| |
| |||||||||||||||||
 |
| | LinkBack | Thread Tools |
08-02-2007, 05:16 PM
| #1 (permalink) |
| ICHiBAN HoOT   |  "Friday Night Lights" UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif., Aug. 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Inspired by the New York Times best-selling book and acclaimed theatrical feature, the Emmy(R) nominated "Friday Night Lights: The First Season" debuts on DVD on August 28, 2007 from Universal Studios Home Entertainment. Executive produced by Peter Berg (who directed and wrote the feature film) and Academy Award(R) winner Brian Grazer (The Da Vinci Code), Friday Night Lights has won viewer devotion and critical praise for its look at the emotional dynamics of small-town life. Featuring outstanding production values, insightful writing and compelling characters, the series has received several prestigious honors including two 2007 Primetime Emmy(R) nominations including Best Directing, the 2007 Television Critics Association award for Outstanding New Program, The George Foster Peabody Award and the American Film Institute's (AFI) 2006 Television Program of the Year. All 22 episodes of the initial season, available for the first time on DVD, come with outstanding bonus features including a "Making of the Final Episode" featurette, special commentary by the show's producers and deleted scenes from some of the season's most memorable episodes. "Friday Night Lights: The First Season" comes in a five-disc set and is priced to own at $29.98 SRP. "Friday Night Lights" tells the story of life in the small town of Dillon, Texas, where everyone comes together on Friday nights when the Dillon High Panthers play. But life is not a game; and the charismatic players, new coach and the passionate fans find that their biggest challenges and obstacles come off the field in the compelling day-to-day dramas of their tight-knit community. Bringing this story to life is an impressive ensemble cast including Kyle Chandler (King Kong) Connie Britton ("24"), Scott Porter (Music &Lyrics), Gaius Charles ("The Book of Daniel"), Taylor Kitsch (The Covenant), Zach Gilford (The Last Winter), Minka Kelly ("What I Like About You"), Adrianne Palicki ("South Beach") Jesse Plemons ("Grey's Anatomy") and Aimee Teegarden ("Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide"). Season 2 of "Friday Night Lights" premieres Friday, October 5 (9 p.m. ET) on NBC. 'Friday Night Lights' Scores with Critics Starting with its acclaimed premiere episode, "Friday Night Lights" has won over critics across the country with its top-notch visuals, heartfelt writing and gifted cast. Michael Schneider of "Daily Variety" declared it "one of the best-looking pilots of the year with sharp cinematography, strong editing and a feature-quality feel." "Friday Night Lights" is "the fall's best new series," according to "Time" magazine, and "the best live-action show about contemporary life in America that is currently on the air," in the opinion of Adam Buckman of the "New York Post." The Associated Press raves that Friday Night Lights is "breathtaking in how it captures ordinary life set against extraordinary passions." Give A Cheer For Exclusive Bonus Features "Friday Night Lights: The First Season" comes packed with exciting extras, including: -- Behind the Lights -- A special look at the creation of the first season of "Friday Night Lights" -- Episode Commentary with the Talented Cast of "Friday Night Lights" -- Deleted Scenes from Favorite Episodes Money Back Guarantee! Universal Studios Home Entertainment is so certain consumers will enjoy Friday Night Lights: The First Season, the company is offering to refund the purchase price* to anyone who isn't totally satisfied with the DVD. Additional details can be found at http://www.fnlguarantee.com/. *Excludes taxes, shipping and handling. For more information please visit http://www.great-tv-shows.com/. TECHNICAL INFORMATION DVD Street Date: August 14, 2007 Copyright: 2007 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved. Price: $29.98 SRP Selection Number: 61101115 Running Time: 15 Hours and 55 Minutes (954:58) Layers: Dual Aspect Ratio: Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78:1 Rating: NR Technical Info: English Dolby Digital 5.1, English SDH |
|  |
|
09-10-2007, 11:18 PM
| #4 (permalink) |
| ICHiBAN HoOT | SPOILER Below is a brief preview of Season Two of Friday Night Lights, complete with a synopsis of Season One, as compiled by BuddyTV. Premiere Date / Time: Friday, October 5, 9 p.m., NBC Time Slot Competition: Women’s Murder Club, Moonlight, Nashville, WWE Friday Night Smackdown Cast: Kyle Chandler, Connie Britton, Zach Gilford, Adrianne Palicki, Jesse Plemons, Minka Kelly, Scott Porter, Aimee Teegarden, Gaius Charles, Taylor Kitsch Based on the film and the book of the same name, Friday Night Lights was one of the most acclaimed series in the 2006-2007 season. Despite its critical success, the series was largely overlooked by viewers and failed to garner much in the way of ratings. Fortunately, NBC recognized its worth and its potential and renewed it for a second season, to air on the new night and time of Friday (fittingly) at 9 p.m. The drama centers on the high school football team in the small, fictional town of Dillon, Texas. Times are hard in Dillon, and the Dillon Panthers, led by head coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), are the one shining beacon in an often bleak West Texas existence. Last season, Friday Night Lights ended on an electrifying and bittersweet note, with Dillon winning the state title but Coach Taylor on the way out of town, having accepted the head job at fictional Texas Methodist University. His wife, Tami (Connie Britton) had just discovered that she was pregnant, and has decided to stay in Dillon until their teen daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden) finishes high school. The new season will begin eight months after last season’s finale. Tami is about to give birth, but Eric is in Austin. Former quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) has become an assistant coach for the Panthers. |
