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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: October 3, 2006
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Friday Night Lights, “Pilot” (season 1, episode 1). [Stream on Netflix.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: It’s probably most important to remember that the Friday Night Lights movie did not move the needle all that much, in the grand scheme of things. $61 million domestic off a (surprisingly hefty) $30 million budget is certainly not bad, but there was nothing demanding that a TV series be made to extend the Friday Night Lights cinematic universe. But there it was, on the NBC schedule for fall 2006: Friday Night Lights, the drama that was about football but not really about football, unless you liked football, in which case it was about football, but don’t worry if you don’t like football, because it’s not really about football. The storyline and characters didn’t really carry over from the movie, and the fact that that didn’t really matter very much was that Connie Britton signed on to play the role of the wife of the head football coach — the very same role she had in the movie, if not the very same character. Expectations were modest.
That we ended up getting a show as special as Friday Night Lights out of such humble beginnings is something of a miracle, and that was evident by the very first episode, where high-school football coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife Tami (Britton) stood at the center of a drama that expertly blended the lives and families of these kids who played football with the drama of what went on between the goalposts.
By the end of the pilot, where star quarterback Jason Street suffers a devastating injury and the show’s soaring soundtrack, courtesy of Explosions in the Sky and theme-song writer W.G. “Snuffy” Walden, took things to an emotional level that the TV audience was not expecting, and it’s that surprise that I think drove the near-evangelical praise that Friday Night Lights got in its first season. Nobody saw it coming.
