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1[[AC:[[Series/FridayNightLights The TV series]]]]
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3* {{Adorkable}}:
4** Matt Saracen is a shy, socially awkward nerd who stammers a lot and is also an IronWoobie, which makes it incredibly heartwarming and endearing to watch him gain more confidence and self-esteem as he falls into his role as TheLeader and TheQuarterback, makes genuine FireForgedFriends on the football team and becomes one half of the show's longest-lasting OfficialCouple with Julie Taylor. He and Julie also have great chemistry, especially since Julie is much more brash and headstrong than he is, making their teen romance that eventually grows into a much more serious one in the later seasons really cute.
5** Similarly, Matt's best friend Landry Clark is another candidate, only he's even more of a NiceGuy than Matt. Starting out as Matt's PluckyComicRelief in Season 1, once Landry grew into his own character (being an ExtremeDoormat with a heart of gold and ChronicHeroSyndrome who [[ButtMonkey has his heart batted around like a ball of yarn between various women]]) it becomes just as heartwarming to watch him come into his own as an adult, becoming wiser and more mellow while remaining the same EndearinglyDorky nerd he was in high school.
6* AssPull: Several of the plot machinations at the end of season three come out of nowhere, the most glaring being that Dillon is suddenly revealed to have an entire neighborhood that is a crime-ridden hellhole slum that has never been mentioned or alluded to before.
7* AudienceAlienatingPremise: Football fans felt that the show didn't have enough football scenes. Non-football fans thought there was too much of it.
8* SugarWiki/AwesomeMusic: Uses a lot of the truly epic and beautiful Explosions in the Sky songs that were present in the movie, as well as its own score by W. G. Snuffy Walden.
9* BadassDecay: Somehow between the beginning of Season 4 and the end of Season Five, Luke Cafferty goes from being a kid who can play Running Back, Wide Receiver, Quarterback, Linebacker AND Safety more or less equally well (any coach's wet dream) to a kid [[spoiler: that absolutely no college of any size is even remotely interested in.]]
10* CatharsisFactor:
11** The Season 1 finale. To say the Panthers had a lot working against them doesn’t cover it: star QB [[TheAce Jason Street]] [[CareerEndingInjury winds up paralyzed]]; backup [[TheQuarterback Matt Saracen]] stumbles out of the gate; a ringer QB causes trouble; and Coach Taylor is constantly in the hot seat due to pressure from the town of Dillon. They overcome the odds and win the State Championship, and it felt so good!
12** The Season 4 finale. Eric Taylor gets fired from the Dillon Panthers thanks to [[{{Jerkass}} Joe McCoy]], then has to build a new team from a reopened high school - the East Dillon Lions - from the ground up and can only get a win against the worst team around. What’s worse is the Panthers turn into [[{{Jerkass}} total jerks]] under [=McCoy=] and his pet Coach Aikman and they antagonize the Lions. With all the crap Taylor and the Lions had to deal with, it was satisfying to see the Lions beat the Panthers and deny them the playoffs. The [[StunnedSilence look]] on [=McCoy’s=] [[JawDrop face]] is only icing on the cake.
13* CommonKnowledge: The series is sometimes misremembered as one which "glorifies" high school football and sweeps the uglier aspects of it under the rug, and receives criticism for doing so especially as more and more evidence emerges of the dangerous injuries high-school kids can sustain by playing American Football. However, while the series definitely highlights the more positive aspects a lot of the time ([[BandOfBrothers the cameraderie]],[[EarnYourHappyEnding the sense of accomplishment]], etc.), it makes no attempt to hide away things like debilitating field injuries[[note]]Jason Street is paralyzed from the waist down in the ''first episode'' and it becomes a gigantic aspect of his character and personality[[/note]], the toll the game takes on kids' psyches and even the extremely unscrupulous and outright illegal tactics that college recruiters employ to get in kids' heads way before they're able to make informed choices about scholarships. It also especially criticizes the fickleness of small-town football mob mentality, where the kids are hailed as heroes when they win and treated like pariahs when they lose, and how generally messed up and damaging that kind of behavior is.
