is about family, class, faith, race and the narrow options available to teenagers in a small town. Viewers who had no interest in the sport often never gave it a chance; viewers who did found something closer to a family drama with a scoreboard.
At its centre is a marriage. Kyle Chandler plays Coach Eric Taylor, and Connie Britton plays his wife Tami, a guidance counsellor and later school principal. Their relationship, loving, combative, funny and mutually respectful, is one of the most convincing portraits of adult partnership television has produced. Around them, a rotating cast of students, played by actors including Taylor Kitsch, Zach Gilford, Adrianne Palicki, Jesse Plemons and, in later seasons, Michael B. Jordan, gave the show a constant renewal as characters graduated and moved on.
How it looked and felt
The production style was a big part of its identity. Shot on location in and around Austin, Texas, with multiple handheld cameras, minimal rehearsal and room for actors to improvise, the series felt observed rather than staged. Scenes overlap and breathe; dialogue sounds like people talking. It is a style many later dramas borrowed.
Survival against the odds
The show’s life was a long negotiation with low ratings. The second season, shortened by the 2007–08 writers’ strike, is generally considered its weakest, weighed down by a melodramatic crime storyline that the writers largely moved past afterwards. From the third season on, NBC kept the series alive through a co-production deal with a satellite television provider, which aired new episodes first, an unusual arrangement that bought the show three more years.
Those final seasons, including a fourth-season shift that sends Coach Taylor to a struggling new school across town, are among its best. In its last year the series finally received major Emmy recognition, including a win for Chandler, a belated acknowledgement of what critics had been saying all along.
Seventy-odd episodes is a manageable commitment, and the show has aged remarkably well. If you never watched it, the reasons that kept audiences away the first time, the helmets, the pads, the Friday games, matter much less than you might think.
Game of Thrones season one · NBC goes south on Southland · All television articles