Football is a team sport, and in many small towns across the U.S. most everything revolves around it.

The sales pitch for Friday Night Lights, the NBC drama that premiered in 2006, is that it wasn't just all about football, but also about life. The show not only focused on football, but also revolved around the lives of its most important characters and the surrounding community as well.

The pitch was perfect: Friday Night Lights was a show about the football Panthers of Dillon High School in Dillon, Texas, but it really was about the people in the team's inner-circle. The show had a plethora of characters, and also focused on where they were in their lives and the problems that they faced.

The pilot episode begins with Eric Taylor about to start his first season as the head coach of the Dillon Panthers. It was early on the Monday morning before the first game, and Taylor is driving to work listening to a local radio show reminding him it was, "four days until Friday night". In the background the camera was focused on shots of chain-link fences, power lines and blue skies as it showed how small the town of Dillon really was. Radio host "Slammin" Sammy Meade is calling for Dillon residents to rally around Coach Taylor predicting that the outcome of his first game might decide his fate as head coach for the Panthers. Viewers can see Taylor walking on the football field, alone, aware of the pressure that is on him to produce a W Friday night.

Then momentum shifts, suddenly, to all the other people who are feeling the same pressure as Coach Taylor: First, there is Panthers' fullback Tim Riggins, who passed out on this couch hungover; there's QB2 Matt Saracen, washing dishes in his grandma's living room; last, there's Julie Taylor, the coaches daughter, nervously getting ready for her first day of high school.

The pilot episode of Friday Night Lights, in retrospect, is completely different from most televisions shows. Usually a pilot is a slight introduction of the show's background setting, and brief introduction into the lives of a few characters, but the first episode of FNL is so much more. Not only did the pilot introduce Taylor and the amount of immense pressure on him being the head coach of a small town Texas high school football team, it also highlighted many problems that various characters were having in their lives at that time. The pilot's opening scene foreshadowed the greatness of Eric Taylor, and the kind of impression he would leave on Dillon throughout the five seasons FNL aired.

The production of FNL also differed from many other popular television shows as well. Producers of the show were very keen on the idea of filming episodes on-location, rather than movie sets. The soundtracks chosen for background music used throughout the series matched the vibe of what was going on in a small town in Texas. The camerawork was purposely shaky, and the producers used a documentary-style filming technique. Three cameras were mostly used for each shoot, and entire scenes were shot usually in one take which is very unusual. Typically, most productions film a scene from each angle and then repeat the scene several times. In FNL, the first takes usually made the final cut. Producers did this because they wanted to create an environment for the actors that was more organic and it allowed for the best performance.

Throughout the seasons, minor characters seemed to find a way to becoming major. Joe McCoy, the overzealous father of J.D. McCoy, became an underlying problem for Coach Taylor when he first moved to Dillon in season three; but by season four, he had shaken up everything. The same problem happened in season five with Vince's father. Pretty much everybody else in Dillon, and in the later seasons, in East Dillon. A problem that affected Eric affects Tami, and that eventually affects Julie which is relayed to Matt and so on it goes.

Peter Berg, executive director, does an incredible job setting up connections in the show and then watch the chain reactions spread like wildfires. FNL's characters embody the typical high school stereotypes in the show (the popular cheerleader, the arrogant jock, the outcast). Most shows like this feature some stereotypes and then usually in the end focus on one, but FNL intertwines every group together and they all end up having a lasting effect on each other. Berg takes the physical assumptions of a small town, and transfers it to television.

And then, most importantly FNL shows its characters struggling and striving on what they have to do to get by in life. Life in Dillon isn't easy, and some of the biggest problems are because that in a small town sometimes there isn't a big cash flow going around. In Season 2, we see that Tami Taylor is faced with the problem of budget cuts within the Dillon educational system. The boosters for the football want an extravagant new football scoreboard, but she can't even get new books for her students. Viewers witness the Riggins brothers and their financial woes, and see the problems that Jason Street has trying to find a career to support his family. Tyra and Julie working at Applebee's to support themselves; Matt and Smash working at the Alamo Freeze to support their families; Vince working at Ray's BBQ to stay off the streets. A crucial aspect of FNL is that producers wanted their viewers to be able to recognize with characters, and make known that money can serve as its own supporting character.

FNL wasn't the first series that applied the narrative of the soap-opera to televised literature method, but it was one of the most influential in the new trend during the era in which it was released on air. This type of narrative allowed every character to get their limelight. The show would focus on Matt Saracen's grandmother, and her fight with dementia. And give moments to Buddy Garrity who dealt with many personal issues throughout the series. The show would concentrate on life after football, and Jason Street's battle with paralysis. Phenom and heartthrob, Tim Riggins, went through many ups and downs, and to the husband-and-wife-duo of Tami and Eric Taylor.

There are many characters through the five seasons, but FNL, much more than other any other show before it, put forward the morality of each character in Dillon. Producers rejected the idea of a sitcom, and decided to embrace the idea of broadening its focus onto its array of characters. The show never really followed the idea of technological advancement either, as it paid very little attention to the change in digital technology when it was released (for example, several scenes throughout the first few seasons show some characters rely on flip phones). The show used the cultural context of technology in the late 1990s, and not the early to mid 2000s in which the show was based on in time. FNL recognized the power of an individual voice, and experience. And everyone deserves to tell their story out loud, and not to focus on the new trend of social media that high schoolers used in that point in time to record their lives with.

Which, in closing, brings us back to football, which seems to have a political mindset attached to it. During one of the final scenes in the pilot episode the Panthers trail by 3, and QB1 Jason Street is severely injured. Street's injury is unknown, and in comes backup QB Matt Saracen. All the team knows is that have to win for their community, and their livelihood at this point. Saracen, untested, struggles when he first comes in, and then on the final play he heaves a deep ball to the end zone. The camera slowly shows the ball spiral through the air, and then pans to the cheerleaders, coaches and to the crowd. The images that the camera is displaying gives the viewer an image the show will return to, frequently, over it's five seasons: a football twirling through the air, in the dark blue Texas sky above the lights and noise, spiraling and spinning - assuming a Panther or Lion player will be there to catch it.