The Best Show You're Not Watching: Friday Night Lights

Where I grew up in California, football is The Thing To Do on Friday nights. Every week from September to November (or longer, depending on playoff games), hundreds of students, parents, teachers, and tradition-loving locals flood the bleachers at Temple City High School to cheer the city's beloved Rams to green-and-gold gridiron victory. (Say that five times fast.) It doesn't matter if you know someone on the team or if you even like football—Friday night is game night. Diehard devotees—like my own mother and father, who proudly wave a TCHS flag on their car each fall, despite the fact that their youngest child left the district four years ago—hold tailgating parties in the parking lot with friends and neighbors before every kickoff. Cheerleaders enlist fans in synchronized roars between plays, as Rodney, the mascot, makes exaggerated hand gestures and does cartwheels up and down the track. Members of the high school marching band and accompanying dance team entertain the restless crowd with choreographed routines and familiar tunes at halftime. And when the athletes walk off to their locker room at the end of the night, everyone stands for the playing of the alma mater and points one finger toward the field in salute of both the team and the city they represent. It sounds cheesy, I know. But it's actually kind of great. When I lived there, I never loved my town more than in those moments, because those moments—even though they took place inside a football stadium—weren't just about sports or scores or school spirit. They were about history and community and all the attendant virtues and vices therein.

I'm going somewhere with this, I swear. Here, in fact:

Tonight, NBC begins airing the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights, a show about high school football, yes, but also—and more importantly—a show about life and the people who live it the only way they know how in a tiny, tight-knit Texas town called Dillon, home of the Dillon Panthers and, now, the rival East Dillon Lions as well.

Clear your calendars, readers. This is a must-see.

My affection for FNL is obviously tinged with a certain amount of nostalgia, but I know plenty of cityfolk who love and worship the series just as much as I do, and who didn't spend every weekend of their youth singing solemn odes to their hometowns after watching 16-year-old boys mow each other down for fun. Many people I know who watch the show don't even like football. And that's fine. Football is really just a backdrop for the big picture anyway, an arena for other issues, like race and poverty and politics and family dysfunction. There's no shortage of nail-biting activity on the field, but the real action happens in homes and among families and friends.

I could go on forever about the many reasons why you should watch this underdog of a series—great writing and some of the best acting on TV come to mind—but I think you're better off experiencing it for yourself first. I've already seen tonight's episode, and it's good. Heartbreakingly so. But don't take my word for it.