Displaying the same sense of grit and determination against insurmountable odds that would make for a great football film, then a five-season television show adaptation, then another movie that would undo any sense of closure achieved by said television show, Peter Berg is once more talking up his potential Friday Night Lights continuation—this time giving you actual plot details to tack onto your own ideas of where everyone ended up, which are now wrong. During a recent press conference for Battleship (which we are still perfectly willing to pretend is a Friday Night Lights follow-up, really) Berg told MTV that showrunner Jason Katims is “about done” with the script, adding that it would feature a storyline that “parallels what happened to Mike Leach … a coach at Texas Tech who was unjustly fired and unjustly accused of mistreating a player with a concussion, which was proven to not have been the case.” Berg calls this a “redemption story,” one that would finally redeem Coach Taylor after years of being such a selfish, reprehensible reprobate. Seriously, the worst.
Anyway, obviously this would mean centering the movie on Kyle Chandler’s Coach and Connie Britton’s Tami, with plans to “bring in Riggins, Tyra, Lyla and all other characters as we could get them”—perhaps via a series of vignettes where these people receive letters from the Taylors, and then we learn what they’re up to now, just like in The Muppets Take Manhattan. However, as Berg admits, every one of those actors is currently busy, and the problem (in addition to mainstream audience interest) remains one of scheduling: “If we can get everyone in the same room at the same time, we all want to do it,” Berg says, which—as seen in the examples of Arrested Development, Party Down, Veronica Mars, and Wet Hot American Summer—is just vaguely committal without being concrete enough to sustain another several years of talking about this.