Friday Night Lights was an incredible show about football, life in a small town, and high school. It had career-best performances by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, surrounded by a young cast, for whom this was their big break. This show could make us laugh, cry, and celebrate the victories of its fictional football team (the Dillon Panthers) as if it were real. Let’s shout “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!”, and talk about the best episodes of the show, ranked:
9 Leave No Man Behind (S2 E14)
The second season was the worst of the show by a big margin. This episode is the only one that feels like it could have been done in any of the much better seasons. Matt Saracen (Zack Gilford) was dealt an awful hand: his father was a soldier overseas; his mother had left them, and his grandmother showed signs of dementia. Even with that situation at home, he did everything he could to be the best quarterback on the team, and created a father-son dynamic with coach Taylor (Chandler).
This episode shows Saracen's breaking point, as he gets day drunk. Coach has some tough love for Saracen, throwing him in the bath to sober him up, and then Saracen starts sobbing, asking why everyone leaves him (father, mother, ex-girlfriend, new girlfriend, and even coach, who at the start of the season gets a college job). It’s a tragic moment that always gets our eyes misty, as we understand what is happening, and coach Taylor has to tell him: “There’s nothing wrong with you”. This kind of episode made FNL one of the best shows about being a teenager, as they showed the ups and downs of that age, while giving us incredible performances by both Kyle Chandler and Zack Gilford.
8 Thanksgiving (S4 E13)
A game between the haves and have not’s (West Dillon Panthers vs East Dillon Lions), love confessions, and someone sacrificing himself for his family; this is a great season finale. Coach’s new team, the Lions, is bad, and his game against the Panthers has everything we love about the sport, including a last-second play that wins the game. This episode also has a fun, emotional Thanksgiving dinner with most of the characters involved; and a love declaration between Vince (Michael B. Jordan) and Jess (Jurnee Smollet).
“Thanksgiving” is here because of Tim Riggins and Taylor Kitsch’s performance. Riggins never cared much about what happened to himself; he was the bad boy who didn’t care about his future. When the police found out his brother Billy had been running an illegal chop shop operation from their garage, everything changed. Riggins decides to confess it was all his doing, and he’ll go to prison so that his nephew can have something they never did: a present father and a stable family life. This generous, selfless act shows how much he loves his brother and family. The walk in silence to the police station is chill-inducing, as is Kitsch's acting in that scene (his acting was always best in silence, trying to contain all his feelings inside). A memorable moment as we feel for the character and understand his noble sacrifice.
7 Kingdom (S5 E5)
Sometimes the best episodes are those where we just hang out with our favorite characters. In “Kingdom”, the Lions go outside of Dillon to play a game and stay the night. The young team bonded after a night together, where they got into all kinds of shenanigans. This episode is Michael B. Jordan’s, as he’s seen as the leader both on and off the field, sparking his buddies to a spectacular win. In the aftermath, there’s the W, but also the memories, and stories that will bond the team forever. Sometimes that’s all you need for a great episode of television.
6 New York, New York (S3 E8)
This is Jason Street’s (Scott Porter) exit from the series. A happy ending on a New York trip for him and his best friend Riggins (Kitsch). Street is going to pursue a career as a sports agent, and wants to convince the mother of his child that they can have a life together. Seeing that this might be the last adventure they have together for a while, Riggins tags along and tries to help his best friend as much as he can: buying suits, giving him a pep talk, and being there for him. Riggins' “Texas Forever” to Street means so many things at once, and when the ending arrives, we just feel like Riggins is happy for Street, sad that we won’t see him as much, is destroyed, as this is much more difficult than we thought. It’s an incredible ending for one of the core characters since the show started.
5 State (S1 E22)
We’ve been with this team the whole season, and we suffered with the game as if it was a real football game. The Dillon Panthers go to the state championship and win it. This is the plot of this episode, but there’s much more story. There’s Tami telling the coach she’s pregnant, and the face of happiness and surprise on him; there are the players just being together before the match, and there’s the team coming from behind to win the game. But that's not all, there's also the road trip with Lyla (Minka Kelly), Tyra (Adrianne Palicki), and Landry (with each episode, Jesse Plemons got more to do as if they knew he could give incredible performances); and there’s the beautiful ending with the parade and the song “I Was Living in a Devil Town” by Bright Eyes. It was a perfect ending to an almost perfect season.
4 The Son (S4 E5)
Matt Saracen (Zack Gilford) goes back to town for the funeral of his father, who died in Iraq. This episode is in the hands of Gilford, and he hits it out of the park. Saracen has many conflicting feelings, as his dad preferred to be in the war than take care of him, a teenager, and his sick mother. Gilford shows anger, confusion, sadness, and loss, and every feeling is fighting against one another in the heart and soul of this young kid. He makes us feel everything he's feeling.
There's an explosion at the Taylors' dinner table, where Saracen says he hated his father, while apologizing for not eating and being sad, and it might be one of Gilford’s best acting moments ever. An incredible episode that made us want to call our families just to say hi. About the episode, Zach Gilford told Vulture: “But I read this, and I was like, “I don’t want to f*ck this up.” Everything I’ve been doing on these years on the show, I was like, “This is my chance to make it or break it.” I didn’t want to phone it in, and I wanted it to be as good as the script was.”
3 Always (S5 E13)
The series finale is great. It tells the story of the State Championship game and also shows us how everybody ends. It has a great Michael B. Jordan performance, but especially great acting by both Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, as they decide their future, and she asks when her time to shine will be, and they decide their next step. Friday Night Lights always showed one of the best marriages on television, and this finale episode proves it, as they have a mature conversation where both put their cards over the table, so they can decide as a team their next move. It also has the exciting final game, edited together with everyone's futures, so we can see that all of our favorite characters are going to be okay. We could say the same of the actors, as most find incredible success in future projects.
2 Mud Bowl (S1 E20)
After a train explosion leaves some chemicals near Dillon’s school, the team can’t play in their home stadium in the semifinals of the State Championship. Trying to not lose the home-field advantage, Coach Taylor has a unique idea: create a new stadium on a field for just one game, and go back to the origins when football was the more important thing. He also makes his players build the field. When the game starts, so does the rain, turning the whole field into mud. It’s a fun change to most of the football games we’ve seen all season.
Creator and Executive Producer Peter Berg told Grantland about the episode: “There’s a great moment where Kyle and Connie are just alone in the field, and he starts walking it off, and there are these wild bulls around them. We’re sitting there thinking, “This is why we do it. This is what it should be.” That’s when something inside me clicked.” It’s a tense game, and a tense episode, not for the football outcome, but because Tyra almost gets sexually assaulted in an isolated parking lot, while everyone is at the game. A riveting episode of television.
1 Pilot (S1 E1)
Not many shows come so fully formed from their pilot episode as this one. It already has the tone, style, and ideas that will continue for five seasons; it has great characters and actors playing them; it has a new town and how everyone feels about the high school football team. It shows us the relationships between all of them, and it has a tragedy at the end, which tells us that this is going to be a different kind of show. The episode does all of that in less than 45 minutes. It’s perfect. It has heart, love, sorrow, tragedy, the first coach Taylor speech, the team, and the community coming together. It even has our first “Texas, forever” and “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!” Proving that if you like this episode, you’re going to love the five seasons that followed. That’s everything you can ask for in a pilot episode, and this one delivers incredibly.