In honor of the fifth and final season being released on DVD yesterday I now present my thoughts on the entire series of Friday Night Lights.
Now I know what many of you are saying who haven’t seen the show, “What are you doing reviewing a show about Texas football on a geek review site?” Now I have to answer it with a preface, people who know me know that if there is one state I never want to live in it’s Texas, and I never grew up on football so believe me I understood the criticism. But then I started to watch the show, and I continued to watch the show and now I have finished watching the show, and it is about Texas football but it’s about much more then that.
What Friday Night Lights has done is it created incredibly good characters, well written and well thought out characters that make you love the show. The show looks past just football and creates a world full of human beings with lives that you care about. The show made some mistakes but then so do people in general and this show is one of the first shows that I think truly understood this. You can never predict where a character is going to go, whether they will be successful or not because they’re all human beings and some people become successful and others don’t. As one of the members of the crew says in the bonus features, “There’s a lot of dream crushing on this show.” And to me that is incredibly refreshing.
Friday Night Lights did not have it easy, they went through possible cancellation many times and yet still pushed through it and created a product which I can’t speak more fondly of. After watching the show I still don’t want to move to Texas but I do now realize that there are real people in Texas even if I don’t ever want to live there.
The fifth season started with Coach Taylor and the East Dillon Lions starting up their next season after a dismal year in season 4. Some of their bigger characters have gone on to college and there are even some brand new characters in season 5. The funny thing is, this was always a show where even if the character was loved there was no guarantee you’d ever see them again and still today that is unheard of, for a show to be so dedicated to the story that some characters really would move away and never be seen again. And even in the final episode I was still left guessing at where these characters would end up.
If you haven’t watched this show go back and pick up the first season, I know the idea of a show about football doesn’t strike those who haven’t watched it yet, but instead understand that this show has some of the best character writing in television today. Coach Taylor says something in the second episode of the fifth season which is especially applicable, when talking to someone he wants to get on the team he says, “You live in Texas, you love the game of football, you just don’t know it yet.” I’m going to say the same thing, “You watch Television, you love Friday Night Lights, you just don’t know it yet.”