I’ve held off on writing about Friday Night Lights because I haven’t been able to articulate how it makes me feel. Now that NBC has done the right thing by taking a chance and locking down the low-rated but awesome 30 Rock for a second season, I’m adding my voice to the rising chorus of Friday fans and critics who are screaming RENEW. And we’re not yelling because we like football.
The non-traditional way this show shoots — no rehearsal, four cameras moving at all times, no marks for the actors — results not in the sloppy, slapdash soap you might be picturing upon hearing such a thing, but in the most intimate, real, heartbreaking drama out there.
Even as it plays upon the age-old heartstrings attached to The American Dream — it’s set in a small Texas town that lives and dies by the successes and failures of its high school football team — FNL is not a red-state-baiting, chest-thumping man hour.
It’s completely sensitive, and smart, and gives equal time to kids fumbling their way through first love and adults stuck in relationships that are destructive and, in Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton‘s Eric and Tami Taylor, the most functional, sexiest couple on TV. The kind that remind you fun isn’t just for teens. The kind that make you re-think your stance on marriage.
Even the football, which is dispensed at just the right time, in just the right amounts, is filmed thrillingly — it’s like you’re a player out there, dashing around, not always with the play, sometimes in the crowd, sometimes on the bench.
I really can’t say enough. Chandler and Britton liveblogged at nbc.com after last night’s terrific season finale — dudes I totally cried — and made a few references to “second chances” and another season. If the official announcement from NBC is a green light on Season 2, I implore you to catch the whole damn thing in reruns or when the box is released. Fuck, DOWNLOAD IT. I FULLY ENDORSE THE ILLEGAL DOWNLOADING OF FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. (If NBC allowed Canadians to watch the series on its website I wouldn’t have to push you there, btw.)
It’s one of the best-written, best-acted, best-played television shows network television has produced in a long time. If you don’t watch it, it will go away.
Watch it.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2007.