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.
With its different mindset, "Friday Night Lights" has claimed a world far from TV's beaten path, and depicts it with such honesty that we viewers behold its ordinary people (and, by extension, ourselves) with new eyes. In the writing, acting and on-location filming (the production is based in Austin), Friday Night Lights debunks the "TV version" of things, depicting real life on its own indigenous terms.
The Associated Press, October 12, 2006
I wish I could say that NBC is as good as Herman Melville. That'd be stretching it. Still, Friday Night Lights and Moby-Dick share a few major themes — masculinity, passion, anticipation — and each of them is bouncing with virtuosity. It would be great fun if FNL made it through damp, drizzly November.
Slate, October 10, 2006
If this sounds grandiose, so is "Friday Night Lights." But its capacity to turn a single sound into not just evidence of football’s mortal stakes, but exposition, scene-setting and anthropology (this is West Texas, where football players and E.R. workers work closely together), is proof that this is a fiercely controlled and inventive work of art.
The New York Times, October 3, 2006
Yet none of this plays as soap opera, or perhaps it actually is soap opera in the finest sense, as a penetrating moral compass on the way humans privately direct their lives. Rejecting that genre's lingering-camera cliches, Berg's lens moves ceaselessly, in almost jittery fashion, which on the small screen takes some getting used to. It alights all over town, inside crackerbox houses with peeling paint and nouveau brick mansions, at pregame bonfires and locker room pep talks, and ultimately in taut action on the field, where fortunes rise and fall for ordinary people resigned to seeing their lives peak entirely too early.
Newsday, October 3, 2006
More than simply being outstanding, "Friday Night Lights" is an important series because of the way it takes family-friendly television seriously. The issues covered here — racism, the dream of success and that classic struggle for acceptance and popularity — create the kind of family drama that can bring everybody to the table. Plus, there's something indescribable about it that makes it impossible not to feel for these kids and their families, owing not to any tragedy but, instead, to a sense of vitality and spirit. In short, this is a winner.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 3, 2006
The journey from nonfiction best seller to feature-film adaptation to fictionalized small-screen spin-off is a perilous one, and it wouldn't have been surprising if "Friday Night Lights" had torn a ligament or two along the way. Somehow, though, the story of the role high school football occupies in the heart of Texas just keeps going and going, and what finds its way onto NBC tonight is both cinematically broad and heartbreakingly specific, a melding for once of the best that movies and television have to offer.
The Philadelphia Daily News, October 3, 2006
What Berg manages to do here is wholly impressive. If you don't care for football, or high school football in particular, or even the concerns of a bunch of high school kids and their fanatical grown-ups — which plenty of viewers probably don't — Berg makes you care.
The San Francisco Chronicle, October 2, 2006
The real joy of the show lies in its smaller moments. The show abounds with accurately observed, artfully rendered snippets of real life, from the obnoxious businessmen who cluster around the coach, to the nattering voices on radio, to the solidity of the churches and the faith they represent.
USA TODAY, October 2, 2006
© 2007 James Fan. This site is in no way affiliated with NBC, though I certainly hope they take notice.
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