UPDATE (May 23) : Friday Night Lights returns with reruns this summer (Sundays at 9/8 Central).
UPDATE (May 10) : Looks like it's official, folks. Kristin at E! Online reports that Season Two is on its way with a full order of 22 episodes. Michael Ausiello at TV Guide confirms the excellent news.
UPDATE (April 11) : First comes the Peabody. Then come an additional six scripts. Let's hope renewal is next.
The press has spoken. The public agrees. Friday Night Lights was one of the best things to come out of 2006-07. We think it deserves a shot at 2008, too.
Let this page be a monument to its excellence. Let it be a resource for The Powers That Be, where they may carefully examine its brilliance before deciding its fate. Most importantly, let it be a place where we, the fans, can say that we fought our hardest to keep a great thing alive.
On the upside are its demographics, slightly younger and higher-income than NBC's average. It also has improvisational yet crafted writing, innovative camera work and the kind of image marketing can't buy, as the kind of show — like the recently renewed NBC sitcom 30 Rock — that raises the quality bar for the whole lineup.
The Houston Chronicle, April 11, 2007
As far as network TV goes, it doesn’t get any better than this.
And no question, it is a soap opera. But “Friday Night Lights” is so much more than that. An episode rarely doesn’t include some moving moment or moments that remind viewers that life can hand you some tough cards but is always worth playing.
The Buffalo News, April 11, 2007
By all rights, "Friday Nights Lights" ought to be "living large," to borrow an oft-used phrase from the show.
The heartfelt, emotionally rich drama about life in a small Texas city is the most critically acclaimed new network series of this season. Last week, it won the prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in television - the first of what almost certainly will be a string of prizes. It has a truly passionate core audience - one that includes its network's top executives.
The San Jose Mercury News, April 11, 2007
But "Friday Night Lights" is much more than the sum of its overriding themes. It is an exceptional (synonym No. 5) production, with a cast that has gone largely unheralded this season, beginning with Kyle Chandler as Coach Taylor.
He's turning in the best performance of any leading actor on TV this season, with great support from Connie Britton as his wife and a group of striking young actors ("striking" is synonym No. 6) who deserve to be mentioned by name - Zach Gilford, Scott Porter, Aimee Teegarden, Gaius Charles, Minka Kelly, Adrianne Palicki, Taylor Kitsch and Jesse Plemons.
The New York Post, April 11, 2007
Few series have ever better captured the mix of open hearts and small minds, kindness and cruelty, that so often mingle in a small town's devotion to its high school. And few series have ever laid better claims on your emotions or manipulated them so efficiently that you may find yourself laughing and crying at the same time tonight.
USA TODAY, April 11, 2007
Friday Night Lights is about high school football in the same way that Moby Dick was about whale hunting. You don't have to be a sports fan to enjoy it. It's beautifully shot, with lots of grays and browns helping convey the loneliness and desperation of the West Texas landscape, and the music is expertly chosen.
The Baltimore Sun, April 11, 2007
The series has introduced characters of inordinate depth and a husband-wife relationship that's more realistic than any other portrayal of a couple in prime-time (except maybe Tony and Carmela Soprano). "FNL" has earned a shot at overtime.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 11, 2007
In lesser hands, that would be the stuff of TV melodrama, but Friday Night Lights transcends its small-screen underpinnings with some of the most real and heartfelt exchanges between parents and their children you will ever witness in a fictional TV series. In tone and feel, the series it most closely resembles is My So-Called Life, the short-lived 1994 coming-of-age drama that featured a then-unknown Claire Danes as an adolescent caught between girlhood and young womanhood.
The Times Colonist, April 11, 2007
When I watched, something unexpected happened. I couldn’t take my eyes off these characters. It wasn’t just their impossibly good looks. I was fascinated by their lives and their interactions. I couldn’t wait to see them each week, to see how they would deal with their triumphs and disasters, to revel in their basic goodness, to find joy and sorrow in lives that, as it turned out, were more familiar to me than I imagined.
If there was better dramatic writing on TV this season or a cast with more chemistry, I must have missed it.
The Hollywood Reporter, April 10, 2007
I can say that the show handles its business on and off the field with convincing authority. It knows the big and small details of operating a high school football team—the drills, the plays, the formations, the sketchy recruiting situation, the bartering with state governing boards, etc. And, of course, it’s a first-rate melodrama, too. But by combining these two things, the dramatic stakes are raised all around.
The Onion A.V. Club, April 6, 2007
No dramatic series, broadcast or cable, is more grounded in contemporary American reality than this clear eyed serial about the hopes, dreams, livelihoods and egos intertwined with the fate of high-school football in a Texas town.
The Peabody Awards, April 4, 2007
This is the best show on television that not enough people are watching.
The Tampa Tribune, April 4, 2007
But there’s far more to the show than a palpable sense of place. The show’s actors and directors have unprecedented freedom to change lines, alter scenes and improvise moments that feel true to the moment and to their characters. And the show’s writers, who’ve come up with some of the most nuanced, compelling story lines on television (most of which don’t have a thing to do with football, despite the show’s origins as H.G. Bissinger’s non-fiction account of a real Texas high school football team), are fine with those improvised alterations.
