Trivia / Friday Night Lights

The TV series

• Dawson Casting: Almost all the high-school age characters were played by actors in their mid to late twenties, with the exception of Julie (Aimee Teegarden, 16) and Landry (Jesse Plemons, 18). . Derek Luke, who plays Boobie Miles, was thirty.
• The Danza: Lamarcus Tinker as Dallas Tinker, Aaron Spivey-Sorrells as Coach Spivey, Timothy F. Crowley as Coach Crowley.
• Friday Night Death Slot: Survived surprisingly long there, appropriately for the title. It helped that NBC timed the episodes so as not to coincide with high school football season.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Landry is the worst football player in the main cast. Jesse Plemons is the only cast member who actually played high school football.
• Only Barely Renewed: Twice. Fans have blamed the Audience-Alienating Era on Executive Meddling related to the show's poor ratings. The third season explored premium cable and syndication as a way to make the show profitable.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Glen Powell unsuccessfully auditioned for Tim Riggins and later J.D. McCoy.
  • Hastings was supposed to have a storyline about being gay and coming to terms with it, but the writers changed their minds.
  • Smash was going to make a cameo appearance in the final season like other former cast members, but Gaius Charles had retired from acting at the time to become a minister (though he later went back to it). They still managed to give closure to his story by claiming he's one of the professional players in a game on TV.
• Written-In Infirmity: Landry's second-season leg injury that put a hold on his football-playing subplot; appropriately enough, Jesse Plemons had actually injured himself in a pick-up game of football.