Nothing is finite in today’s Hollywood. Anything you’ve ever seen may be reborn, revived, rebooted, or reimagined, even stuff seemingly nobody cared about. And if people did care about it, then you can guarantee that title is at the top of every studio exec’s list to remake. According to Deadline, a Friday Night Lights reboot—whether a series or film—has long been discussed. Now it’s inching closer to reality, because Universal Television is getting the gang back together to see if they can’t come up with something new (that is also still Friday Night Lights).
Yes, Jason Katims, Pete Berg, and Brian Grazer are reportedly in the “early stages” of bringing back their beloved sports drama, per Deadline (which reports that the project has already “taken out to market”). This revived Friday Night Lights is “believed to be a new story, still set in the world of high school football, with new characters rather than the previous cast.”
That might be a bit disappointing to fans who clicked on a Friday Night Lights reboot headline hoping for news of the return of Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) and his wife Tami (Connie Britton). Sorry, but Chandler is a super hero now (starring as a Green Lantern in the upcoming HBO DC series), so they’re going to need a new coach for everybody to imprint on. But never fear: Katims, Berg, and Grazer excel at creating strong ensemble casts that tug on your heartstrings. Just look at Katims’ FNL follow-up Parenthood, which was a similar if somewhat less critically acclaimed success.
It’s only been 13 years since Friday Night Lights went off the air, which is not a ton of time in terms of reboot. In the interim decade-plus the entire landscape of network television has changed (and decayed). No doubt NBC would love to return to those halcyon days of old, at least financially. But in this era a guaranteed hit isn’t getting a primetime slot on the network’s Thursday night lineup, it’s getting sent straight to streaming. For instance, the reboot of The Office—a contemporary of FNL—is a “Peacock Original.” Expect that whatever Friday Night Lights becomes in this new iteration, it will enjoy a similar fate.
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