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whadu · Level 49: GameShark **Posts:** 37190 **Timestamp:** Fri Apr 10, 09 10:28 PM

Source: http://www.vancouversun.com/Entertainment/Friday+Night+Lights+ren ewal+changes+broadcast+playing+field/1455850/story.html

Friday Night Lights is not just another critically acclaimed, low-rated TV drama that found a way to keep the lights on.

It might may just have become the model for the future of broadcast television as we know it.

NBC officially announced Tuesday that the Peabody winning ensemble drama about the intersecting lives of teenagers and their friends, families and confidants in a small, economically depressed town will be back for two more seasons.

The decision marks a potential seismic shift in the way hour-long TV dramas are financed and made in the future.

Despite averaging just four million viewers on NBC in the U.S. -- fewer viewers than watch inexpensive, easy-to-make reality fare like Wife Swap and Supernanny -- Friday Night Lights won its last-minute reprieve thanks to a deal between a major television network, NBC, and U.S. cable operator DirecTV.

Friday Night Lights airs in Canada on the Global-owned E! network of satellite stations.

This week's deal mirrors the deal signed last summer, when the then struggling series was unexpectedly picked up for a third season after two years of strong reviews but low ratings. That deal earned DirecTV the right to show Friday Night Lights' season before NBC.

The difference this time is that DirecTV knows now that it won't make money on the deal.

Friday Night Lights barely registered with DirecTV cable subscribers when it aired between last October and January of this year, even though the season earned some of the series' strongest reviews yet.

DirecTV got what it wanted out of the deal, though: A quality program that distinguished it from its competitors.

DirecTV and NBC-Universal share Friday Night Lights' production costs, as part of the deal.

Those costs are low, compared with other, hour-long dramas like Lost and Desperate Housewives, because Friday Night Lights is filmed in a small town in Texas, away from the expensive production centres of Burbank and Hollywood, and because it features an ensemble cast of relative unknowns.

Friday Night Lights is a TV series that creates stars rather than using already established performers. The cast is ever evolving. Adrianne Palicki and Minka Kelly, for example, will graduate to feature film projects at the end of this season, and will not return in the fall. Another performer, Aimee Teegarden, is expected to return, though she has landed a recurring role on the high-profile 90210. Performers who have already left the show include Scott Porter and Gaius Charles.

Friday Night Lights originated as a book: New York journalist Buzz Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team and a Dream, a personal memoir of a high-school football team's championship season in Odessa, Texas in the late 1980s.

Bissinger's cousin, actor-filmmaker Peter Berg, adapted the book into a successful feature film in 2004, then adapted the film version to TV in the spring of 2006.

The American Film Institute has twice named Friday Night Lights to its annual list of films and TV programs that are culturally significant.

Friday Night Lights has adapted well to television because of its complex, serialized storylines, its small-town setting, and its small, intimate scale. TV's serialized nature allows the stories to breath and grow from week to week, at their own pace.

Friday Night Lights is unique, too, in that it is filmed with handheld cameras, without rehearsals or pre-production planning. Episodes are scripted, but the performers are encouraged to ad lib if they feel it suits their character.

The show utilizes multiple cameras -- most hour-long filmed dramas use just one camera -- and the camera operators are encouraged to move around the actors as they're performing. The result is a fast-moving filmmaking style more akin to guerilla filmmaking than traditional TV and movie making.

Friday Night Lights' last-minute renewal is considered important because it has shown how a program can survive when it is respected and admired but doesn't score high enough ratings to warrant renewal on its own.

The series survived because its maker, NBC Universal, found an outside partner to help with the costs.

NBC Entertainment president Ben Silverman, reportedly one of Friday Night Lights' biggest boosters and the executive widely believed to have been the architect of this week's DirecTV deal, told the New York Times that Friday Night Lights was saved in part because its producers were willing to work with advertisers, as well as be flexible with the show's costs.

Season 4 of Friday Night Lights will play first on DirecTV in the U.S. in the fall, and will be rerun on NBC and possibly Global in the winter and spring.
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