Caffeinated Clint
The final siren has blown on the long-gestating “Friday Night Lights” movie.
“That we are not doing”, executive producer Jason Katims said this week of a film that would’ve played as a sequel to the 76-episode series starring Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton.
Katims was at the TCA’s for his new series “Rise”, where he asked about the chances of a revival.
In development since 2011, the feature film spin-off of the TV series was the result of a spitball sess by executive producers Peter Berg and Jason Katims, with Katims later starting work on a script.
Some of the cast – namely Chandler and Taylor Kitsch, who played Tim Riggins – publicly poo-pooed the film idea in the first quarter of the game, and ultimately, Berg and Katims followed suite.
“I’ve come to believe it’s probably not a good idea and I seriously doubt it’s gonna happen”, Berg told Collider in 2013.
The libretto, Berg later said, would’ve been inspired by the Mike Leach case, in which the coach was fired from Texas Tech for poor treatment of a player with a concussion. In other words, it would’ve been about Coach Eric Taylor being blamed for something he was innocent of.
“Jason Katims worked pretty hard on it”, Berg said of the script.
While Katims laid the final nail in the coffin of a “FNL” movie, he did hint that a “Parenthood” sequel, of some sort, might be on the way.
“I’d like to revisit it at the right time, but that was a really large cast and it means getting people’s schedules together. But at some point, I’d like to do it.”
Katim’s new series “Rise”, premiering in March, has already been compared to “Friday Night Lights”.
Based on the book ”Drama High” by Michael Sokolove and the life rights of Lou Volpe, it revolves around the drama department of a working class high-school.
“[There] was some connectivity to Friday Night Lights and telling the story about this small town and making it feel authentic,” Katims said of the series. “While it had this engine of the musical theater, and we got to follow that, we could also go into the lives of the people in this blue-collar town in Pennsylvania and follow their relationships. It’s a story of this community and I was drawn to that.”
“Rise” will air on the same network that gave life to the first season of “Friday Night Lights”, NBC.
