54: Friday Night Lights

Okay, so it's not particularly popular - in fact it's come perilously close to cancellation after just about every season that has aired, and not without cause - no one has watched it, though not helped by its constantly moving time slots and relative lack of promotion. And it certainly has a cult, but not a cult like, say Battlestar Galactica. That said, it's been incredibly critically well reviewed, falling all over critics top ten lists after its first season, still its best, and hell, I like it a lot, and it could still desperately use the promotion as it's somehow still on the air, albeit in an incredibly bizarre airing first on DirecTV, and then re-airing on NBC later fashion, so it's here.

The show is loosely based on a movie, which is based on a book, by Buzz Bissinger (I mention his name because if you haven't seen him make a fool out of himself in this episode of Bob Costas Now where he irrationally bashes blogs - also if you watch this - ask yourself why is Braylan Edwards there?). While I have yet to read the book, the movie is not bad, but far inferior to the television show, which pretty much starts at the premise of the movie - football crazed Texas town where the star player - quarterback in the television show, running back in the movie, gets critically injured, ending their respective careers, and there is lots of pressure on the coach to win now even without his star, or risk both the harassment of his family and losing his job.

What it is essentially is kind of a football soap, with, with the glaring exception of a second season plot of a character accidentally murdering (can it still be murder if it's accidental? I don't remember from criminal law, though I suppose I should) someone, most things being within the realm of realism - hard to believe all of these things would happen to the same people over the course of a year, but any one of them could and it wouldn't be too far fetched, or at least I assume not in Texas, since a character would definitely not drop out of high school to travel the rodeo circuit with a boy up north. Characters get together, break up and make up, and Coach Taylor has to deal with every possible scandal a high school coach could possibly deal with - steroids, ineligibility, quarterback controversies, a racist remark by an assistant head coach and many more, all while, along with his wife, just about managing to be the perfect parent.

I wrote a bunch of my opinions about FNL after finishing it (well, catching up to where it is now) so in the spirit of not repeating too much from it, I'll say that as cheesy and just TV as the show is (Coach Taylor seems to have just the right words to say at a critical point in every episode - whether to motivate his wife, drive his players, or apologize to his daughter), it does work because the characters are good, and the actors portraying them do a good job, generally, and I suppose you get that warm tingly exciting feeling when say, Matt and Julie are getting back together, which is why you need TV sometimes I suppose, cause if it were The Wire, Matt would get killed and Julie would be addicted to heroin.

But do do the show a favor and actually watch it, it needs as many viewers as it can get.