Last week I posted an email I sent to NPR’s Fresh Air after its contributor David Bianculli went on a bizarre rant about NBC not supporting its program “Friday Night Lights” to his satisfaction.
Today, NPR’s All Things Considered answered the question Bianculli failed to ask: how does a show without an audience stay on broadcast television?
Friday Night Lights premiered to great reviews three years ago. The story of a football-obsessed Texas town was praised for its realistic portrayal of lives in the American working and middle classes, which is a surprisingly hard thing to find these days on American television.
But so is an audience.
The critically acclaimed but little-watched drama was on the brink of cancellation until satellite-TV provider DirecTV recently threw the show a fiscal Hail Mary.
“It seemed fairly certain the show would be canceled,” says series writer Jason Katims. “And what happened was, through what I consider to be a stroke of genius, they came up with this idea.”
DirecTV was looking for a cheap way to bring an exclusive show to its lineup; NBC had a good show that wasn’t making any money.
So DirecTV bought the rights to air the new season of Friday Night Lights first, before NBC did. And the network got money to prop up a program that was otherwise doomed.
I still marvel at how someone can be a television critic and willfully ignore how television gets made.