I found myself re-watching Friday Night Lights recently, and a funny thing happened when I got back into the small-town comings and goings of Dillon, Texas: I became obsessed with the fathers on the show. All of them. Coach Taylor, Buddy, that dick J.D. McCoy's dad, Saracen's father serving in Iraq, Vince's money-grubbing dad. When I first started watching the show, I was in my twenties, semi-directionless, wondering what my future held. Some days, it held a lot. Others, not so much. The kids on the show spoke to me. They, too, were waking up and trying to figure life out. After all, I was closer to them in age. High school memories were still fresh, and the young characters' every breakup, disappointment, loss, and late homework assignment spoke to me.
They don't anymore. I'm married. I have two kids whom I worry about endlessly. And now I see Friday Night Lights in a whole new way. Rather than feeling redundant, the storylines have taken on different meaning.
Which led me to wonder: Could I really learn something about fatherhood and how I relate to other men from a critically acclaimed TV series?
"You're not crazy," showrunner Jason Katims tells me. "The idea of parenting and fatherhood and these surrogate father-son relationships that are so prevalent in the show, to me, it's the lifeblood of the show. It's everything."
Katims worked on Friday Night Lights for the duration of its five seasons, as a producer and the head writer (he now runs NBC's Parenthood). He says that the writers would often bring their own parenting experiences to the table and work those into the scripts, which makes sense. If you watch the show as a father, the struggles seem ridiculously real. Or in my case, almost real. I'm not quite there yet, as my kids are still young. "You start with your own stories and that's the fodder. None of the writers are from a small town in Texas obsessed with high-school football. But for all of us who worked on the show — not just the writers, but certainly the writers — it's a deeply personal show."
There's a moment in season one of Friday Night Lights when Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden) are playing ping-pong in their garage late at night. We see them from afar with just a dangling lightbulb illuminating them. It's a ritual they clearly have down. It made me think about my own kids, our own rituals, and wonder what they'd be in the future, or if I'd even have moments like this at all.
In the scene, Coach is giving his daughter some direct advice about boys. He's worried now that she's in high school and his quarterback Matt Saracen is looking to date her. It's one of the more awkward speeches you'll ever hear Coach Taylor spout, but also one of the most human. After he bumbles his way through it, she just responds with a simple "I love you, too, Dad."
"I think that was one of my first times ever playing ping-pong," Teegarden tells me from her home in L.A. about that scene. "I was horrible at it. I think when you're watching it, it's not the dialogue that's being said, it's the in-between, mostly non-verbal communication between two people. And that's something about the father-daughter relationship."
"I love that scene," David Hudgins, another writer and producer for the show, says. "I remember the exact moment when the idea for it came up in the writers' room, and it was this idea that yes, he's got to have these conversations with her, but what he really wants to do is just be with his daughter. And he just wants her to be a kid again and play ping-pong with her and let that speak for itself."
When Hudgins told me this, I realized how much I identified with Taylor. I've become nostalgic for my own kids' childhood, and they haven't even experienced it yet. I look at the kids on Friday Night Lights and think about how in 10 years, my kids will be going through those same things. Joyful things, sad things, confusing things. I don't know who my son's future Julie Taylor is, but I'm already mad at her.
"Julie has an army out there," Teegarden warns me.
Many Friday Night Lights fans believe Coach Taylor is the ultimate father figure, myself included. That we, as human beings, can't reach any higher level and we should all aspire to be him as much as possible in our daily life.
I recently brought this up to a friend and fellow fan of the show. "Yeah, that's fine, but Buddy Garrity is the more realistic father on that show," she said. "He's the one who's flawed, and we all know that person. You can't be Coach."
I brought this theory to Brad Leland, who played Buddy, the town's booster club king. "In the very beginning, it felt a little bit relaxed to me, a little more stereotypical," Leland tells me from his Texas home. "From the very first meeting, we all sat in, [creator] Peter Berg said, 'These are your characters, you make them what you will.' Having grown up here and knowing a lot of guys that are like that, I knew exactly that they weren't assholes. They were really good guys who cared about their community."
"No doubt Buddy was flawed," Hudgins adds. "And that was part of his appeal. Buddy always had the best intentions in the world. He wasn't always good at achieving those intentions. I would agree that he was much less of a 'perfect father' than Coach. But we also tried to give Coach plenty of challenges and obstacles to test him as a father."
It was oddly comforting to hear Leland and Hudgins say this. I hated Buddy at the beginning of the series, but learned to love him. And whether he was a conniving prick about town football, one thing was always apparent from the start of the series: He loved his kids, and he tried his best to make them feel loved.
Parent-child obstacles are the heart of Friday Night Lights. And father-son obstacles, those power plays, the "I know what's right, you don't" moments, have started to rear their heads in my own life. It's tough. My son and I argue over how much Netflix he can watch, why eggs are better for you than waffles, why going to school is a necessary part of life. I know it's only going to get harder. I know that one day I'm going to look back and long for an argument over eggs and waffles.
"We very consciously tried to tell stories that were the 'Friday Night Lights example' of what would happen," Hudgins says. "That story in season five with Vince [played by Michael B. Jordan] and his father wanting to control his son's future after he got out of jail — that triangle that it created between Coach and Vince and Vince's father, I thought that was some of the most powerful stuff of the series. A lot of credit goes to the actors who were in that story, but it was another conscious attempt to score that relationship and how two very alpha males deal with each other."
"I definitely think there was a lot of real emotion that comes out onscreen," Teegarden says. "There's a scene with Kyle in a car where I was sleeping around, probably, with some guy in a band. I get picked up by my dad. It was a sad, weird thing, being an adult but then returning back to being a child and getting in the car. She had this moment with Kyle where she's like, 'I know, I'm in the wrong, I know I've fucked up a lot, but please just don't, don't lecture me right now. I have so much going on and I'm already punishing myself enough. Just pick me up and let's go and I know I fucked up.' I think there's something that's very hard about admitting when you're wrong instead of asking for help. We were working through things the entire day and trying to figure out what my layers were in the scene. We shot it in one take and that was it."
On a fundamental level, this all seems ridiculous. That I could take life cues from a TV show, and important ones at that. But if something inspires you to be a better person and more loving to your sons and daughters, who cares what that source is? Some people go to church, some people read self-help books, some people don't do anything at all. Spending time with the residents of Dillon, Texas, learning from their heroics and downfalls, is not such a bad thing.
"People say, 'I learn so much about being a dad from Coach Taylor,'" Katims tells me. "It's meaningful to me that the show has an element that people feel has informed their choices in life."
It was kind of a relief to hear him say that. It wasn't just me.
"Kyle said it," Leland says. "I remember him saying that the most important thing that he learned from talking to high school coaches when he was researching to play that role is that the work was way too hard, the money was not good enough, and the only way you could do that job was if you loved those kids. And I do believe that I've seen that in action."
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