Was Friday Night Lights about football? Oh, most absolutely. But for some reason that seems to be an issue where watching shows about cops and lawyers and doctors (folks none of us really want to deal with), are prime-time gold. Maybe its telling that Glee cannot be stopped no matter how been at a dead sprint to reach far past mediocre since its initial brilliant pilot.
Heather Havrilesky writes about it better than I ever will over at the NYT.
At Dillon High, no student ever had a single zit (well, maybe Landry) |
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Friday Night Lights had the single best pilot of a TV show I can think of. It was also one of the best acted shows on TV for 4 of its 5 seasons (that second season they actually veered towards becoming a standard-issue prime-time soap, and it made the show mostly unwatchable). I was in high school drama, not football*, but FNL always felt more like high school than anything I saw elsewhere. And the characters- high schoolers, teachers, coaches and parents - always felt grounded and real enough, and not the absent parents of teen-shows, the cartoonish teachers of most high-school shows, etc... When you guys were recommending me a thousand different shows, this was the one I was psychically recommending to you, but I figured if you weren't watching now, you weren't going to start.