I have recently finished one of the best TV Shows that has ever been done. It has been a book, by H.G. Bissinger, a movie and a TV show, which is now no longer showing. It is Friday Night Lights.
In Texas, there is nothing bigger than football (American football) and nothing is bigger than high school football played on Friday nights. Saturdays is for collage and Sunday is left for the NFL. The show spends the first three seasons of the show in a strong, rich school of mostly whites. There is a few blacks but they are just treated as players and not much. They get injured and then they are disregarded. The first two seasons follows the book really well. In the last two seasons, the coach is forced to move to the other high school in the black section of town. He is forced to start over dealing with poverty and racial issues. It would be easy just to say it is these issues but the show deals with much more.
One of the underlying themes is showing people whom high school athletics are everything for the town and the players who play them. It shows the glory but also the pain and hard adjustments after it is all gone. The series is shown more in a documentary style even though it is not. The strong central characters of the coach and his wife make it even stronger as they try to raise the daughter and try to help the players who play the game realize their dreams and sometimes help them adjust those dreams into something more realistic.
I must stress that if you don’t understand or even like football, there is more than enough in this show to keep you watching. I really enjoyed this show and happy to hear there could be another movie in the mix.