Dan Telfer: When the A.V. Club travels, we always make time to visit pop cultural landmarks. If something memorable happened in the world of film, TV, books, or music we want to go there. We’re not just tourists, we’re Pop Pilgrims. Friday Night Lights, the TV show, recently finished up a solid five-season run, telling the moving stories of high school football players in fictional Dillon, Texas. The show was filmed almost entirely on location outside Austin, Texas and today we’re heading to Del Valle Field where much of the action took place. How much do you think Texas ended up seeping into the show because you got to shoot it here as opposed to say Los Angeles? Michael Waxman: Oh my gosh, quite a bit, I mean this is one of the things Jason Katims when he took the job – they called Jason and said “Hey, we want you to be the show runner on this show” and he said “Well the only way I’ll do it is if we get to shoot the show in Texas.” That’s the way the show was set up. The show was set up to be a location show. We never had anything on a sound stage. We shot the football scenes, the practice scenes, the interior coaches’ office, locker room. And then when we were shooting in season 4 we had this field and then we secretly built East Dillon’s field on the other side of these bleachers. But here’s what happened – so we said “Okay, we have to create East Dillon – East Dillon High School and East Dillon Field. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to take this baseball field and turn it into East Dillon.” And it was rough and it was scraggly and we turned it into the football field which was great because the idea was East Dillon had no money. So we put some stands up there in that little press box above the old tunnel and we took the back section of the Panther stands and turned that into the East Dillon gym building. And what we did is we took the Panther Weight Room, got rid of that, and turned that whole section of the locker room building into the East Dillon Lions locker room and used the back entrance as the main entrance to East Dillon. Dan Telfer: Now one of the things people love so much about seeing live sports is how spontaneous it is. How hard was it to film that in a fictionalized, scripted – Michael Waxman: That actually took us a while. professional football players. Dan Telfer: And did you ever have any of the actors get so good at it you needed to use their doubles less? Michael Waxman: Absolutely. Certainly Michael B. Jordan, tremendous athlete. He would go out and practice with our semi-professional football team. And Taylor Kitsch loved to do his own stuff. In a certain moment you have to stop that because you don’t We actually used some semi- want the actor to get hurt. Jesse was great, Jesse Plemons. He played the worst player. When he was like on the team he was a scrub. But Jesse, Jesse was a really good football player. Dan Telfer: Okay, thanks so much Michael. Michael Waxman: Hey, appreciate it, nice to see you all. End.