TV Roundup: Friday Night Lights

With May sweeps signalling the end of the traditional TV season, I would like to look back at a few shows that caught my attention. I ended up watching three new dramas--Jericho, Heroes, and Friday Night Lights.

Jericho started slow (how often do you get to say that about a show that detonates a nuclear bomb in the first episode) but quickly got better. Heroes was as close to a phenomenon as a scripted show gets these days. It began fast and gained from there. I'll take a more in-depth look at those two shows later. First, I want to consider the best new show of the season, a show that's already one of the two or three best dramas on TV: Friday Night Lights.

This is the third iteration of this story. It started as a prize-winning book by Buzz Bissinger about Odessa, TX, a blighted oil-patch city in West Texas that lives and dies with the Permian Panthers. That turned into a movie starring Billy Bob Thornton, who gave a fine performance as Coach Gary Gaines. The movie was pretty good.

When NBC announced FNL would be on their fall schedule, I groaned. First, I thought it would be another lying hagiography of small-town athletic values. I grew up in a football-crazy small town. Hey, I played in high school. There's no bigger snake-pit in the world. Second, I hate, hate, hate the way most sports are portrayed on TV shows (White Shadow excepted). They look cheesy and cheap.

Then I watched the pilot. It was stunning. From Kyle Chandler (Coach Derek Taylor) to Zach Gilford (Matt Saracen) to Gaius Charles (Smash Williams) the team was amazingly well-cast. Taylor Kitsch was immediately noticed as bad-boy fullback Tim Riggins, but even this seemingly stock character was quickly revealed to have many different facets. And the female characters! Unknown (at least to me) Minka Kelly, Adrianne Palicki (her Tyra was another stock character quickly turned 3-D) and young Aimee Teagarden (one of the few actual teens in the cast) were phenomenal. But the queen bee who ruled them all was Connie Britton as Tami Taylor. I have to admit here that I have a long-standing crush on Britton and have often bitched and moaned about her inability to find a role that took advantage of her smarts and sexuality. Well, she's found that role. Add in Jesse Plemons (Landry Clarke), Blue Deckert (Mac McGill), and Brad Leland (he rules as Buddy Garrity) and you have one of the most talented and jam-packed ensembles on TV.

The writing and cinematography were first-class. The show looked spectacular. Berg's method of shooting (hand-held cameras constantly rolling, camera operators responsible for finding the shot, actors concentrating on performance not blocking) gave a distinctive feel to each episode, and the football action looked amazing. Shot in long takes, you got a real sense of where players were in space and the actors (or stunt performers) actually looked like high-school players, not 30-year-old behemoths. FNL was one of the most expensive shows of the season, but it looked like every dime was on the screen.

I only have one complaint. Dillon was supposed to be a powerhouse team and one of the season-long arcs was whether or not the team would reach its championship potential (they did, btw, in a wonderfully shot state championship game). Some bloggers and critics have complained about the team's improbably second-half comeback in the championship game, but as Gregg Easterbrook likes to say, "Until it's half-time, you've got just as much time to come back as they did to get ahead." Given that the Panthers comeback started early in the second half and stretched across the full 30 minutes, it seemed very realistic. My complaint is not about the championship game. It's about the season. I played for a very good high school team, a state powerhouse in our classification. We usually had two tough games a year. Dillon won every game in the last seconds. Come on, if you're championship caliber in Texas, at least six of your games are going to be wins on the order of 48-6 or 63-7. Still, I realize that a huge rout is not that dramatically interesting, so I'll go with it.

Friday Night Lights has received an order for 22 second- season episodes. A few critics have wondered what the show will do since the Panthers won state in their first season. Come on!! (to quote Gob Bluth) Trying to get a team ready to repeat is its own struggle. I foresee complacency, ego, selfishness....

I can't wait.