Friday Night Lights was a unique show that ran for five seasons and was always difficult to market. Was it a football show, a high school show, or a small-town show? It was all of the above, and it did all those things well (even if the football games were always comically close). It had great performances from the whole cast: from experienced actors like Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton to others who got their first breaks in this show: Jesse Plemmons, Taylor Kitsch, Adrianne Palicki, or Michael B. Jordan (although he had already gotten noticed in The Wire).
The show had a unique tone and style, since the pilot, where improvisation was encouraged, they shot in real places and used a documentary-style camera that made us feel like we were witnessing all the different lives in this small town that loved high school football over everything else. Let’s shout “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!” and decide the ranking of every season of the show.
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5 Season 2
NBCUniversal Television Distribution
This is the worst season of the show by a large margin; to the point that nothing that happens during this season , and carries into the next (even the writers acknowledged the many mistakes they made). We could skip these episodes and not lose much. The maligned murder story with Landry (Jesse Plemons) and Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) didn’t make any sense in this grounded show; even if it showed that Plemons had a great performance in him and should have gotten better storylines and more screen time. The only episode worth watching is “Leave No Man Behind”, and it’s because of all the history shared between Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford).
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4 Season 4
This season was a new beginning as coach Taylor starts coaching the just-opened, new high school’s football team, the East Dillon Lions, in the poorest part of town. Having to start a football program from nothing made this team an incredible underdog, and made the Panthers, the team we had been rooting for, the bad guys. Most of the high school characters we’d loved from the beginning also left, so we got a new generation of actors to be in this high school: Vince (Michael B. Jordan), Jess (Jurnee Smollet), Luke (Matt Lauria) and Becky (Dora Madison). About the experience of working with Kyle Chandler, Michael B. Jordan told AV Club: “I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a tennis match. That’s the best analogy I can come up for it. You’re volleying back and forth with Pete Sampras. (…) It raised the bar; it steps your game up. I play at the level of my competition. It just brought me up, and I think I walked away a better actor from it. He taught me a lot that he didn’t even know he’d passed on to me.”
This season also gave us an incredible arc for returning actor Zach Gilford in what might’ve been the best acting of his career, especially in “The Son”; showed us Kyle Chandler looks better in blue than in red; and made us incredibly sad finding out the destiny of Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) confessing a crime, so his brother doesn’t go to prison, and his nephew has a present father, something they never did in the season finale “Thanksgiving”.
3 Season 3
Universal Television & Imagine Entertainment
The end of a cycle as many of our core group of high school characters got their endings and the actors started appearing in many other movies and shows. It was the end of beloved characters like Lyla (Minka Kelly), Tyra (Palicki), Smash (Gaius Charles), and Jason (Porter), whose final episode “New York, New York” is chill-inducing as we not only see his happy ending, but also how it affects his best friend Riggins (Kitsch), as he knows his best friend is starting a new phase of his life. Never has a “Texas Forever” been used to say so many things.
A new quarterback has moved into town, and all of Dillon wants him to play. That pressure affects everyone, especially coach Taylor and Saracen, who has always been more heart than talent, playing the position. This season was the culmination of everything that coach Taylor had done for the town and team, as they went back to the championship game and lost in a heartbreaking way (like in the book), the town had an exciting young quarterback to rave about; and it ends with Taylor and Tami (Connie Britton) getting new, exciting jobs in an incredible season finale, that could’ve been used as the series finale, as the show hadn’t been renewed yet.
2 Season 5
After a fourth season where East Dillon was comically bad, this is the season where they get big-dog status, as the season ends with the team in the Championship game. The whole season is marked by the future of the East Dillon characters, especially Vince, in a performance that showed Michael B. Jordan was destined for big, movie star things. His character is becoming a high school star, colleges want to recruit him, and the father who abandoned him years ago comes back, to get something for himself in his kid’s success.
The season also has some time for returning characters from previous seasons, like Riggins, Tyra, and Saracen. It’s the first time we see Coach Taylor overwhelmed, as his daughter has done some things he can’t understand (sleeping with her married R.A. in college), and it looks like not even football can make him feel better. The last episode is one of the best of the show. We see the moment where Tami (Britton) asks her husband when her time to shine will be after many years following his dreams; but also the championship game, and, as always, everything must get resolved in the last play of the game. Showing both those final game moments and the future of every character is a great ending for this show, which ends with the coach and his wife in a new town, one where they moved because now is her time to shine.
1 Season 1
From the pilot episode, we noticed this show was special, and the whole first season should be in the pantheon, to the point that if the show had been canceled after only one year, we would still be talking about it. It was one of the best shows about being a teenager, while showing how being a high school football star in a small town comes with a lot of pressure and problems. The season was 22 episodes long, so they had time to develop every story, let them breathe, and show all the small wins in between.
Be it Jason Street adapting to his new life after his accident in the pilot; the cute relationship between Matt and Julie (Amiee Teegarden), the coach’s daughter; the love triangle between Street, Riggins, and Lyla (Minka Kelly); the racism in town through Smash’s (Charles) stories, and, especially, the relationship of the coach Taylor and his wife Tami, as they might not always see eye to eye, but they love each other to their core and that love and stability helps every one of the rest of the characters as they know the two will always be there to help the kids. The first season made history for its characters, had a great tone, and it’s the best of Friday Night Lights.
