There’s a reboot in the works for the television series Friday Night Lights.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is there will be new storylines and new characters.
According to Variety, “Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, Gaius Charles and Jesse Plemons are not expected to return.”
So no Coach Taylor, unfortunately.
It will still revolve around high school football, however. That will be the meat and potatoes of it all. Sequels and reboots are a huge gamble. If they want this project to be successful there are some things they have to maintain from the original show.
They absolutely have to have cameos from previous characters. Not because we are co-dependent, but that’s the small-town feel.
You see the former high school football player who wears his state championship ring, hanging out at the local burger spot and reliving his glory days. Imagine a scene where Tim Riggins shows up out of nowhere. Oh, man.
The reboot also needs some deep issues.
The original show dealt with everything from drugs, pregnancy, racism, and everything else in between.
The “Texas forever” saying between the team they said repeatedly throughout the series will probably be said again. I’m torn about using it.
There are elements in how they shot the film and the series that had a documentary-like aspect to it. That’s because it’s based on a true story of the 1988 season of the Permian Panthers.
It was documentary journalism, which adds such a special relationship between the viewer and the show itself. It’s more organic.
The camera operators were trained to follow the actors. That exact approach needs to be adopted in this case.
The interesting part is what Britton, who played Tami Taylor in the series and Sharon Gaines in the movie (both the head coach’s wife), had to say. When asked about the possibility of a reboot, she wasn’t about it.
“You need to let it go,” she told Variety in 2019. She appeared nice about it, however.
