‘Brave from the beginning’: 20 years of Friday Night Lights – the sports drama that dared to be different

Power couple … Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in Friday Night Lights (2006). Photograph: Album/AlamyView image in fullscreenPower couple … Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton in Friday Night Lights (2006). Photograph: Album/Alamy‘Brave from the beginning’: 20 years of Friday Night Lights – the sports drama that dared to be differentIt launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B Drama, and let its stars improvise in a way that was fresh and new. This show about smalltown US football was confident, trailblazing – and wonderful

I’ve been around the south of the US enough to have seen the importance of football: little burgs where the high-school football field has stands that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two soccer club in the UK. Friday Night Lights, which was first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in the most fervent edges of that world, smalltown Texas, where what happens under the floodlights at the end of the working week defines the mood of the place for days to come.

Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one such town, Temple. “Friday Night Lights is based on Odessa, and Odessa and Temple are very, very similar,” he told me in 2017. “The high schools used to play each other at 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 being beaten [up]. Not just harassed, but beaten. Everywhere you went, you really had to look over your shoulder. If you were at the mall, if you were at the parking lot, if you were at a party – people really wanted to fight.”

That was the world into which the Pulitzer-winning reporter HG “Buzz” Bissinger inserted himself. In 1988, he moved to Odessa with his family to write a book about smalltown football. He expected something folksier than he ended up with, which was a portrait of young men being simultaneously revved up like boxers and told to be gentle like priests, all the while burdened with the expectations of their whole community and the pressure to win college scholarships.

View image in fullscreenField of dreams … the Dillon Panthers in Friday Night Lights. Photograph: Bill Records/Nbc-Tv/Kobal/REX/ShutterstockIt was also a portrait of a town riven with racism, where football sucked precious resources from classroom budgets, and where evidence was everywhere that football was a broken dream, especially in the former golden boys, with their state championship rings, 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 TV series, Against the Grain, that lasted a single series, and propelled the young Ben Affleck nowhere. 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 director of the movie, Peter Berg – which used the book as a starting point for something wonderful: Friday Night Lights.

Odessa became Dillon, home of the Dillon Panthers. In came characters, some clearly based on their counterparts in the book, others entirely new. Out went some of Bissinger’s more troubling reporting, but the thrust of his discomfort with much of life in Odessa was reflected in Dillon.

Friday Night Lights ended up being so good that it transcended difficulties, some of its own making, that might have killed it. Its second season was cut short by a writers’ strike, but was also hampered by melodramatic plotlines. After that second season, with ratings low despite critical acclaim, NBC planned to scrap the show before coming to a co-production deal that saw it air first on cable for the remaining three seasons. It was so good it was possible to forgive its fairytale elements – the show’s de facto hero, coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), moving to a school across town with no money and no football programme, and making them state champions inside two seasons.

View image in fullscreenRising star … Michael B Jordan as Vince Howard, who appeared in the final two series of Friday Night Lights. Photograph: Album/AlamyEric and his wife Tami (Connie Britton, in the role of her lifetime – as was Chandler), a part-time counsellor who somehow becomes principal of Dillon High, are the moral heart of the show, he stern and hard but loyal and trusting, she softer and more empathetic but just as determined. They row, sometimes very badly; they struggle with bringing up their deeply irritating teenage daughter; they live with the insecurity that comes with being a coach at a school with high expectations, and the constant attention and demands it brings.

The show was brave from the beginning. The pilot episode introduced us to the square-jawed leader, the 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. No more football, all hopes and dreams and expectations gone.

View image in fullscreenYoung love … Jesse Plemons (left) and Adrianne Palicki in season two of Friday Night Lights. Photograph: NBC/Getty ImagesThe breakout star of the show was supposed to be Taylor Kitsch, playing brooding, handsome, drunken, violent, womanising Tim Riggins, in the vein of James Dean at his most sullen, so puppyish you could forgive him anything, even if Coach couldn’t. He’s the one who went straight to starring roles, but the real winner was the potato-ish actor playing an initially incidental character called Landry Clarke, who grew more central as the series progressed: that was Jesse Plemons, perfect as a teenager who’s clever but knows that is rarely an advantage and often a disadvantage in this world, especially when paired with a lack of the only thing that is respected: physical prowess. (Landry’s hapless and hopeless alt-rock band is just the perfect thing for his character.)

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

Berg encouraged his cast 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 story beats were met, they could adapt dialogue and reactions. It gave the show a naturalism that felt new and fresh in a network drama: when characters paused to think of a reply, they were actually thinking, not just pausing.

View image in fullscreenFresh-faced … Ben Affleck (left) in Against the Grain, a 1993 TV adaptation of the book that inspired Friday Night Lights. Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/AlamyThe female characters had lives of their own and weren’t simply adjuncts to the football (Britton had played coach Billy Bob Thornton’s wife in the movie, and had not been willing to return only to reprise looking pretty in the corner). Admittedly, except for quarterback Matt Saracen’s dementia-ridden grandma, they were all stunningly beautiful, but then so were pretty much all the men. Berg’s camera, though, had a covetous eye for its young cast, male and female alike: it’s hard not to look great through a filter against a Texas sunset, as Kitsch was so often shown, often muttering, “Texas f’rever.”

Friday Night Lights didn’t overstay its welcome: 76 episodes over five seasons. At times it creaked, but its humanity always tethered it, and its sense of place was constant. If Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Sunnydale was hilarious because it would just invent locations – here are some docks! Here’s an airport! – Dillon was the opposite. It had nothing. Fast food, a bar, a car dealership, and the open range. All it had was football, and the Friday night lights. Just like Odessa and Temple, towns where anything could go wrong.