The same night Kyle Chandler won an Emmy for the final season of “Friday Night Lights,” he shut the door on its future.
Speaking at the ATX Television Festival during a panel honoring the 20th anniversary of the acclaimed drama’s premiere, the man forever known as Coach Taylor shared a story he said he’d “never mentioned before.”
“That night when I did win the award, it only serves as credit to the way you guys ended the show,” Chandler said. “It was so obvious that it was the best way to end the show. It was the perfect way to end the show… And it was just so intrinsically obvious that we had gotten away with murder. They tried to shut us down, they’d done this, they’d tried that, blah blah blah, all this crap, right?”
He continued: “So that night when I won the award, no more than 10 seconds after I sit in my seat back at my table, after walking back and doing the pictures — I’m so proud, I’m so happy, and this and that — I won’t mention who it was, but somebody came up to me and said, ‘Do you want to do a movie?’ I had an offer to do ‘Friday Night Lights: The Movie,’ and I just immediately said, ‘No.’ We really did something. I knew it was something great… It was damn hard work…Now, 20 years later, people are still watching the show. Anyway, I’m just saying, y’all did a great job, we all did a great job, it was just once in a lifetime — period.”
The crowd, filling every seat on both levels of the Paramount Theater in Austin, TX, agreed. The 90-minute panel was filled with steady applause, loud cheers, and overt enthusiasm for the NBC series inspired by Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction book and the subsequent film of the same name.
The evening kicked off with a special performance from Crucifictorious, the band from the show led by Jesse Plemons and Stephanie Hunt. Plemons also revived the group for the show’s 10th anniversary in 2016 at the same festival, with Kirsten Dunst in attendance.
Once Plemons left the mic after playing “Walking in a TV” and covering Tony Lucca’s “Devil Town,” the ATX TV Festival co-founders made way for Jason Katims (showrunner), David Hudgins (executive producer and writer), Jeffrey Reiner (E.P. and writer), Kerry Ehrin (consulting producer and writer), and cast members including Plemons, Chandler, Connie Britton, Gaius Charles, Brad Leland, Adrianne Palicki, Derek Phillips, Scott Porter, Stacey Oristano, Louanne Stephens, and Aimee Teegarden.
The ensuing conversation ranged from casting rumors, like how creator Peter Berg initially pursued Dwight Yoakam to play Coach Taylor, to protecting the Taylor marriage, who soon blossomed into one of television’s best couples.
“We don’t want our characters to have affairs,” Britton said, remembering her first conversation with Chandler about their roles. “We don’t want it to be about pitting the two of them against each other. Most marriages, the couples are just trying to make it work with each other, and get through life with each other. We really wanted to show a picture of that kind of marriage, as opposed to the very over-dramatized, fraught [TV marriages]. So we did say to the writers, ‘Don’t do that.’ Right?”
“Yes, you made it very clear,” Katims said.
“And you were so nice about it,” Britton added with a smile.
The team also addressed less happy memories, specifically the maligned Season 2 storyline that saw Landry (played by Plemons) kill a man while he tried to rape Tyra (Palicki). The storyline was criticized for taking a show prized for its grounded approach to small-town family life and turning it into exactly what Britton said she wanted to avoid: an “over-dramatized,” less relatable TV show.
“Remember when Landry killed a guy?” Palicki quipped to Plemons. “Did you see that coming?”
“No, no,” Plemons said. “It was a surprise.”
Making the aberrant choice stand out all the more was that Season 2 didn’t get to finish on its own terms. The 2007-08 writer’s strike cut production short, and when it ended, Katims said NBC didn’t want to finish the season. In fact, they were canceling the series altogether.
“We had the season end on Episode 15, and not only was it not intended to be the end of the season, it was kind of an odd little episode,” Katims said. “We had the other six episodes broken, we had the trajectory for the end of the football season, we had the whole rest of the season. […] The show was canceled for a number of weeks, and it tortured me like nothing else in the world that the show would end at all, but that it would also end the season I needed to atone for the murder story.”
Only a “miraculous” deal with DirecTV allowed “Friday Night Lights” to return for Seasons 3-5 and establish itself as one of the greatest drama series ever made.
Then 13 years after its finale, rumors of a reboot sprang up with Universal Television taking pitches with Berg, Katims, and producer Brian Grazer on board. On Friday, however, Katims was hesitant to talk about where plans stood, emphasizing repeatedly that there’s no “rush” to put out another version of “Friday Night Lights.”
“I know that came out in the trades, but the idea of doing another incarnation of the show is much more of a conversation [right now],” Katims said. “The legacy of this show — the book that Buzz Bissinger wrote is one of the great works of long-form journalism, the movie was unbelievable, and I thought we all made a good show — so we wouldn’t do anything until the point we feel we can do a show that will be able to live up to that legacy. There’s no reason to do it until that happens. It’s something we can discuss and think about, but none of us want to rush into it.”
Based on the rapturous response to the existing series, even 20 years later, it’s going to take one helluva idea to stack up.
“Friday Night Lights” is available on Paramount+. The ATX TV Festival runs from May 28-31 in Austin, TX.
