Who would have guessed, at the start of the season, that one of my favorite shows would be a newcomer about a town obsessed with football? I would have been the first one to tell you that wasn't going to happen. I was wrong.
Simply put, Friday Night Lights is one of the best shows on television. It delivers on so many levels, offering up action, drama, comedy, and heart with impressive production, fantastic acting, and wonderful writing. The first season has just concluded, and now we have to wait and see if it will be fortunate enough to get picked up for a second, something I sincerely hope happens.
In 1988 the Odessa-Permian Panthers high school football went on an impressive run to the staste finals. The team's trip and the town's obsession with the sport is chronicled in the 1991 book, Friday Night Lights. In 2004 Peter Berg directed the big screen adaptation of the book, creating a first rate inspirational sports film, starring Billy Bob Thornton. Two years later, Peter Berg continues to feed his interest in the story, creating a fictional team and characters to inhabit a very similar football obsessessed world, but expanding the universe well past the confines of the football stadium. Thus, the Friday Night Lights television series was created, and with it a terribly addictive, engrossing, and very real feeling show. To lead the cast they brought in Kyle Chandler, who also starred on Early Edition, as the team's coach, alongside a couple of actors playing similar roles to the ones they played in the film, Connie Britton and Brad Leland.
This series brings the personal visual style that Berg used in the film to a more expansive television landscape. We go inside the lives, loves, problems of the kids and the parents involved. You cannot help but feel for them as they find their way through life, the good and the bad.
The season finale finds the Dylan Panthers in the state championship game, it is a high point for everyone involved. The season has been filled with potholes, trainwrecks, and serious interpersonal issues which all conspired to keep them from reaching for their dreams. Despite the hardships, the team pulled together with the support of their coach and are on the cusp of realizing all that they have worked so hard for. The game comes at a time when many of their personal issues have to be pushed aside to focus on the game, while other issues are just coming to a head.
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