The Unusual Life of Friday Night Lights - Page 2

Despite what he feels was the network and studio's genuine passion for Friday Night Lights, and despite his shock that he never got the call to resume their truncated second season after the writers strike, Katims is pragmatic about the fact that he almost didn't get to explore those stories. "At the end of the day there is a dollars and cents reality to it. No matter how good your show is, if it's not getting the viewership the network thinks it needs to sustain it, that's it."

He has some experience with that scenario. Critical and cult favourite My So-Called Life, canceled after one season, was his first television series. He credits creator Winnie Holzman with teaching him how to find the adolescent voice within himself. "A lot of us who choose to be writers never grew up anyway," he joked.

"My So-Called Life and Friday Night Lights are really bookend experiences for me," he added. "They were very similar in a lot of ways. They both had a sense of tapping into the inner lives of these people, very intense and real, with small but extremely passionate audiences."

Friday Night Lights is a unique experience in other ways, and not just for Katims. The vérité style means the actors refer to the cameras as "snipers," since they never know where the shot is coming from, but are filmed at all times from all angles, with at least three cameras trained on them. Rehearsals are minimal, the actors' movements aren't choreographed, and they are encouraged to ad lib.

"It's an incredibly exciting way to shoot. It feels different than other sets," Katims explained. "People are energized, they're excited to be there, every scene is an adventure. They're not spending hours in a trailer waiting, not doing half a scene and then stopping to go to the other angles."

"It does change the writing of the show in several ways," he continued. "We give the actors an enormous amount of freedom with the words on the page. It would be impossible to have them stick to the lines in the script because the filming style doesn't lend itself to that. And giving them that freedom has made these scenes incredibly rich. We've found so many moments that could never be written; they're discovered there on the stage."

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things by day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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