Friday Night Lights Review

Friday Night Lights is shot like a documentary, with handheld cameras chasing actors who were given room to improvise, and that method is why it feels truer than anything else on network television at the time. The football is incidental. What the show is about is Eric and Tami Taylor, played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton as the rarest thing in American drama, a married couple who like each other and argue like adults, and critics singled that partnership out from the first season to the last.

The teenagers around them are written with unusual care, Tim Riggins and Matt Saracen especially, and the town is drawn without condescension. The famous stumble is the second season murder plot, a lurch into soap the writers abandoned and later disowned, and there are stretches where the sports plotting resets a little too neatly. It survived poor ratings through an unusual deal with a satellite provider and got the ending it deserved. Nearly twenty years on its reputation has only grown, and the sentiment it trades in is earned every time.