We Recommend: Friday Night Lights

I don't like sport. Pretty much any time I try and watch anything vaguely sporty, I get bored. It probably doesn't help that the two most popular sports in the UK include one where teams can, and do, play for ninety minutes without anyone scoring, and one where a game can last five days and still end in a draw. As such, a TV show about US high school football is the last thing I want to be watching. For added points, set it in rural Texas where everyone is a good Christian to get my humanist rankles going and then stress how obsessed the community and school is with football at the expense of everything else (like academia, for example) to complete the trifecta of "things that wind me up".


So I should hate this show. But I don't. It's brilliant. Given how much it does to turn me off, it's amazing that it manages to win me around. Much of that comes down to two things: it's remarkably well written and the performance are wonderfully naturalistic. Much of the latter is down to the interesting approach taken in filming the show. It was purposefully under-rehearsed, the actors given leeway with their lines and delivery, and the camera operators trained to follow the actors, rather than having the actors follow carefully prescribed movements. It makes the show feel like nothing else on TV.

Kyle Chandler's performance as coach Eric Taylor is a stand-out, as is a young Taylor Kitsch as Tim Riggins. The writing itself is great, but I always figured I'd get annoyed by the amount of time spent on showing the actual games themselves. Yet I didn't. A knowledge of American Football isn't required, though having a quick read of the basics on Wikipedia can be handy, but what I found was that I gained an insight into exactly why people enjoy watching sports so much. The drama they were able to build-up to within the games, the excitement as the Dillon Panthers had a few seconds left to grab the victory... it's a genuine rush. Everything we see of these characters outside of the games is a short-cut to getting viewers invested in the team in the same way as long-term fans of sports teams feel invested in them after years spent following them. And of course, while in actual sport the truly exciting moments and dramatic games come along fairly rarely, in Friday Night Lights we get the edited highlights, scripted and filmed to be as exciting as possible for the viewer.

The show stumbles a little in the second and third seasons. Each season represents a school year, but the show is quite aware that it's built up a wonderful cast of young actors whose characters should be graduating and moving on. As such it contrives in awkward ways to keep as many of them around as possible, while failing to focus on the new players, creating an awkward tension between the on-pitch and off-pitch action.

Luckily it finds it's feet again for the fourth and fifth seasons by doing exactly what it should have done earlier, and bringing in new characters and letting them take the spotlight.

It's far from a perfect show, but the first season is one of the finest examples of television ever made, and is really worth watching, even for those of you that have as much dislike for sport as I do.

Friday Night Lights is being shown again from the start on Sky Atlantic, starting 8pm February 14th.