Friday Night Lights

With the Writer’s Strike dovetailing with summer, it may be a while before a really compelling new TV series builds a world we want to stay in for a while. So this is a good time to revisit the (recent) classics.

I didn’t watch Friday Night Lights when it first aired, nor did I watch it during Covid. My dad watched soccer 24/7 and hardly anyone paid attention to my high school’s football team. When I taught high school, none of the players actually understood football, and they lost every single game (despite this, they were ecstatic to be on the team and the students cheered them on, as most didn’t understand how football worked either). 

A few months ago, a friend of mine told me about his experiences as a high school football player. He described endless running drills, doing lunges around the school, and being smacked to the ground multiple times a day. When he was 16, he broke his hip, effectively ending his football career. Although the injury has healed, he still has knee and hip problems. The more he described the culture of high school football to me, the more fascinated I became. How did people get so into it? And why does football continue to dominate the lives of so many?

After asking other friends these questions, they told me to just watch Friday Night Lights. 

With five seasons and 100 episodes, Friday Night Lights is a commitment, a seemingly daunting one if you don’t understand football. Yet the pilot immediately hooked me. Despite having more football talk than I expected, I easily followed it.

Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) takes over as head coach of the Dillon Panthers, a monumental task considering the entire town rests its hopes and dreams on this team. But then a tragedy strikes, and the entire team is turned upside down. As the coach rallies around his players and does his best to support them. Even though the players are local royalty, they defy a lot of the football player stereotypes, and each one faces their own personal demons and pressures, which leads some of them to steroids and alcohol.

As interesting as the men are in Dillon, the women held my focus. They face an entirely different set of challenges. High schooler Tyra (Palicki), whose sister is a stripper, gets painted as the town harlot, but there’s so much more to her. Her mother has been in multiple relationships with abusive men, and Tyra is determined to escape Dillon and the same fate. Coach Taylor’s wife, Tami (Britton), is often seen by the others as just “the coach’s wife.” While Tami and Coach Taylor have one of the healthiest marriages you’ll see depicted in a TV series, she doesn’t accept this role. Tami is determined to help her students achieve their dreams – and to pursue her own.

The Season To Skip.  After a brilliant first season, the second season takes off in inexplicable directions. Most of this was apparently due to the 2007-08 writer’s strike. When the series returned for its third season, the writers hit the reset button and acted as though season two never existed. So you can skip the second season.

The remaining season return to top form, and each one goes deeper into the characters of the different themes that face this every town in Texas — the economic disparities, the role of religion and race, the lack of school funding, the polarized views of abortion — and the ways that all the divisions somehow unite around a team of high school athletes.

The 2000s ushered in a fascination with anti-heroes. But Coach Taylor doesn’t really have a dark side. He cares deeply for his wife, his daughter, and his players. He stands up for what is right. He gives his players rousing pep talks, always finishing them with the phrase that became the show’s mantra: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.”

With so much tough news, true crime, horror, and dark drama, this is a world that will give you some hope and invite you in to stay a while.