Hard-hitting 'Lights' gives 110 percent

October 03, 2006|Globe Staff

One way to praise NBC's ``Friday Night Lights" would be to say, ``It's a stand-up-and-cheer drama about football!" And then to use football metaphors such as ``Catch this TV forward pass." Because, as the show's Dillon High Panthers wrestle for a Texas state championship on the field, you'll want to stand up, cheer, and program the series onto your DVR.

But ``Friday Night Lights," which premieres tonight at 8 on Channel 7, is more than a football drama for ESPN types about whether the Panthers' offense can score. It's a drama about small-town Texas, adolescence, adolescent adults, Americana, religion, racism, family, gender roles, and, oh yes, football, too. Based on the 2004 movie that was based on H.G. Bissinger's nonfiction book, and adapted by the movie's director, Peter Berg, this rich series is the new season's true underdog.

In the town of Dillon, football isn't a sport, it's an identity -- a way for people to distract themselves from desolation, and to distinguish themselves. All the adults and radio talk hosts in ``Friday Night Lights" are obsessed with the game, and they put acute pressure on the players and new coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) not just to play well, but to win. You'd think these kids were preparing for a tour of duty in Iraq. Coach Taylor feels the heat, and so does his wife, Tami (Connie Britton, who also starred in the movie), when her weekly book group becomes a Panthers strategy session.

Berg has done a fine job of lifting his series above familiar teen melodrama and making it into a group portrait of a town. ``Friday Night Lights" is radically different from the movie ``Dazed and Confused" in its themes, but the two are similarly unglossy snapshots of local Texas culture. There's nothing corny or precious about Dillon -- none of the soapy romanticism of the towns in ``One Tree Hill" or ``Dawson's Creek." It doesn't feel like a quaint L A fantasy of the sticks. You can see hard living and depression on many of the adult faces, and you can see unworldliness and big dreams on the kids' faces. There aren't any characters who are too smart to be real -- those people who exist only on TV.

The documentary feel of ``Friday Night Lights" is strengthened by the use of a hand-held camera and quick-cut editing. Unlike the stylized realism of ``NYPD Blue," which turned the jitters into an artistic tic, the show's shaky camerawork brings vitality and intimacy to the drama. Even when the camera holds still and isn't swerving or zooming in, it nonetheless pulses with energy. MTV has a reality version of ``Friday Night Lights" called ``Two- A-Days," and even that unrehearsed footage doesn't feel quite as alive as this show.