14* FanPreferredCutContent: Hastings was supposed to have a storyline about being gay and coming to terms with it, but then the writers chickened out. Most fans wished they had left it in, as it would have provided more substance to Hastings bonding with the rest of the team, since otherwise he's a bit of a FlatCharacter.
15* GeniusBonus: Texas Longhorn football fans will find the idea of having to replace a star quarterback named J. Street with a big legacy to be quite familiar, as does the idea of a star quarterback named [=McCoy=] and an athletic, dual-threat star quarterback named Vince.
16* HilariousInHindsight:
17** Landry's season 2 story where he inadvertantly kills Tyra's would-be rapist created a gag among the fans that he was a serial killer and whenever a character inexplicably disappeared, he'd done them in. Then came Creator/JessePlemons' role as Todd Alquist on ''Series/BreakingBad'', who is an unfeeling sociopath and kills multiple people without remorse, but also shares many of Landry's character traits and is an EndearinglyDorky NiceGuy.
18** In ''Series/Bloodline2015'', Kyle Chandler hates a guy named Eric.
19** After Tami's troubles with a pro-life mob, Connie Britton herself plays the leader of a group of MoralGuardians in ''Film/ProfessorMarstonAndTheWonderWomen''.
20* HoYay: Jason and Phil had the most best bond and bromance than Jason and Tim had.
21%%* IronWoobie: Matt Saracen.
22%%* JerkassWoobie: Yeah J.D. is a real prick in season four, but it's obvious that his dad's parenting and role in meddling with the Panthers program really messed him up.
23%%* MemeticMutation: Clear eyes. Full Hearts. CAN'T LOSE.
24* TheScrappy:
25** Epyck for many, for being a very stock "troubled teenage ethnic girl" character and taking up a lot of screentime in the final season only for her story to end abruptly. Julie also qualifies for many with her bratty behavior and dud romance plots in Seasons 2 and 5.
26** Carlotta, who has no personality beyond being a {{Spicy Latina}} and apparently only exists because Matt couldn't just be single after breaking up with Julie. This is topped off by her being hastily written out of the show for reasons she refused to explain beyond "My family needs me."
27* SophomoreSlump: The Tyra/Landry murder plot, Julie becomes a brat who inexplicably cheats on Matt with a random older dude, Matt boinks his grandma's caregiver, etc. This led to some CanonDiscontinuity in the third season, as the show itself had to [[BroadStrokes file off some of the edges of some characters' stories and arcs]] in order to [[CharacterRerailment get everything back on track]].
28* SuspiciouslySimilarSong: The Dillon Panthers' fight song sounds a lot like Notre Dame's fight song, justified in that the song is used by real life high schools too.
29%%* TearJerker: ''The Son'', aka 'Why didn't Zach Gilford get an Emmy nomination after this?'.
30%%** In "Jumping the Gun" when Coach Taylor calls Riggins honorable. The look on Tim's face...
31%%** "Leave No One Behind":
32%%--> '''Matt:''' You left me for a better job! Julie left me for a better guy, Carlota left me for Guatemala, my dad left me for a damn war! Everybody leaves me! What's wrong with me?"
33%%* TrappedByMountainLions: The second season put Landry and Tyra into their own, completely isolated plotline for the first ten episodes that is studiously ignored by the writers at all other times, ''even while the plot was ongoing''.
34* UncertainAudience: The head of NBC's marketing department's reaction to the pilot was that while it was great, he wasn't sure how to sell the show. It's a small-town drama with a heavy emphasis on sports(specifically American Football), but it's also not primarily a "sports show" and instead uses the football stuff as a FramingDevice for more subtextual themes of brotherhood, camaraderie, teamwork, etc. It's also not really a high-school drama even though many of its main characters are high-school football players, so it can't be sold as such either.
35%%* TheWoobie: Jason Street (kinda, see WheelchairWoobie) and, to a lesser extent, J.D. [=McCoy=] in Season 3.
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