Friday Night Lights

Season four of the critically acclaimed Friday Night Lights debuts tonight! The show centers on the coach, players, family, and community of a high school football team in small-town Dillon, TX. While on the surface, it’s a high-school drama about football, it’s much more than that. The football drives a lot of the storylines, but doesn’t take up much screen time. It’s the relationships between the characters that are the backbone of the show, and they are some of the deepest and most realistic you can find on TV. You will fall in love with the characters and their lives, despite their very real flaws.

Like many of the show’s current fans, I was a bit leery of the show when it first aired. I’d seen the movie and liked it, but didn’t think I’d want to tune in each week for a melodrama about football players. I am so glad I gave it a shot the summer after the first season — I ended up watching all 22 episodes in a few days and it’s become one of my all-time favorite TV shows. It’s struggled to find an audience, though, and only continues to air through an exclusive deal with DirectTV. If you’re like most Americans and don’t have DirectTV, you’ll have to wait until next year for the delayed broadcast on NBC. But if you haven’t seen the show yet, that gives you plenty of time to catch up on the 50 episodes of the first three seasons.

Need more? Read the non-fiction book about a real Texas football team on which the movie and TV series are based. You can also watch the movie, which was directed by Peter Berg, who created the TV series, and features some of the same actors and music as the show.

Plus, Adele from the blog Persnickety Snark has a great feature about Friday Night Lights this week. She’s gotten a host of YA authors to share their love of the series, including Sarah Dessen, Melissa Walker, and Meg Cabot.

October 28th, 2009  ♥  Books, Television  ♥  2 Comments »