FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS SIGNED TV SCRIPT TAYLOR KITSCH RPT

Friday Night Lights is an Emmy Award-winning American serial drama television series adapted by Peter Berg, Brian Grazer and David Nevins from a book and film of the same name. The series details events surrounding the Dillon Panthers, a high school football team based in fictional Dillon, Texas, with particular focus given to the team's coach, Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his family. The show uses this small-town backdrop to address many issues facing contemporary Middle America.

Produced by NBC Universal, Friday Night Lights is broadcast by NBC. Premiering on October 3, 2006 with an initial order of 12 episodes, the show was eventually picked up for an entire season. NBC would go on to renew the show for a full 22-episode second season after the first season was completed and Season Two episodes began airing on October 5, 2007. Only 15 of these episodes were completed before production was stopped due to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, leading to speculation that the show might be canceled. However, on April 2, 2008 NBC announced that the show had been renewed for a 13-episode third season where episodes would first air on DirecTV in the fall and then be rebroadcast on NBC in the winter.^[4] To date, Friday Night Lights has aired 37 episodes.

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.

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.

The show chose not to use Odessa as the setting and instead used it as inspiration for the fictionalized town of Dillon, Texas. 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 the 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, who plays Head Coach Eric Taylor's wife, and Brad Leland, who plays football booster Buddy Garrity, in similar roles, and using Explosions in the Sky, a band that wrote most of the film's soundtrack, for some situational music. Though many people have assumed that the show's theme song is also by Explosions in the Sky, it is actually the work of W.G. Snuffy Walden, who composed the themes for "The West Wing" and "My So-Called Life," and Bennett Salvay.

With this conception in hand, filming for the show's Austin, Texas-based pilot began in February 2006. Berg described filming the pilot and eventually the show in Texas as "a deal breaker" for his weekly participation in the project. Even so, the show features a number of homages to its Texas heritage. In filming the pilot, Berg ensured this homage by featuring Texas Longhorn coach Mack Brown as a Dillon booster and having a caller to the fictional “Panther Radio” compare Panthers' coach Eric Taylor to Brown. The pilot also incorporated much of the surrounding area. Football scenes for the pilot were filmed at Pflugerville High School's Kuempel Stadium and at the RRISD Complex. The Dillon Panther uniforms were based heavily on the uniforms of the real life Pflugerville Panthers.

In addition to physical locations, characters in the show were also inspired by Berg’s observation of local high schools students while preparing for filming the movie. For example, Jason Street, the character whose promising football career is ended by a spinal injury in the pilot, was inspired by a real life incident in which David Edwards, a player from San Antonio’s Madison High, was paralyzed during a November 2003 game. Berg was at the game when the incident took place and it had a profound effect on him, leading him to base the pilot around a similar incident.