Friday Night Lights, Season One Review

NBC's Friday Night Lights is one of the finest hours of television out there right now, and its excellent first season is available on DVD in a five-disc set.

The TV series is based on the non-fiction classic by HG "Buzz" Bissinger about the 1988 Permian Panthers high school football team of Odessa, Texas and their quest for the state championship.

Bissinger's brother-in-law Peter Berg brought the movie to the big screen with Billy Bob Thornton as the head coach. Berg then developed Friday Night Lights as a television series for NBC, employing the themes of the book and movie in a fictionalized setting.

The team is still the Panthers, but now they're the Dillon Panthers. Dillon is apparently located somewhere in the "West Central Texas." Kyle Chandler plays Eric Taylor, the first-year head coach of the Panthers, and his character is a major improvement over the film. No disrespect to Billy Bob, but Chandler is a million times better in the role. In Thornton's defense, he was playing a real guy, who was probably not that much fun. The Eric Taylor character is much more fully developed, not only because he's fictional, but because the structure of a television series allows for more character development than a 2-hour movie.

Also, my wife says that Coach Taylor is hot, and I don't remember hearing that when we saw the film version.

Connie Britton reprises her role from the movie as the coach's wife, and her chemistry with Chandler is great. Her scenes with their daughter (Aimee Teagarden) are also very well-played. Also on hand from the film version is Brad Leland, who plays local car delaer and Panther booster Buddy Garrity. He provides some of the best moments in season one, and many of the funniest.

The players are uniformly well-cast, from Taylor Kitsch as bad boy Tim Riggins, to Gaius Charles as "Smash" Williams, and Zach Gilford as sophomore QB Matt Saracen, who gets the starting job and a crush on the coach's daughter all in the same episode.

Despite some credulity-stretching, soap-operatic plot turns, the show is still top-notch, one of the best-written, best-produced, and best-acted series on TV.

And it's filmed right here in Austin.