Friday Night Lights is a drama that started in 2006 and sadly ended shortly after in 2011. A show about a high school football team and all of the drama that is entailed with it doesn’t sound very appealing to most viewers but it came to be one of the greats in terms of television shows.

The show had some semi-big names in it like Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton but the names didn’t much matter once you really got into the show.

It followed the characters throughout their dynamic lives and gave a new perspective of what it is like to live in Dillon, Texas.

The show tackled big subjects like race, religion, and class but we also see more light-hearted subjects like first dates and state championships. Most of all it shows how real the characters are. For example, the loving marriage between Coach Taylor and wife Tammi did have its ups and downs, and their clever and seemingly perfect daughter Julie made teenage mistakes we all know happen in life.

The characters struggle with real life challenges from deciding on where to go to college, to helping a sick grandmother, to the drug scandal of Brian “Smash” Williams.

The show isn’t all wonderful and it does have the classic clichés: the do-or-die game, the underdog winning at the last minute, and the dorky kid gets the popular girl. But it does provide a more optimistic view of the world than something like Breaking Bad or American Horror Story. It restores some faith in humanity and gives us something to believe in: good people and good football.