Watch Now
Where To Watch
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
You don't have to love football to admire Friday Night Lights.
-
A fiercely controlled and inventive work of art.
-
The biggest and most pleasant surprise of the season.
-
One of the fall's brightest new dramas.
-
[A] rewardingly seasoned new drama series that's practically indistinguishable from the acclaimed feature film, except that it's better.
-
More than simply being outstanding, "Friday Night Lights" is an important series because of the way it takes family-friendly television seriously.
-
Extraordinary in just about every conceivable way.
-
The most engrossing new drama of the fall season.
-
"Friday Night Lights" is not good. It's great.
-
A finely detailed exploration of high school life and small-city dynamics.
-
Lights has a rare ability to portray life in small-town America without being condescending or sentimental.
-
Surprisingly wise and moving.
-
Director-writer Peter Berg understands completely, and he explores the psychology of team sport and the dynamics of personal tragedy with great sensitivity.
-
The drama is one of the season's best because it makes you care even when you know something big is coming -- and because it finds pleasant little surprises along the way.
-
Both cinematically broad and heartbreakingly specific, a melding for once of the best that movies and television have to offer.
-
Berg has done a fine job of lifting his series above familiar teen melodrama and making it into a group portrait of a town.
-
I can’t say enough about how "Friday Night Lights" defied my expectations for what a TV show about football would be.
-
Intensely stirring.
-
The plotlines are predictably full of teen melodrama and small-town angst, but the cast is interesting, and the show's semidocumentary style gives it surprising grit.
-
It's the best high school coaching drama since "The White Shadow," and deserves a chance.
-
It isn't as ambitious or objective as HBO's "The Wire," but it's about as close as broadcast TV gets to "The Wire." It finely depicts the daily grim and gritty existence of kids and adults dealing with narrow hopes, sad expectations, provincial victories, race and poverty.
-
The smartly told stories of first-year coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler, "King Kong") and his Dillon High School Panthers are packed with gritty style and heartfelt emotion.
-
Every character is dead on - no exaggerations, no caricatures.
-
Between its cinematography, setting, and subject matter, Lights doesn't look a whole lot like anything else on television right now.
-
Has the same quick-cut look, crisp dialogue and bone-crunching game scenes [ast the movie].
-
Ultimately, what makes "Friday Night Lights" compelling is not the football or the cast. It's the accumulation of little details, like the eager faces of the pee-wee players as they meet and respectfully worship the big high-school boys whom they dream of becoming.
-
This is one show that could, with the right kind of leadership, make it to the playoffs.
-
You've seen it all before, but Berg's sharp powers of observation and a talented and very pretty young cast... keep it fresh.
-
It feels so close to actual American life that it lacks the gut excitement that would take it over the line into true entertainment. [9 Oct 2006, p.41]
-
"Friday Night Lights" ultimately feels like one of those family programs middle America and conservatives pine for that too few of them actually bother to watch -- a portrait of decent, God-fearing folks wringing joy from America's game as an escape from their hardscrabble lives.
-
Peter Berg... seems to have decided that the show would only work if storytelling were pared down to quick-cutting iconography set to guitars.
-
Standard high school sports soap opera.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 291 out of 314
-
Mixed: 6 out of 314
-
Negative: 17 out of 314
-
Mar 15, 2011
-
Aug 17, 2010
-
JosephW.Oct 21, 2007