“Brave from the start”: 20 years of Friday Night Lights – the sports drama that dared to be different | Television

II’ve been around the American South enough to understand the importance of football: small towns with stands on a high school football field that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two football club in the UK. Friday Night Lights, first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in one of the most fervent parts of this world, small-town Texas, where what happens in the spotlight at the end of the work week sets the mood of the place for the days to come.

Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one of those towns, Temple. “Friday Night Lights is based on Odessa, and Odessa and Temple are very, very similar,” he told me in 2017. “The high schools played football, and they’re the kind of towns where everything happens on Friday because it’s the football game. I didn’t really think about it until many years later, but you really risked getting beaten up. Not just harassed, but beaten up. Everywhere you went, you really had to looking over your shoulder, if you were at the mall, if you were in the parking lot, if you were at a party, people really wanted to fight.

It was into this world that Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist HG “Buzz” Bissinger entered. In 1988, he moved to Odessa with his family to write a book about small-town soccer. He expected something more popular than what he ended up with, which was a portrait of young men simultaneously horny as boxers and asked to be gentle as priests, while being burdened by the expectations of their entire community and the pressure to secure college scholarships.

It was also a portrait of a city riven by racism, where football drained valuable resources from classroom budgets, and where evidence was everywhere that football was a shattered dream, especially among the former golden boys, with their state championship rings, who were still hanging around Odessa rather than lighting up the NFL.

The book came out in 1990 and was acclaimed everywhere except Odessa. In 1993, it inspired a television series, Against the Grain, which lasted only one series, and did not propel the young Ben Affleck anywhere. There was a 2004 movie that stuck more closely to the book and was pretty good. And then there was the 2006 series – created by the film’s director, Peter Berg – which used the book as a jumping-off point for something wonderful: Friday Night Lights.

Odessa became Dillon, home of the Dillon Panthers. Characters arrived, some clearly based on their book counterparts, others entirely new. Some of Bissinger’s most disturbing reporting has faded, but the extent of his discomfort with much of life in Odessa was reflected in Dillon.

Friday Night Lights ended up being so good that it transcended the difficulties, some of its own creation, that could have killed it. Its second season was cut short by a writers’ strike, but was also hampered by melodramatic plotlines. After this second season, with low ratings despite critical praise, NBC planned to drop the series before entering into a co-production deal that would see it air first on cable for the remaining three seasons. It was so good that it was possible to forgive its fairy tale elements — the show’s de facto hero, Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), moving to a school across town with no money or football program, and making them state champions in two seasons.

Eric and his wife Tami (Connie Britton, in the role of his life – as is Chandler), a part-time counselor who somehow becomes principal of Dillon High, are the moral heart of the series, he stern and tough but loyal and confident, she softer and more empathetic but just as determined. They row, sometimes very poorly; they struggle to raise their deeply irritating teenage daughter; they live with the insecurity that comes with coaching at a school with high expectations, and the constant attention and demands that it brings.

The show was brave from the start. The pilot episode introduced us to square-jawed leader, quarterback Jason Street, and his sparkly-toothed cheerleader girlfriend, Lyla Garrity, our leading man and lady, surely. By the end of the episode, his back was broken. Football gone, all hopes, dreams and expectations gone.

The star of the show was supposed to be Taylor Kitsch, playing the brooding, handsome, drunken, violent, womanizing Tim Riggins, in the vein of a most brooding James Dean, so puppyish that you could forgive him everything, even if Coach couldn’t. He was the one who went straight to the main roles, but the real winner was the potato actor who played an initially incidental character called Landry Clarke, who became more central as the series progressed: it was Jesse Plemons, perfect as a smart teenager but who knows that is rarely an advantage and often a disadvantage in this world, especially when coupled with the absence of the one thing that is respected: physical prowess. (Landry’s hapless and desperate alternative rock band is just the perfect thing for his character.)

A more likely star has emerged in Michael B Jordan, going from child soap opera player to dramatic actor as quarterback Vince Howard in the last two series (his flirtation with Jurnee Smollett’s Jess Merriweather is one of the show’s most touching relationships).

Berg encouraged his actors to improvise, had scenes filmed with handheld cameras, and did away with “blocking” — the discipline of telling actors exactly where to move throughout a scene. As long as the story beats were respected, they could adapt the dialogue and reactions. This gave the series a naturalism that felt new and fresh in a network drama: When characters stopped to think about an answer, they were actually thinking, not just stopping.

The female characters had lives of their own and were not simply adjuncts to football (Britton had played coach Billy Bob Thornton’s wife in the film and was not willing to return just to resume looking pretty in the corner). Sure, with the exception of quarterback Matt Saracen’s dementia-afflicted grandmother, they were all incredibly handsome, but so were almost all of the men. Berg’s camera, however, had an eager eye for his young actors, both male and female: It’s hard not to look stunning through a filter on a Texas sunset, as Kitsch so often demonstrated, often muttering “Texas f’rever.”

Friday Night Lights didn’t overstay its welcome: 76 episodes spanning five seasons. Sometimes he broke down, but his humanity always held him close and his sense of belonging was constant. If Sunnydale from Buffy the Vampire Slayer was hilarious because it would just invent locations, here are some docks! Here is an airport! – Dillon was the opposite. There was nothing. Fast food, a bar, a car dealership and an open range. There was only football and Friday night lights. Just like Odessa and Temple, cities where anything can go wrong.