Friday Night Lights
FRIDAY Night Lights is a series ostensibly about sport in a small Texas town.
BASED on the 1990 non-fiction book Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H. G. Bissinger, and subsequent to the 2004 film based on the same book, Friday Night Lights is a series ostensibly about sport in a small Texas town.
It moves events from the book’s factual coverage of the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers - a high school football team in Odessa, Texas - to the fictional Dillon, Texas.
The show uses small-town characters to address issues such as racism, drug and alcohol abuse, and perceived economic hopelessness. Early in tonight’s episode, a drunk young man makes the mistake of undervaluing sport to a football player, and the carpark beating that follows is one of the most shockingly violent things I’ve ever seen on television.
Addictive, with plenty of local resonance.
Friday Night Lights, 8.30pm, ABC2
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