Friday Night's Bright Light

Miranda Penn Turin / Icon Int’l Zach Gilford, the sensitive heartthrob quarterback from Friday Night Lights, goes deep and talks about why his show is not 90210, Carol Burnett’s wedding crashing, and the Hail Mary to save the series for two more seasons.

When it premiered on NBC in 2006, Friday Night Lights seemed like a Hail Mary pass. A drama about a high-school football team in suburban Texas, it was hard to imagine who would tune in—other than high school football players in suburban Texas. Sure enough, despite winning an Emmy in its first season, the show has been haunted by the Arrested Development curse of tremendous critical acclaim combined with low ratings. After a near-death experience following the Hollywood writers’ strike, the show was revived by a cost-sharing deal between DirecTV and NBC. It began airing on DirecTV last October, and is now rerunning on NBC.

"And Carol Burnett’s just so goofy and funny, telling these anecdotes about crashing weddings! Because no one would question her, they’d be like, “Oh, that’s Carol Burnett!'”

Zach Gilford, a genuine football fan from Chicago, plays Matt Saracen, the Dillon Panthers’ once-star-now-benched quarterback and resident sensitive guy. After majoring in theater and education at Northwestern, Gilford flirted with a job as a schoolteacher before moving to New York to pursue acting. As Matt, the 27-year-old Gilford has become one of prime-time’s heartthrobs who can actually act—a rarity—and has roles in three movies scheduled for release in 2009. He spoke to The Daily Beast about playing hoops with Terrell Owens, Carol Burnett’s wedding crashing, and his show’s death-defying existence.

Entertainment Weekly just reported Friday Night Lights is close to scoring a two-season pick-up, courtesy of DirecTV and NBC. You must be pumped.

Yeah. Randomly, I talked to one of the executives at DirecTV today. The call was non-work related, then I was like, "Alright dude, you got to tell me, what's going on?" He said the discussions are getting much more realistic. Especially in an economy like this, it really has to make sense for both networks. I think DirecTV loves it, they feel like we were great for them. But right now, everyone thinks of it as an NBC show—no one thinks of it in association with DirecTV at all. So I think they feel if they knew they had two more seasons of it, they could really make a huge effort to make it clear it is a DirecTV show. Have a lot more ownership of it.

Choosing to air the show on DirecTV this fall stirred some controversy among fans—most people don’t even have DirecTV. Do you think the deal was good for the show?

Yeah, it's been great for the show. It kept it alive, there is that. Because we wouldn't have been on at all if DirecTV hadn't signed on the way they did this year. I don't know the specific numbers, but they put out a huge ad campaign for us when we first aired on their station. So even people who didn't have DirecTV, they put it in their consciousness again—it kept them aware so that when it came back on air on NBC, people knew it. I had so many people in the fall who were like, "When is it going to run on NBC? I know it's on DirecTV, I want to see it so bad." Our fans are very rabid about it. I met several people who actually were like, "I switched to DirecTV just to watch it." I thought, "Sweet, that's exactly what they wanted you to do."