friday night lights

Friday Night Lights is an award winning American television serial drama adapted by Peter Berg, Brian Grazer and David Nevins from a book of the same name. The series details events surrounding the Dillon Panthers, a high school football team based in fictional Dillon, Texas. The show uses a small-town backdrop to address many issues facing contemporary Middle America.

Produced by NBC Universal, Friday Night Lights initially received an order of 12 episodes and began airing on October 3, 2006 at 8:00pm on NBC. NBC increased this number on November 13, 2006 ordering a full season of 22 episodes. In addition to airing in the United States, the program is also broadcasted in Canada, The Philippines, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Norway, Iceland, Italy and the United Kingdom and is available from several online sources.

On May 10, 2007, NBC sources confirmed to TV Guide's Michael Ausiello that the network had renewed the show for a second season. This was confirmed by NBC on May 14, 2007 when it was announced that the show would change timeslots during the 2007/2008 season, airing, appropriately enough, on Friday nights at 10/9c. After a shakeup in NBC management the timeslot was adjusted so the show could air an hour earlier at 9/8c. Season 2 episodes are scheduled to begin airing on October 5, 2007.


PLOT

Friday Night Lights is the story of the Dillon Panthers, their Coach Eric Taylor and the fictional city of Dillon, TX, a town that lives and dies with every game their Panthers play. It is not a “sports show” in that the individual episodes tend to revolve around the personal lives of the Coach and his players and not around the actual playing of Football. Upcoming games are treated more like ever present specters in the background, influencing events while not being the focus of them.

Accordingly not every episode will show an actual game even though every game that is played by the Panthers is shown to some extent, often in cut scenes at the end of an episode.

The show puts special emphasis on dealing with social issues facing the various team members and their families. Episodes have addressed pertinent social issues such as infidelity, drug use, mental illness, racism, alcoholism and parental abandonment.

SEASON 1

Season one revolves around two main events, the ascension of Coach Eric Taylor to the position of head coach and the paralysis of star Quarterback Jason Street. These two events set off a chain reaction that leads the series through its first season, a season that largely revolves around a few basic themes.

The first of these themes is the overcoming of adversity. This is most evident in the juxtaposition of the team's new quarterback Matt Saracen and Jason Street who is now paralyzed from the waist down. Both these characters must struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds as Street learns to live without the use of his legs and Saracen must rise to be worthy of the position he has now inherited. Both struggle mightily against their respective challenges and their journeys largely parallel each other as each eventually conquers those challenges.

At the same time, a theme that repeats itself throughout the first season is the struggle Coach Taylor must face trying to balance the need to do the right thing with the need to appease a town whose hopes and dreams are inseparably intertwined with their high school football team. At several points Taylor must risk his team's success and consequently his job to do the right thing.

Finally, the first season's overarching theme is that even seemingly stereotypical people have unknown depth; once that depth is revealed people generally aren’t as different as they believe themselves to be. Nowhere is this made clearer than in one of the season’s most volatile relationships, that of “Smash” Williams with Tim Riggins. Williams is a driven athlete, obviously college bound, with a good family, while Riggins is an unfocused alcoholic with absentee parents and no prospects beyond high school. When the season opens both characters despise each other but as it progresses they become more and more dependent on each other eventually forming a friendship. In doing so they realize that they aren't as different as they had once thought.

Each character is touched in some way by this theme as most were introduced as stereotypes of a small Texas town in the Pilot. Gradually, as the season progressed, the audience began to see each character's depth and to discover the similarities among them.

**wikipedia.org