|
| |
|
09-12-2007, 05:50 PM
| #6 (permalink) |
| Member of Sylar's Army  | i don't watch this show but they've been filming down here where i live. they held auditions and started filming. they put some kind of bulletin on tv asking for people to (hispanics, mostly) to audition. i believe they already wrapped up whatever they were doing but it was pretty cool they were shooting an episode down here. nothing ever happens around here. |
|
| |
|
10-01-2007, 12:18 AM
| #10 (permalink) |
| ICHiBAN HoOT | "Friday Night Lights" can't lose Cynthia Littleton: On the air By VARIETY STAFF Much has been said by the cognizati about the greatness of NBC's "Friday Night Lights," how it has managed to capture the simple majesty of everyday folks living through everyday trials and triumphs. All the superlatives that have been hurled at the show during the past year are true, and justly earned. In primetime's sea of cops, docs, lawyers and supernaturals, "Friday Night Lights" is the bravest show on TV, and it trumped the odds against shows with anemic Nielsen numbers to secure a renewal for a second season, which begins Oct. 5 at 9 p.m. "Friday Night Lights" stood apart in its freshman year because its only storytelling fulcrum in the traditional sense (i.e. a built-in plot engine like the case of the week, disease of the week, etc.) a small-town high school football team's quest to reach the summit of the Texas state high school football championship. The Dillon Panthers' bid for "State" is greatly complicated after the team's star quarterback is injured paralyzed in the first game (and episode) of the season. But to tag "FNL" as a "football show" is like saying John Ford's "Stagecoach" is about bandits and Indians running amok in the old West. The vast majority of "FNL" hinges on the writers' ability to find compelling stories within the stuff of life in a small Texas town. Like everything else about the show, even the town of Dillon was finely drawn as a vibrant, complex character -- neither dirt poor nor oil flush, neither a redneck wasteland nor an enlightened utopia. Dillon has many classes, many races and many nuances that were slowly drawn out through the course of 22 segs last season in such a way that made it come alive to people who've never been anywhere near the Lone Star state. For all that there is to gush about over "FNL" (The writing! The ensemble! The directing! The production touches!), what stands out most to me after two weeks of marathon viewing of the season one DVD set is how so much of the drama is rooted in a subject rarely tackled in such a significant way on the small screen: Parenting. In one way or another, the struggles of the main characters revolve around parent-child relations -- bad ones, good ones, compromised ones and non-existent ones. Yet there are no wholly bad kids, moms or dads in "FNL." Even the most wrong-headed of them have their moments, to the credit of "FNL's" chief creative stewards, exec producers Jason Katims and Peter Berg and exec producer-director Jeffrey Reiner. The core of the series is the Taylor family -- Panthers' football coach Eric (Kyle Chandler); his wife Tami (Connie Britton), who is the school's well-liked guidance counselor; and their teenage daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden) who starts out a sophomore in the first season. They are loving and close-knit. Eric is a thoughtful and devoted dad, who naturally is a father-figure to many of his players; Tami is young enough and fun-loving enough to be relatable to many high schoolers, particularly her own, but with the kind of natural authority that aimless adolescents respond to on the inside, even if they're rolling their eyes on the outside. As is often the case with 15-year-olds, however, the open-door relationship that Tami in particular has with Julie begins to head into slammed-door territory as the series goes on. As we embark on season two, those two are definitely at loggerheads as only mothers and their teenage daughters can be. There are other strong-momma figures on the show, including Corrina Williams (Liz Mikel), the single-mom of the team's star running back Brian "Smash" Williams" (Gaius Charles); and Joanne Street (Katherine Willis), the mother who has to watch her son's dream crater, along with his legs, in one tackle that leaves erstwhile star quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) in a wheelchair. One of the show's most complicated characters, savvy party girl Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), has one of the most messed-up moms. Tyra is definitely in the position of playing mother to her world-weary, occasionally pill-popping mother, Angela (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson). Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the diamond-in-the-rough quarterback who's pressed into service after Street's injury, has perhaps the most heartbreaking home scenario. Dad is a career soldier station in Iraq, where contrary to the war-is-hell cliche he's much happier there than living at home with his son. Mom is AWOL in Oklahoma -- a backstory hinted at but never fleshed out in season one -- and so Matt lives as the parent to his grandmother Lorraine (Louanne Stephens, pictured left with Gilford) whose grip on reality is challenged by advancing Alzheimer's disease, so much so that Matt periodically has to pretend he's his long-dead grandfather to calm her down. Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly, pictured right with Porter), another primary character, has the idyllic home life on the outside that crumbles, slowly but surely through the course of season one. She's the girlfriend of Jason Street, she's the daughter of the town's auto-dealer mogul and chief football team booster Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) -- and everything in her life is turned inside out by the time season one has ended. Her relations with the mom and dad she once saw as Hallmark-card perfect is aggravated by the sense of betrayal she portrays so well -- betrayal from outside forces that screwed up her plan to marry her star quarterback, and internally from a mom and dad who pretended everything was hunky-dory for too long. And though the drama ebbs and flows from episode to episode, pound for pound there may be no more compelling, tortured soul on the "FNL" roster than Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), the team's star full back, a guy who's sent out on the field to be a human steamroller and barricade in service of his more nimble teammates. His position on the field is an apt metaphor for what life in his brief 17 years has handed Tim, who has puppy-dog, lady-killing eyes under his scraggly bangs. Mom and Dad Riggins went their separate ways in a violence, cigarettes and alcohol-fueled haze, basically abandoning Tim and his older brother Billy and their modest but middle class home, forcing Billy (Derek Phillips) to grow up in a hurry to pay the mortgage and keep the fridge stocked with beer and pop tarts. Tim Riggins spent season one looking for love, and father-figures, in mostly wrong places -- none more so than when he briefly reconnects with his actual father, who's been gone so long he doesn't know that nobody calls his younger son "Timmy" anymore. Most of the aforementioned stories weave together in a way that aims not for the trite "it-takes-a-village" sentiment but in a way that illustrates the universality of love, pain, longing and loss. And perhaps most importantly, for all the parents in the audience, "FNL" offers an unvarnished look at how the child is the father of the man, or how teenagers can't help but develop in the image of their parents, warts and all. Against this backdrop, the Panthers' oft-repeated team motto "Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose" has particular resonance. Like the Dillon Panthers, the "FNL" cast and crew has an inordinately hard task ahead of them to even maintain, let alone build, on the foundation the laid down last season. But based on their collective perf last season, I'm betting that, give or take a few fumbles here and there, this is a team that still can't lose. |
|
| |
|
10-04-2007, 04:43 PM
| #11 (permalink) |
| ICHiBAN HoOT | McCollum: 'Friday Night Lights' has a new game plan By Charlie McCollum Mercury News Article Launched: 10/04/2007 08:37:24 AM PDT Click photo to enlarge Zach Gilford as Matt Saracen and Aimee Teegarden as Julie Taylor star in this... ( Bill Records )«12»The Dillon Panthers' winning the Texas state football championship in last season's finale was miraculous; the bigger miracle is that "Friday Night Lights" - the TV home of the Panthers - is back for its second season. Last season, "Lights" (9 p.m. Friday, Chs. 8, 11) - based on H.G. Bissinger's non-fiction bestseller and the subsequent 2004 film - was the best show on network TV that almost no one was watching. Despite heavy promotion by NBC and universal critical acclaim, it never made the Top 100 in viewership, and it looked as if the Panthers' first championship would be the team's last. But the network decided to give the series one last shot. It has moved it to Friday nights, where ratings expectations are not quite as high. Rather than emphasize the football elements of the show, as it did last year, this year's promotional push focuses on the series' portrayal of life in a small town - which has always been the heart and soul of "Lights." Given the show's ratings, there's a very good chance you weren't watching the first season, so a quick recap is in order: "Lights" is set in the working class town of Dillon, Texas, where most of the residents are consumed with the successes (or failures) of the high school football team. Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler in a career-defining performance) is the new coach, trying to juggle the pressures of his job with a home life that includes his wife, Tami (a wonderful Connie Britton), and teenage -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Advertisement -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden, the most believable teen on TV). The golden couple is star quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter) and head cheerleader Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) - until Jason is paralyzed and Lyla sleeps with his best friend, the hard-drinking Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch). Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) takes over for Jason and finds true love with the coach's daughter, Julie. Star running back "Smash" Williams (Gaius Charles) tries, and later gives up, performance-enhancing drugs. Tim's longtime girlfriend - party girl Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki) - finds a soul mate in the geeky but decent Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons). It sounds soapy, but the first season was a rich and rare observation on real life. It took on issues ranging from Smash's drug use, peer pressure and teen sex (the episode where Julie and Matt decide not to have sex was one of the show's best) to religious beliefs and small-town politics. It wasn't just that the show dipped into those themes (other series do that) but that it did so with intelligence, insight and sensitivity. When "Lights" returns Friday, the story has jumped from the fall championship game of last season's finale to the last days of summer before high school resumes. And things have changed. Tami Taylor, who discovered she was pregnant in the finale, has her baby. Eric Taylor has taken a coaching job at a major college and is away from home much of the time. Julie is going through some serious attitude problems and wondering whether there's more to life than Matt. Smash is now the toast of Texas football - and starting to believe his own hype. Jason is an assistant coach, while Lyla has found that ol' time religion. Landry is trying to impress Tyra and his father (Glenn Morshower of "24") by going out for football. There's also a new, much tougher coach in town, played by the fine character actor Chris Mulkey, and the team is having a hard time adjusting. What has remained the same is the show's smart writing and its striking cinema verite visual style (much of it looks like a documentary). The performances by Chandler, Britton and the younger actors - notably Porter and Palicki - are still totally convincing and real-to-life. The opening episode does have a problem, though. It feels, at times, as if the producers are trying too hard to win over more viewers and, in the process, forcing the story and the emotions. In particular, there is one story line involving Landry and Tyra that drifts into melodrama, something that "Lights" never did last season. But even with that reservation, I urge you to watch "Friday Night Lights." This is quality television, a series that deserves to find an audience large enough to keep it on the air. GET READY tomorrow night FNL |
|
| |
|
10-05-2007, 07:57 AM
| #15 (permalink) |
| ICHiBAN HoOT | Finger crossed it will do good. .. I would love to see landry an Tyra together ..lol The only thing in this article that bothers me is that there is going to be less football scenes. i loved them all last season. The article LOS ANGELES — Get ready for the small town of Dylan, Texas, to start looking more like Dallas now that NBC's Friday Night Lights is back for a second season. That means a lot more skin and scandal. "There are a large number of shower scenes," Adrianne Palicki, 24, says with an uncomfortable giggle. Her character, Tyra, is first seen in the season premiere (tonight, 9 ET/PT) in a bikini while sucking on a suggestively shaped popsicle. "We've also had a few (nude) scenes in the locker room," adds co-star Jesse Plemons, 19, whose socially inept character, Landry, has just joined the high school football team. "The good thing is that Landry's not really OK with taking his clothes off — unlike Riggins (played by Taylor Kitsch). Taylor has been complaining the most about having to take off his shirt." But no one's complaining about a second chance to prove themselves after a first season that was critically acclaimed but ratings-starved. FIND MORE STORIES IN: NBC | Texas | Dallas | Dylan | Emmy nominations | Adrianne | Tyra Over lunch, both actors acknowledge that the Austin set was somber the day Emmy nominations were announced. Nary a nod went to their underdog drama. "It was very disappointing," Palicki says. "There was a backlash from not getting nominated — people were furious. So that's even cooler, in a way. Look at how many fans were so angry." "The feeling now," Plemons adds, "is let's give them even a better show, so there's no way they're going to be able to pass us up." The new game plan: less football, more personal struggle. Among the drama: Palicki's Tyra and Plemons' Landry enter into a secret romance that, Plemons says, "catches both of them off guard." The unlikely duo — Tyra the Beauty and Landry the Geek — were brought together last season when Landry became her tutor, then came to her rescue after an attempted rape. "I would love for them to be together," Palicki says. "Tyra deserves a good guy." In real life, Plemons, a native of Mart, Texas (just outside Waco), has been dating a Texas girl for six months who he says is "beautiful — inside and out." The currently single Palicki says she has had many Landrys in her life, but as a high school student in Toledo, Ohio, she strictly dated jocks. "I had Landrys as friends," she clarifies. "They were the guys you thought you'd marry someday, but you just couldn't date because it wasn't cool. How stupid is that?" |
|
| |
