On Tuesdays, I do a Top 10 list. This season, I am doing Top 10 characters from various TV shows. My Top 10 this week, in honor of the beginning of football, is Top 10 Friday Night Lights Characters! Friday Night Lights has an incredibly deep ensemble so there are also several close calls and there could have been more. There won't be this many every week!
Close Calls: Smash Williams, Becky Sproles, Luke Cafferty, Joe McCoy, Billy Riggins
This was a very tough list and I was very tempted to put several of the close calls on this list at #10 over Julie because I grew to not like Julie much as a character in the final season. But she is an essential member of the Taylor family and drives so many interesting stories in the first couple seasons. There was an inherent sweetness in the young love between Julie and Matt and her dynamics with her two parents felt very real and earned.
9. LORRAINE SARACEN
Matt Saracen's sweet and forgetful grandmother is one of the best recurring characters on Friday Night Lights. With many great one-liners and a genuine affection for her son, she had a heart of gold but we could also see glimpses of a harder edge thanks to a tough life lived. I spent most of the series worried that the show, which loved to pull at heartstrings sometimes, would kill off Grandma Saracen and I wasn't sure my heart could take it. So I was happy she made it all the way.
Buddy Garrity started off as perhaps the most cartoonish character on the show but as he continued to evolve over all five seasons (longer than a lot of regulars can say!), he became a very complex character. It was easy to root against him sometimes but it was even easier to root for him a lot of the time. In a lesser show, he would never have grown and he would never have gained more dimensions. This show was not content to him just being a caricature.
7. LANDRY CLARKE
Aside from the whole "Landry murdered someone" plot disaster of Season 2, Landry was a great character. Often the best source of comic relief in the show, Landry also filled a role on the show that no one else did. There were lots of jocks, caring adults, blowhards and troubled youth. But there was only one major character who played in a speed metal band and was from a different walk of life in Texas high school social circles. His scenes always brought a different sensibility to the show and he was well developed throughout the series. Again, except for the murder.
6. TYRA COLLETTE
Landry's killing partner comes in at #6 on the list. Tyra was a little bit of an afterthought at the beginning of the series. She appeared to be a hard-edged mean girl and there wasn't that much attention paid to her. But as the series progressed, she became a really fascinating character with a tremendous amount of depth. She was someone who always wanted to aim higher in life but didn't quite know how to reach those heights. With help from other characters like Tami and Landry, she found her own strength and evolved more than almost any other character on the show.
Friday Night Lights made many big changes in its fourth season and it took sometime to get used to the new characters. While the original characters were still by and large my favorites, the new ones from East Dillon were still intriguing and the best of them was Vince Howard. Vince had a tough life in every way. Much like Tyra, he had to fight a world that was stacked against him and sometimes that world overwhelmed him. But he was inherently likable and well-meaning and became a deserving focal point as the series came to a close.
4. MATT SARACEN
Now we're really getting into the best of the best from a show that had so many great characters. Matt Saracen could be considered the heart of Friday Night Lights is many ways. His range of roles included backup QB to star QB to backup QB again, grieving son, caretaking grandson, confused boyfriend and much more. He was sometimes quite funny and often quite heartbreaking. He was someone who the viewer might have just felt sorry for if he wasn't such a dynamic character. He was really, really easy to root for all through the series.
Oh Tim Riggins. What a unique character. Never mind the fact that he looked about ten years older than a high school student. He is one of the coolest characters to grace a TV show. Taylor Kitsch could convey so many things with saying very few words. Like Saracen, he was a sympathetic character but unlike Saracen, he didn't always make it easy on us as viewers to root for him. He was so much more complicated than your average high school jock even though he also had all the average high school jock traits. He was an enigma so much of the time and it worked to perfection.
2. TAMI TAYLOR
You had to know who the top two characters were going to be, right? If Riggins was one of the coolest characters of all time, Mrs. Coach was one of the realest characters of all time (she was pretty cool too, by the way). Connie Britton's masterful performance made Tami Taylor seem like a real person through and through. There was nothing archetypal, nothing put-on, nothing heightened. She had a range of emotions but they were all want a normal person would expect. She was also responsible for some of the funniest lines in the entire series. It's a shame Britton never won an Emmy for this performance.
It was closer between #1 and #2 than you might think but of course Coach Taylor is the best character on Friday Night Lights. He's the glue that held it all together (Tami certainly deserves a lot of credit too though). He is everything anyone should want in a teacher, coach or mentor. He never went easy on anybody but everything he did was done with care and precision. He seemed like he had all the answers when he was in charge, and mostly he did, but we saw all sides of Eric including when he didn't really know what to do next. Unlike Britton, Kyle Chandler did get a well-deserved Emmy for this role.
Tomorrow: A One Season Wonder look at 1990's Ferris Bueller!
Next Tuesday: Top 10 Schitt's Creek Characters!
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