David Kronke was appointed Mayor of Television after a bloodless coup in 2000. Since then, he has improved infrastructure, championed greater educational opportunities and fought for reforms that have utterly erased corruption and incompetence from the television industry. Since Mr. Kronke has ascended to power, Television is a far better place. "The least interesting aspect of the show"
If “Friday Night Lights” – NBC’s acclaimed but low-rated melodrama about a small-town obsessed with high-school football – returns next season, the show itself won’t be nearly as obsessed with high-school football as its characters.
“We're doing everything we can to distance ourselves from football,” Variety reports executive producer Jason Katims saying this past Friday said at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills. “We find football is the least interesting aspect of the show. … I think we've earned the right to tell stories that have nothing to do with football. In fact, I think it's a necessity.”
Well, that should prove an interesting extreme makeover (starting, one presumes, with the title, which of course refers to the traditional evening for high-school football – why name the show after something it won’t depict?). The show is based on the non-fiction bestseller by H.G. Bissinger, roundly considered to be one of the best sports books in, well, ever. In his book (which was turned into a well-reviewed movie by Peter Berg, another of the show’s executive producers), Bissinger placed the game in its social context in Odessa, Texas.
Bissinger captured the whiff of small-town racism, vividly portrayed adults who lived vicariously (if somewhat sadly) through the student-athletes and empathized with those athletes and the coach, who had an almost ungodly amount of pressure placed upon them to win, something the author was implicitly critical of. The book, to put it mildly, did not find many fans in Odessa.
Very little of that nuance made its way into the series (though the coach, played by Kyle Chandler, received occasional pressure from boosters and talk-radio fans, as did the occasional player). The games, when depicted, generally followed a familiar yet invariably entertaining template, with Chandler’s team falling behind, then rallying to win it all. Instead, the show has been largely concerned with who’s dating whom.
NBC has requested to see six scripts for a potential second season. So, if “Friday Night Lights” does return, perhaps a more appropriate title would be, “Friday Night Car Backseats.”