Friday Night Lights (TV Miniseries) _ 9/10
The religion of Texas high school football
Review by Brian Wright
Looking around Amazon.com for something for Mama for Christmas, it occurred to me she’s a huge fan of Kyle Chandler… esp. his role in the mid-1990s series, Early Edition, where he plays a young man who for mysterious reasons receives a newspaper every morning with news of events 24 hours into the future. (An innovative idea with more plot possibilities than Star Trek! Mom rarely missed an episode.)
So that settled it: I’d track down a DVD collection with Kyle Chandler in it. Turns out CBS hadn’t yet released the DVDs on Early Edition, but the actor was heading up the cast of a critically acclaimed new series based on the book Friday Night Lights (FNL)… which had also been turned into a movie of the same name starring Billy Bob Thornton. So with Mom also having spent some time in a small East Texas town (Tyler) and being fully aware of the fanaticism Texans bring to their high-school football experience—recall the incident of the mother in a town near Houston who wanted to kill her daughter’s rival on the cheerleading squad (made into a movie)—I figured Mom’d appreciate the first season of the Friday Night Lights miniseries. Did I ever get that right! Continue reading