Greg and Zanna play catch-up on one of the greatest series of the 2000s.
SCORES
Absurdity of casting: 5
Hotness of cast: 5
Hookedness of reviewers: 5
SHE SAW
The number of conversations Greg and I have had recently that centre around the lives of teenage characters in the 15-year-old television series Friday
Night Lights should be embarrassing to us. We have become so addicted to this show there is absolutely no reason you should take our critique of it seriously. We are junkies selling crack.
The first season of FNL has 22 episodes - a preposterously high number that was commonplace for network television at the time but is almost three times longer than most high-end series now. We demolished it at a perverse rate. It's set in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, a place powered by its high school football team. Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife Tami (Connie Britton) are at the heart of the show along with a motley group of high school students so obviously played by actors in their mid-twenties that the single teenage cast member, Aimee Teegarden, looks like a preschooler next to her "peers".
Casting absurdities aside, this show is the perfect combination of family drama, sports film and teen soap. The pilot episode sees the Panthers play their first game under Coach Taylor, which ends in the star quarterback suffering a devastating injury that leaves him paralysed. Suddenly the "it" couple's dreams are shattered, the painfully shy second-string quarterback is shoved into the spotlight and the coach has the entire town of Dillon breathing down his neck. It's just an impeccable set-up for hours and hours of riveting television.
Created by Peter Berg, the series is inspired by Buzz Bissinger's book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream. Unlike the book, this story is entirely fictionalised but it's shot with a fly-on-the-wall documentary-like visual style using real locations around Austin, Texas. And though I've never been to Texas, nor an American football game, it feels authentic. That's in no small part due to the chemistry between Chandler and Britton, who inhabit their roles to perfection. The stability of their marriage, characterised by an unwavering love and shared sense of humour, isn't typical of a drama, and provides a comforting anchor point around which chaos swirls.
I could write whole tomes on Matt and Julie's break-up, Lyla Garrity's spiral into Christian radio hosting, the unlikely pairing of nerdy Landry with top-tier hottie Tyra, the murder subplot misstep or Riggins' unsurvivable smile - shows like this are why people once had blogs. But it's probably better kept for pillow talk with my husband – Friday Night Lights is currently anchoring this marriage, amid the swirling chaos outside.
HE SAW
As with anything good, it's the characters. The show's about football and teen sex and Christianity and whatever, but don't worry about all that. What matters is the characters, who are exactly the sort of people you want to spend a lot of time with in a long lockdown, because they're hot. So many attractive people squeezed into such a small space, with such extreme close-ups. We don't get to see any of the reasonably extensive sex, and not even much of the pashing, but there's a lot of smouldering and also quite a bit of simpering: Riggins, Lyla, Tyra, Smash, Coach, Mrs Coach and the others. Earlier this week, I told Zanna I'd had a dream that she and I were out somewhere when an American man started talking to us, and I became insanely jealous, suspecting that she was into him. She said, "Well, if he looked like Riggins, I definitely would have been."
