Tuesdays with Tom Benedek: Some thoughts on Friday Night Lights
The latest guest post from screenwriter (Cocoon) and long-time friend Tom Benedek:
I will be teaching a TV Pilot Wrting Workshop online at Screenwritingmasterclass.com starting next week. In addition to working on 60 page original pilot scripts(or 30 or so pages for half-hour) we will be reading and discussing pilot scripts from some great and/or favorite shows. Friday Night Lights is among them. Because it was a movie first, this TV show is good for studying the differences between TV and features scripts.
The movie Friday Night Lights is excellent on so many levels. It authentically captures the emotional forces driving its characters as it tracks through one amazing season for a high school football team in a small Texas town. The resolution contains many triumphs but it is not your average major studio sports movie. It is inspirational, gritty, emotionally dense, harsh towards its subject. Football can be a cruel sport and the film does not blink at its subject.
The TV series has a balance that is different from the movie. It contains all the same satisfactions as the film and expands on them. The pilot script sets up strongly emotional character and plot conflicts which feel as though they have long term potential. The 52 page script evokes a wonderful sense of place while setting in motion a single story which resolves in that first episode. The script builds this emotionally complex fictional world(inspired by true stories) seamlessly from its source — non-fiction material.
SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FILM AND THE TV SERIES:
Unlike the the movie, the TV series is fiction. Many things which happened in the TV series may be based on true events, but there was no obligation or necessity to not fictionalize. However, the writers have used fiction to service the truth, reflect life. I have never heard anybody complain that the TV series was not like the book, that it did not hold true to the documentary vision presented in Buzz Bizzinger’s wonderful book.
The movie covers one season. The TV show covers one week of a season in each episode — and completes a football season each year of its run.
Female characters in the film had minor roles with little conflict. In the TV series, the women, are half the show if not more.
The film is about high school football — a team, a few players, one coach, little else. The TV series is a family show centered around high school football. For TV, the week’s game mattered, could be pivotal, but internal/characters stories of the coach and his family, the other players, their girlfriends and families were most important, took up much more screen time.
The TV series took, in its pilot episode, what might be considered a 180 away from the classic sports film mold. In its first seasons, it is as much about a great athlete who will never walk on the field again, as it is about playing the game of high football. in the film, a promising character loses his season to a serious knee injury. In the TV series, this permanent disability gave the series a charge and a gravitas it might not have had otherwise.
Here is what the film’s director/co-writer, Peter Berg, had to say about pitching his vision for the TV series to the network:
I remember I went to NBC, and there were about 10 people in the room. [Kevin Reilly] and I looked at each other, and he said, “What do you want to do?” I said, “I want to build up this all-American quarterback, this hero. This wonderful, beautiful kid with his entire future ahead of him. His biggest decision in life was whether he was going to take a full ride to UT or Notre Dame. He’s got the hot girlfriend. He’s got the loving parents. And he’s going to break his neck in the first game. We’re going to create this iconic American hero, and we’re going to demolish him.”
Strong pitch. The inherent internal and external conflict in this idea is potent. What TV often does best: a complicated series of events, the open question, the grappling with the conflicts of his life and sensibility which will be a subject of the show. Berg’s idea projects that this character and his life is something worth exploring from many angles, in many episodes. Raising itself away from the film, it adds a fresh, intense poignancy, a dark and difficult twist of character to a show that could have just been about the joys and agonies of winning and losing every week. The use of this character arc in the show forced an emotional honesty on everything else in the series. And it worked.
Anyone have thoughts on this? FNL fans out there?
I pulled the Berg quote from here, a fun piece all about the show.
If you have any comments or questions for Tom, he will be happy to respond.
For more information about Tom’s TV Pilot Writing class, go here.
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