Night Lights

Friday Night Lights is an award-winning American television serial drama adapted by Peter Berg, Brian Grazer and David Nevins from a book of the same name. The series details events surrounding the Dillon Panthers, a high school football team based in fictional Dillon, Texas. more...

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The show uses a small-town backdrop to address many issues facing contemporary Middle America.

Produced by NBC Universal, Friday Night Lights initially received an order of 12 episodes and began airing on October 3, 2006 at 8:00pm on NBC. NBC increased this number on November 13, 2006 ordering a full season of 22 episodes. In addition to airing in the United States, the program is also broadcast in Canada, The Philippines, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, Norway, Iceland, Italy, United Kingdom,Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and is available from several online sources.

Season two episodes began airing on October 5, 2007.

Production

Inspiration

Friday Night Lights takes its inspiration from a book titled “Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream” and the 2004 film based on it. The book, published in 1990 and written by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger, details the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers, a high school football team in Odessa, Texas. The book itself was intended as a work of journalism and is assumed to be completely factual. The characters in the book are not renamed and the book makes no attempt to conceal their identity. The Universal Pictures film stars Billy Bob Thornton and was directed by Bissinger’s second cousin Peter Berg. The film's characters are again based on the real life residents of Odessa circa 1988. The film is known for staying almost completely true to the source material.

Conception

Once filming on the movie was completed, Berg turned his attention to adapting the story for television. Berg expressed in various interviews following the film how he regretted having to jettison many of the interpersonal topics covered in the book from the film because of the time constraints of a feature film. Creating a TV series, particularly one based on fictional characters, allowed many of those elements to be brought back in and addressed in-depth.

Regardlessly, the show chose not to use Odessa's fabled Permian high school team and instead used it as inspiration for the fictionalized town of Dillon, Texas and its residents. The football team name did, however, retain the Panthers name. Berg made a number of these conscious choices in carrying elements from the film to series and as such much of the work that went into the creation of the pilot was duplication of the work that was done on the movie. Other of these choices include casting Connie Britton and Brad Leland in similar roles, and using Explosions in the Sky, a band that wrote most of the film's soundtrack, for the theme song and situational music.

Read more at Wikipedia.org