Friday Night Lights: the gentle show about high school football that launched Hollywood stars
“C
lear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” So goes the Dillon Panthers’ team mantra in Friday Night Lights, the mid-noughties drama that follows the lives of a fictional high school football team in Dillon, rural west Texas. The first time I watched Friday Night Lights was at my brother’s behest. Considering the series is ostensibly about good ol’ God-fearing Texas boys playing ball, and I’m a decidedly unsporty, Australian atheist, it was an unexpected recommendation. But my brother described the show as surprisingly soft, even soothing. And he was right.
In every episode, stalwart coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) acts as a surrogate father figure to his misfit team, stoically imparting advice with a firm hand. The show is fundamentally about a community and, within that, a band of brothers. The players are often dysfunctional and sometimes even hostile to one another, but are united by their love of the game. The game itself, at a certain point, is merely incidental.
With an ensemble cast, Friday Night Lights uses its small-town backdrop to address many issues in contemporary American culture.
Yes, Friday Night Lights is an innately patriarchal and patriotic show, but it is also wholesome and hopeful. Despite the masculine archetypes the show depicts, it pointedly comments on the very same. “Every man at some point in his life is gonna lose a battle,” coach Taylor says in one scene. “He’s gonna fight and he’s gonna lose. But what makes him a man is that in the midst of that battle he does not lose himself.”
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Friday Night Lights was borne of the success of director Peter Berg’s 2004 movie of the same name, starring Billy Bob Thornton in the role of the coach. The film features some actors from the series, including Connie Britton, but it is set in a separate universe. The film is based on the book of the same-name by HG Bissinger, which documents the real-life Permian Panthers as they played football in Odessa, Texas. I haven’t read the book, but the film is more like 1999’s testosterone-drenched Varsity Blues, which starred Dawson’s Creek’s own Dawson (James Van Der Beek) as the backup quarterback hero. The Friday Night Lights series is much more akin to Dawson’s Creek or, strange as it might sound, Gilmore Girls. Forgive the reductive analogy, but Friday Night Lights is less testosterone, more estrogen – even when you can practically smell the Axe body spray permeating off your TV.
Kyle Chandler as coach and surrogate father figure Eric Taylor. Photograph: Bill Records/Getty Images
Unlike the aforementioned teen soaps, Friday Night Lights isn’t characterised by an onslaught of precociously witty, mile-a-minute, multisyllabic rapport. Instead, its dialogue is mostly pretty grounded and more reflective of actual teens. But just like a teen soap, the characters in Friday Night Lights break up, break down, make up, and make out. It just so happens to all take place in a football-frenzied town.
The pilot begins with quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) being felled by a catastrophic injury on the field, leaving him partially paralysed and his team in turmoil. There are plenty more injuries, affairs and assaults to come, but the stakes equally often feel pedestrian, even banal: will the Panthers win the big Friday game? The most intriguing and moving moments aren’t even on the pitch. Many of the characters navigate intense identity crises. The final two seasons are set in the financially deprived East Dillon, when the show dives more deeply into class, racism and poverty.
We follow characters such as sweet Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) as he cares for his increasingly senile grandmother, and cocky Smash Williams (Gaius Charles), who projects false bravado as he navigates racial prejudice and financial instability. Tyra Collete (Adrianne Palicki) endures trauma and hardship, and boozy Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) – always inexplicably referred to by his full name – has a dramatic arc involving the law.
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As a sidebar, Tim Riggins is monosyllabic and impassive in a way that frustrates me as a now 35-year-old, but would have had me helplessly swooning as a teen girl, as if he’d reached through my screen and sprayed me with post-match sweat from his shoulder-length hair.
Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) and Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch): when their lips finally touched, teenage viewers swooned. Photograph: Nbc-Tv/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock
The show also boasts an impressive history of picking actors before they became Hollywood heavy hitters. There’s Britton, from The White Lotus, as coach Taylor’s wife, Tami, a glass of chardonnay practically soldered to her hand (so much so that it was hilariously spoofed on Inside Amy Schumer). In season four, Michael B Jordan’s Vince Howard is introduced (I like to imagine he’s The Wire’s Wallace, having made it to adulthood.) And, of course, there’s Breaking Bad’s Jesse Plemons as metal musician Landry Clarke, a refreshing counterpoint to the football-mad Dillon residents.
Friday Night Lights ran for five seasons but was cancelled because of low ratings. It’s the curse of many a cult favourite but at least it didn’t outstay its welcome. While a film sequel was temporarily floated, it was canned after concerns it risked tarnishing the show’s legacy. More recently, another film and reboot series have been announced. I’ll certainly watch both if they indeed transpire – but my loyalty remains with the original.
Friday Night Lights is streaming on Binge. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
Katharine Pollock is the author of Her Fidelity (Vintage Australia, $32.99).