Friday Night Lights Puts up a Fight Against the Odds

Before Friday Night Lights premiered last year, the New York Times ran a review of the series that began simply and got straight to the point: “Lord, is Friday Night Lights good.”

The Times wasn’t alone. Almost every television critic in the country fell in love with NBC’s drama about a Texas high-school football coach (Kyle Chandler), his family, and his team.

Yet Friday Night Lights struggled all season to attract an audience, and the finale aired to less than seven million viewers. To put that in perspective, a hit drama averages at least twice as many. After teetering on the brink of cancellation, the series was unexpectedly (and mercifully) renewed. It returns to NBC tonight and faces an uphill battle to bring in new viewers in its second season.

If you’ve ever loved and lost a TV show, you know that this problem isn’t unique to Friday Night Lights—critical acclaim is rarely a good predictor of a TV show’s success. Why, though, are some shows unable to attract viewers despite critical praise? And, more importantly, what does this mean for Friday Night Lights?

The most common reason that a critically acclaimed TV show fails is that its premise doesn’t sound appealing to viewers who judge a show based on its one-sentence description. The critically beloved Veronica Mars faced this obstacle. The show was about a high school student who found time in between classes to investigate crimes, including her best friend’s murder. Never mind that it was wittier and more suspenseful than just about anything on TV—it had the words “high school” in its description, and a lot of potential viewers never tuned in because of that.

Critical darlings Freaks and Geeks (which aired on NBC from 1999 to 2000) and Arrested Development (which aired on Fox from 2003 to 2006) also faced this snap-judgment hurdle. Their quirky and multi-layered humor just couldn’t be distilled into an appealing, easy-to-understand description. Not surprisingly, these kinds of innovative shows are the ones that appeal to college students, which is why it sometimes feels like the only series that get cancelled are the ones we like to watch.

Luckily for Friday Night Lights, it’s a pretty conventional drama if you can get past the fact that its description inevitably includes the word “football.” NBC just needed an effective marketing campaign to show viewers that Friday Night Lights is so much more than a show about high school sports.

Unfortunately, NBC has failed miserably at this. The ads emphasized the high school drama and testosterone-fueled football while ignoring everything else. Promotional posters showed teenagers playing football and a high school couple making out—considering that the middle-aged Coach Taylor and his family lie at the heart of the show, it was odd that they were absent from the ads. The result has been that Friday Night Lights has a lot of young football fans in its audience and hardly anyone else.

This is particularly unfortunate, since other viewers would probably stick with the show if NBC could just convince them to tune in. It might be hard to imagine your parents watching the antics of 16-year-old Veronica Mars, but it’s certainly plausible that they would appreciate the combination of teenage drama and realistic family dynamics on Friday Night Lights. The series even manages to bridge the gender gap by interweaving the characters’ personal story lines with the high-stakes world of Texas high-school football.

Even though NBC has tried to make the newer ads more reflective of the show in order to appeal to women, it might be too late. Consider the case of ABC’s critically acclaimed dramedy Sports Night, which aired from 1998-2000. The word “sports” was right there in the title, but the show was actually about a group of neurotic-yet-lovable New Yorkers who worked behind the scenes at a sports news show. ABC’s ad campaign tried to convey this: one of its taglines was “It’s about sports like Baywatch is about water safety.” Still, after just two low-rated seasons, ABC cancelled the series. Once people get the idea that a show is about sports, it’s hard to convince them that, no, really, it’s not.

Even with good marketing and an attractive premise, though, sometimes shows really are just too good to survive—for example, ABC’s Once and Again, which aired from 1999 to 2002. While critics loved it for its emotionally resonant portrayal of a divorced family, they also noted that it might be too real to be entertaining. In an era when half of all marriages end in divorce, not many viewers want to watch a show about the aftermath of a failed marriage, no matter how good the writing is.

Some critics make the same comment about Friday Night Lights—they claim that its depiction of small-town life is almost too realistic to count as entertainment. Unlike Once and Again, though, Friday Night Lights has the action of the weekly football showdown to keep the show from getting too serious.

Despite all of the obstacles that Friday Night Lights has to overcome to become a hit, fans of the show have reason to be hopeful. Once NBC decided not to cancel the series, they became remarkably supportive of it. For example, NBC moved the series to a Friday night timeslot—while Friday night usually isn’t the first-choice timeslot, the pressure is lower and that will give the show a chance to grow. Plus, it’s somehow easier to remember to watch a show called Friday Night Lights on a Friday night.

The network has also worked hard to get people caught up on season one before season two premieres tonight. The entire first season was available all summer for free on the NBC Web site, and the first season DVD set was offered at a reduced price—some stores sold all 22 episodes for just $19.99. Better yet, Universal offered an unprecedented money-back guarantee with the DVDs. You were actually allowed to open the packaging, watch the whole series, and then decide to return it just because you didn’t fall in love with it. Clearly, they didn’t expect very many people to feel that way.

Yes, a lot of high-quality shows suffer a cruel fate at the hands of the networks. But if NBC is truly willing to support the drama and let it grow, Friday Night Lights might turn into a modest hit. And if you’re still pessimistic, consider this. In 1991, a quirky sitcom premiered on NBC to critical raves and a very small audience. NBC considered cancelling it, but ultimately decided to give it another season and let the show find its audience.

The sitcom was called Seinfeld, and it went on to become one of the most successful series of all time. Don’t give up on Friday Night Lights just yet.