‘Brave from the beginning’: 20 years of Friday Night Lights – the sports drama that dared to be different

It launched the careers of Jesse Plemons and Michael B Drama, and let its stars improvise in a way that was fresh and new.

This show about smalltown US football was confident, trailblazing – and wonderful I’ve been around the south of the US enough to have seen the importance of football: little burgs where the high-school football field has stands that wouldn’t disgrace a League Two soccer club in the UK.

Friday Night Lights, which was first broadcast 20 years ago, is set in the most fervent edges of that world, smalltown Texas, where what happens under the floodlights at the end of the working week defines the mood of the place for days to come.

Britt Daniel, the frontman of the Texas band Spoon, grew up in one such town, Temple. “Friday Night Lights is based on Odessa, and Odessa and Temple are very, very similar,” he told me in 2017.

“The high schools used to play each other at football, and they’re the kind of towns where everything happens on Friday because it’s the football game.

I didn’t really think about it until many years later, but you really risked being beaten [up]. Not just harassed, but beaten.

Everywhere you went, you really had to look over your shoulder. If you were at the mall, if you were at the parking lot, if you were at a party – people really wanted to fight.

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