‘Friday,’ NBC’s unsung champ

IT’S the storylines that tell you how good “Friday Night Lights” has become. They’re rich, swirling around one another in a kind of perpetual motion.

The NBC drama is ostensibly about the outsized importance of the high school football team in a small Texas town; this is the easiest entry point for anyone who hasn’t yet seen the show (and there are, alas, many of you).

The series, which is flirting with cancellation, is based on a movie -- a specific one, “Friday Night Lights,” which was itself based on a book. The show, which airs Wednesday nights at 8, is fluid and involving, so much so that you forget that its cast is, yes, probably too good-looking.

Within this conceit, though, the series has a remarkably balanced tapestry of characters and an egalitarian interest in developing each of them. “Friday Night Lights” began with the glory/tragedy duality of sports -- in the pilot, the Dillon Panthers’ star quarterback, Jason Street (Scott Porter), was paralyzed from the waist down and was relieved by the scrawny backup, Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), who came in to throw the winning touchdown.

Since then the show, refreshingly, hasn’t been about glory or tragedy -- just the incremental stuff of life in the town. “Friday Night Lights” is arguably the most intimate series on network television, thanks to a stellar cast and a cinematic style -- lots of hand-held camera and quick cuts -- that make you feel like a fly on the wall behind various closed doors.

Those doors don’t lead to fussy, VIP places -- the counter-terrorism unit headquarters on Fox’s “24” or one of the Mode magazine offices on ABC’s “Ugly Betty.” In creating place, “Friday Night Lights” moves briskly from Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) watching game film in his office, to good ol’ boy Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) at his car dealership, to the paralyzed Street getting a driving lesson from his wheelchair-bound buddy Herc (Kevin Rankin).

It’s all pretty breezy and effortless, and it feels located. Dillon is a drive-through town, somewhere off the interstate taking you to Dallas or Austin, and lots of episodes feature iconic shots of hardscrabble Dillon speeding by while the local sports talk radio guy is heard second-guessing play calls and hand-wringing over the next big game.

Cannily, “Friday Night Lights” is about sports in precisely the way professional sports has evolved -- as an all-week referendum on personality and back story (most sports talk radio is not about a game but about whether a coach should be hired or fired or whether a player is on drugs, or, currently, whether it’s good or bad that a former NBA player has come out as gay).

It’s all gossipy stuff, and so, on “Friday Night Lights,” the games have become secondary; some episodes pass without one, and in recent weeks Coach Taylor has dealt less with Xs and O’s and more with a player on steroids, a 15-year-old daughter on the brink of sleeping with Saracen, the team’s quarterback, and a racist comment by a coach.

In that episode, the team was roiled by a boilerplate quote given the media by the team’s longtime assistant coach, in which he mused that black players have “a natural gift for running the ball,” because they’re “fearless, dangerous, like junkyard dogs.”

As a story about racism in the workplace, the episode found its energy in the gray area of a sports cliche. So too did an episode in which a blue-chip black quarterback and Hurricane Katrina victim joined the team to buff his recruiting resume.

Coach Taylor kind of deals with these controversies the way Coach Reeves on “The White Shadow” did, by furrowing his brow and putting his hands on his hips and hoping that the whole thing blows over by game time. The White Shadow was a bachelor; but on “Friday Night Lights,” the best scenes involve the mutual support between Taylor and his wife, a guidance counselor played by Connie Britton. (It’s the most unfussy portrayal of a marriage on television).

All of this sophistication unfolds in a red state. Dillon is Middle America but without the condescension that the phrase implies; the mayor is a lesbian, for instance, and Garrity who cares way too much about the Panthers, is terrified that his cheerleader daughter, Lyla (Minka Kelly), is going to go off with Street, the paralyzed quarterback.

Throughout, “Friday Night Lights” artfully contextualizes its sense of place and reflects the political climate of America. Although the show has only one character in Iraq, the father of the Dillon Panthers quarterback Saracen, you can all but feel the parking lot of the Wal-Mart where military recruiters are stationed. And you can all but feel the daily, off-stage improvements and setbacks of the war-maimed in the character of Street.

But they’re all, at bottom, good kids with a finite amount of options on “Friday Night Lights,” and it is from this unspectacular, unsalable premise that the series sparkles like it’s game night.

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paul.brownfield@latimes.com