I was a little bit afraid that NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” would get caught up on a lot of Dawson’s Creek bullshit, but I was relieved to find out last night that that wouldn’t be the case. I watch barely any non-sports television, but I felt like I had to see Friday Night Lights last night because the movie was so good, and the TV show brought back the same writer and director, Peter Berg.

And it sticks pretty well with the formula from the movie. It doesn’t have exactly the same feel–the movie was based on actual people and events, whereas this is completely fictionalized–but there’s still an interest in having characters with a sense of realness. There’s still the same feel of a fucked-up southern town where no one ever bothered to learn that life goes a little bit beyond high school football. There’s still the same patient and dramatic directing.

It works for me because the characters work. Every character here is flawed in some way, and Peter Berg gives them the time and space to show it. It’s a little bit more melodramatic than the movie, but it’s better than I anticipated.

And it looks like they’ve done a fine job casting it, too, and I thought that might be a problem. Billingsley and Winchell and Miles were such fantastic characters in the movie, played by very good actors… I thought it might be a little bit hard to get out of their shadow. And there are characters here with similarities, but pretty significant differences, too, which is good. It’s a whole new set of personalities.

Texas head coach Mack Brown had a cameo last night… and even Mack fucking Brown was good. If I didn’t know ahead of time that Mack Brown was going to be in this thing, I probably wouldn’t have noticed that it was him, and just chalked it up to some guy doing a good job at playing a douchebag.

Here’s a clip that illustrates pretty well some of the positive and negatives. You see Mack Brown, you see the pressure from the coach from some local people… and then towards the end, you see an older ho’s advances towards a player. That seemed like a bit much, but the show kept stuff like that to a minimum.

Anyway, I dug it. Not quite as much as the New York Times, evidently… but I very much enjoyed it nonetheless. Check out the opening paragraph from their review.

Lord, is “Friday Night Lights” good. In fact, if the season is anything like the pilot, this new drama about high school football could be great — and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red; it could belong in a league with art that doesn’t have to pause for commercials, or casually recap the post-commercial action, or sell viewers on the plot and characters in the first five minutes, or hew to a line-item budget, or answer to unions and studios, or avoid four-letter words and nudity.