The Observant Outsider

Nancy Franklin in the "On Television" column on "Friday Night Lights" in this week's New Yorker: Berg, who wrote and directed the first episode and is also one of the series' executive producers, gets you right down in the middle of it all. The show is filmed documentary style with a handheld camera, meaning that you're always aware of a sensibility and an intelligence at work. A lot of scenes are shot from a car -- not establishing shots that indicate whose house the next scene will take place in but exploratory shots: What's down this road? Who lives here? The camera in "Friday Night Lights" goes where strangers usually don't go -- right up in people's faces. It is the observant outsider who somehow got through the town's gates, and who has an open-minded, openhearted agenda, which is to find out who these people are and what their lives are like.