Is Friday Night Lights TV’s greatest show about everyday sacrifice? (preview)

This is 26 Episodes, a biweekly series tracing the history of television in the 21st century via episodes that made the medium great. The episodes are arranged chronologically, from 2000 to 2025, and they're chosen by me, Emily St. James. This is not a "best episodes of the century" list, but every episode I write about is one worth watching in my opinion. The pick for 2011 is Friday Night Lights' "Always."

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There's a moment in "Always" that is probably among the top 10 moments in TV history that I think about most regularly. You likely already know what moment it is. High-school quarterback phenom Vince (Oscar winner Michael B. Jordan) heaves a football high into the air in a last-ditch effort to win the state championship. It arcs toward the end zone, and we watch in the stands and on the sidelines as characters we've come to know and love so dearly over the past five seasons follow its parabola. As the ball begins to descend toward the receivers and defenders jostling for position in the end zone, it passes one of the enormous stadium lights of the show's title...

And the light dissolves into the sun, the football finally descending into the arms of a receiver at practice. It's eight months later. Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) has left Texas behind in favor of taking over the program at a Philadelphia high school. As Delta Spirit's "Devil Knows You're Dead" plays, we get to see where all of the characters landed after the conclusion of the game. We even learn that Vince and company won the championship, albeit via quick shots of Vince's championship ring and a "state champions 2010" banner at the football field. The message is clear: You might win it all, but another season is always right around the corner.

The "time cut to epilogue" isn't all that unusual in TV history, and it especially isn't now, post-"Always," but I'm not sure I've ever seen a TV show so efficiently express the idea of the inevitability of time's passage, the ways in which we keep marching along, doing the same things over and over. So do our repetitions become their own soothing rhythms, in similar fashion to how watching a TV show can become a balm in its constancy.

"Always" is, broadly speaking, a "life goes on" ending, where a TV show affirms that the characters you know and love are still out there, living their lives, even if you're not going to be seeing them every week. It's one of the better ones in TV history, aiming not for histrionics or a thrilling, death-defying conclusion but, rather, the quiet moments that mark the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. Every time I watch it, I feel sad all over again that the show is ending, present tense, even though it ended, past tense, 15 years ago. And every time I watch it, that football passing forward in time reminds me of how easily everything slips away from you, sometimes in a simple match cut.

And every time I watch it, Dillon, Texas, one of the greatest of all TV small towns, feels a little harder for me to reach. Even though I (sort of) grew up there.

Want to read the rest? As the script for an episode of television that "Always" beat for a writing Emmy would say, "That's what the button is for!"