Love Week continues with a toast to the TV couple we don't want to get over

Eric and Tami Taylor forever.

By Tim Lowery  |  February 14, 2026 | 11:00am
Friday Night Lights (Screenshot: YouTube/Friday Night Lights)
TV Features love week
Love Week continues with a toast to the TV couple we don't want to get over

Is it weird to still be turning to a fictional network TV show, some two decades after it debuted, for life advice? Absolutely. Pathetic? More than a bit. Advisable? There’s a 99-percent chance that, no, it’s not. But it depends, as there’s one clear-eyed outlier. Because if we’re talking about Friday Night Lights, the full-hearts-on-its-sleeves NBC drama about a small town in Texas and its lifeblood of a high-school football program that arrived back in the fall of 2006, there is a strong case to be made that, yes, it is. 

If you haven’t watched the show, you’re probably still aware that Friday Night Lights, which ran for five seasons and 76 episodes, has its fair share of big locker-room speeches. There have been sketches about it and, if memory serves, at least one not particularly funny joke about it at the Emmys. It’s something that was just kind of in the air in the aughts, like knowing that The Sopranos is about a guy who yells a lot and is in the mafia, even if you’ve never seen a second of it, or being aware that the world agrees that the guys on Entourage are very, very cool. (That was, admittedly, also not a particularly funny joke.) 

For as much as Friday Night Lights is about so much more than those game-day, fire-’em-up monologues—just like it’s about so much more than football or high school or small towns or, as a devotee of the show maybe annoyingly explained to you at a bar once, America—when boiled down, the series really is just one big ol’ locker-room speech. And the people giving those speeches are either Eric (Kyle Chandler) or Tami Taylor (Connie Britton), who have an onscreen marriage so solid that the pair has been accurately dubbed “The Greatest TV Couple Of All Time” and has inspired love-letter essays with titles like “I Want What They Have” about their very enviable—but decidedly not perfect or drama-free—relationship. So as The A.V. Club‘s Love Week continues, let’s look at why the town of Dillon, and the viewers at home, fell so hard for them.    

For a very tiny taste of the advice the pair gives out on the regular (those locker-room speeches, if you will), here’s a bit Coach gives Jason Street (Scott Porter) at Applebee’s near the end of the show’s very busy second season. “Everything I know about women you can stick in this damn coffee cup here,” the coach tells the 19-year-old former star quarterback, who is now using a wheelchair and just informed his old coach that he got a one-night-stand pregnant and wants her to keep the child. “But I do know you have to have trust and honesty. Without trust and honesty, it is not gonna work.” It’s good advice (and it’s also notable, and wise, that he doesn’t tell him what to do), and you get the impression that Street went to Coach to gauge whether he’s ready to have a kid when he’s pretty much still one himself first. 

There are countless scenes like this (some are more effective than others, but a few land so hard that you may be left wishing you had your own Coach or Tami Taylor in your life), and over the course of the show, these two essentially become Dillon’s Problem Solvers. If there is an issue, they undoubtedly will fix it—or completely change your life for the better. That’s certainly the case with Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan), who was headed toward a life of crime only to become a star quarterback and, in the series finale, explicitly says “You changed my life, Coach,” and Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), who escaped her upbringing and went to college pretty much because of Tami’s persistence.   

The first time we meet Tami, Eric is studying game tape in his dark office, his eyes fixed on the small screen and not her. And the first time we see her in her home, he’s doing the exact same thing while she talks about wanting to get a bigger place and their daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden) compares the football drama in Dillon to Moby-Dick. But pretty quickly, the show makes sure Tami isn’t just Coach’s wife, the better half who lives in her husband’s shadow. And it’s not a stretch to say that by the finale, she’s a more interesting and complex character than he is or that, if the show has a lead, it would have to be the Taylors as a couple.  

And as a couple, they’re tested, sometimes in a funny ha-ha way, like when Tami’s co-worker (played by Steven Walters) drunkenly tries to kiss her outside a work happy hour or when her motormouthed ex (portrayed by Peter Berg, who developed the show) drunkenly gets in a fight with Eric. But sometimes things got pretty dire. No, they never cheated on each other. In fact, Britton said the following to EW: “[Chandler and I] were like, ‘We’re never letting the writers have us have an affair. If they try to do it, we’re not going to do it.’ And we told them so.” But they did have some serious struggles in their marriage.  

Near the end of the series, Tami is offered Dean Of Admissions at Braemore College in Philly, a prospect Eric doesn’t humor, even after several pleas from her to do so. (Here’s a sample, which she gives teary-eyed outside a restaurant: “It’s my turn, babe. I have loved you and you have loved me and we have compromised, both of us, for your job. Now it’s time to talk about doing that for my job. Because otherwise, what am I gonna tell our daughter?”) Eric eventually comes to his senses, delivering an apologetic “Will you take me to Philadelphia with you, please?” and a dose of the feels for the audience. And the show ends not with Vince’s state-winning Hail Mary (the completion of which we don’t even see) but this same couple on a different field in a very different place, embracing as they walk into the darkness together.   

Tim Lowery is The A.V. Club‘s TV editor.   

 
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