The Unusual Life of Friday Night Lights - Page 3

"In every show, but particularly this one, there is a really deep relationship between the writers and the actors, sometimes even if they don't spend a lot of time talking to each other all the time. Because you're having this dialogue. You're writing stuff for them and then you're watching what comes back to you, and you're learning from what they do and adjusting according to what they do. You're inspired by what they've done."

The fact that they have built no sets for the production, shooting everything in actual locations in Texas, also eliminates some of the usual constraints of television. "We are freed to write whatever comes into our head. It's the opposite of what working in television really is. Usually television is a negotiation between you and production. Usually you're bound to the sets you've built. You've built them, now you have to write to them. Because our production is so fluid, it allows us as writers not to be bound in a box."

The writers, some of whom came from football backgrounds themselves, are assisted by football advisers to make the onscreen games look as real as possible. The advisers take the scripts and break them down into a playbook. Then, "they just play football and we film it," Katims said.

Those scenes are crucial to a series that follows the Dillon Panthers through one football season for each television season. However, "the difficulty with marketing the show is the connection to football," he admitted, saying the strength of the show lies in its strong female voice and female characters. "The message we want to get out there is you don't need to be a fan of football to like the show. Even for football fans, football is an Achilles heel: if I want to watch football, I'll watch football. I don't need to watch TV football."

"We had such great reviews, and that's a great thing, but that also gives a sense of it being this important show. The other thing we have to get out there is that it's not like taking medicine. It's entertaining, it's fun, it's enjoyable."

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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