The Chicago Tribune, March 20, 2007
Part of what makes it work is that it gives serious consideration to both adult and adolescent concerns. If the multiple teen crises feel like they're slipping into a soap opera dynamic, rest assured the moment will pass quickly — and you'll probably be genuinely surprised by their complex negotiations of everyday life. The writing is consistently authentic, and the characters are always remarkably human in their individuality.
PopPolitics, March 15, 2007
Most promising television dramas become flaccid after a time — and not a long time — as the writers send established characters whirling off into their separate thin subplots, and episodes settle into a gray predictability. "Friday Night Lights" (Wednesdays, 8-9 p.m ET) has not only avoided that trap, it has proved to be that rare thing — a network series that has grown more absorbing, admirable and generally smashing each week.
The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2007
If only more people knew what a rare and beautiful thing they're missing: a drama that sets the bar much higher than it has to, daring to take on the romance and heartbreak of being a teenager with honesty, compassion and wit. The writers don't take shortcuts with pointless fisticuffs and cliques and ironic asides; they stick to the emotional center of the story at all times.
Salon, March 7, 2007
But after kickoff, the show kept on marching downfield. A cult following developed, and though ratings weren't massive, “Friday Night Lights” came to be labeled by many viewers and critics as the best new series of the year. But it’s moved way beyond that now. Forget "new," it’s now the best show on TV, bar none.
MSNBC, March 6, 2007
There's only so much I can do, but let me use this pulpit and this double-barreled blast of praise to beat the drums once again for this wonderful show and its remarkable cast, who make poetry out of understated realism.
TV Guide, March 2, 2007
I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Much more than a show about football, Friday Night Lights is a family drama, and a very good one. The fight over Julie's new friendship with Tyra early in the episode was well done. Connie Britton continues to amaze me as Tami.
TV Squad, March 1, 2007
And while we’re on the subject of hope, here’s what else I hope: That NBC will do the right thing and renew Friday Night Lights for a second season. As people slowly discover it, and realize that it’s about so much more than football, I believe its audience will grow. Not into a blockbuster, but into the sort of prestige item that NBC can not only be proud of but make money from.
TV Guide, February 28, 2007
An episode focusing on the uproar over a white coach's racially insensitive remarks is perfectly in character for "Friday Night Lights"; after all, one of the show's hallmarks is exposing the unspoken tensions that run through our lives.
BuzzSugar, February 28, 2007
I'm a professional critic and therefore allegedly someone skilled at using words to describe why something was or wasn't good, and I feel like they're failing me in an attempt to capture the pure genius of the scene where Tami has The Talk with Julie. Long before Tami gave Eric her speech about not wanting to lose Julie's trust, you could see her struggling mightily between going all hellfire and brimstone or trying to be the cool mom who's her daughter's best friend, and it was funny and moving and scary and just amazing.
What's Alan Watching?, February 22, 2007
Since then the show, refreshingly, hasn't been about glory or tragedy — just the incremental stuff of life in the town. "Friday Night Lights" is arguably the most intimate series on network television, thanks to a stellar cast and a cinematic style — lots of hand-held camera and quick cuts — that make you feel like a fly on the wall behind various closed doors.
The Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2007
But this extraordinary drama lets us peek inside the lives and the minds of people who aren’t any different than we are, who are struggling with the mundane and major problems of real life. And it’s done with such subtlety, surprising wit and grace, that at the end of every hour, I devoutly wish it wasn’t over.
The Chicago Tribune, February 15, 2007
Once again this stellar series is handling a challenging subject matter with deft and grace. There are no easy answers and "Friday Night Lights" doesn't pretend that there are.
Zap2it, February 12, 2007
I find myself caring deeply about all of these characters, despite all the self-doubt and loathing they embody. In the hands of less capable actors or less nuanced writing, this would be 90210 set in west Texas.
TV Guide, November 28, 2006
Adapted by Peter Berg from his own film version of H.G. Bissinger's best seller, "Friday Night Lights" ultimately is about so much more than football. It's about the hardships placed upon a man and his family by unrealistic expectations. It's about the various biorhythms of teen culture. And it's about how small towns with long-embedded inferiority complexes attempt to define themselves.
The Contra Costa Times, October 30, 2006
"Friday Night Lights," based on the 2004 film, is the "Platoon" of high school football — the story of the embattled infantry as well as of the officers in the field, reverberant with metaphorical and microcosmic echoes. Thus, viewers can come off a weekend of football satiated with the sport and still find fascination in producer-creator Peter Berg's realistic saga of how The Game affects life in this town — not just affects it, but also overwhelms it.
The Washington Post, October 26, 2006
While the culture of high school football is the heart of "Friday Night Lights," its soul is the interaction among the people of Dillon — friends, lovers, families and citizens. The hits and passes on the field ring true, but so do the emotional elements of this community.
The Austin American Statesman, October 24, 2006
"Friday Night Lights" is just tremendous: well-made, well-acted, engaging, both visually and intellectually rich. Only a handful of shows in the history of television have attempted to portray the stresses and beauties of average American life, without glamorization, absurd plot contrivances or one-liners. In its effort to capture the fleeting feeling of Grovers Corners small-town life, "Friday Night Lights" is art: and being art, faces a challenge in winning public acceptance. Yet success is possible. I dare you to watch "Friday Night Lights" and try telling me it's not great television!
ESPN, Page 2, October 23, 2006
© 2007 James Fan. This site is in no way affiliated with NBC, though I certainly hope they take notice.
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