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The TV series

  • Adorkable:
    • Matt Saracen is a shy, socially awkward nerd who stammers a lot and is also an Iron Woobie, which makes it incredibly heartwarming and endearing to watch him gain more confidence and self-esteem as he falls into his role as The Leader and The Quarterback, makes genuine Fire-Forged Friends on the football team and becomes one half of the show's longest-lasting Official Couple 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.
    • Similarly, Matt's best friend Landry Clark is another candidate, only he's even more of a Nice Guy than Matt. Starting out as Matt's Plucky Comic Relief in Season 1, once Landry grew into his own character (being an Extreme Doormat with a heart of gold and Chronic Hero Syndrome who 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 Endearingly Dorky nerd he was in high school.
  • Ass Pull: 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.
  • Audience-Alienating Premise: Football fans felt that the show didn't have enough football scenes. Non-football fans thought there was too much of it.
  • Awesome Music: 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.
  • Badass Decay: 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 that absolutely no college of any size is even remotely interested in.
  • Catharsis Factor:
    • The Season 1 finale. To say the Panthers had a lot working against them doesn’t cover it: star QB Jason Street winds up paralyzed; backup 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!
    • The Season 4 finale. Eric Taylor gets fired from the Dillon Panthers thanks to 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 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 look on McCoy’s face is only icing on the cake.
  • Common Knowledge: 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 (the cameraderie,the sense of accomplishment, etc.), it makes no attempt to hide away things like debilitating field injuriesnote , 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.
  • Fan-Preferred Cut Content: 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 Flat Character.
  • Genius Bonus: 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.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • 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 Jesse Plemons' role as Todd Alquist on Breaking Bad, who is an unfeeling sociopath and kills multiple people without remorse, but also shares many of Landry's character traits and is an Endearingly Dorky Nice Guy.
    • In Bloodline (2015), Kyle Chandler hates a guy named Eric.
    • After Tami's troubles with a pro-life mob, Connie Britton herself plays the leader of a group of Moral Guardians in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women.
  • Ho Yay: Jason and Phil had the most best bond and bromance than Jason and Tim had.
  • The Scrappy:
    • 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.
    • 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."
  • Sophomore Slump: 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 Canon Discontinuity in the third season, as the show itself had to file off some of the edges of some characters' stories and arcs in order to get everything back on track.
  • Suspiciously Similar Song: 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.
  • Uncertain Audience: 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 Framing Device 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.


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