Houses of Friday Night Lights
- Payton Heyman
- Mar 19, 2018
- 2 min read
Friday Night Lights premiered in October of 2006 and ran on NBC for two seasons, until NBC made a deal with DirecTV's 101 Network to air the next three seasons through 2011.
The television series takes place in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, telling the story about a high school football team created by their coach, Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler). In real life, however, most of the filming took place throughout Austin and Pflugerville.
The show essentially avoided stage sets completely and used hundred of locals to film as extras in order to make the show feel more authentic and accurate to normal life. In addition to this, the show used documentary-style filming techniques. Each scene was shot completely in one take using three cameras for each shoot, rather than filming over and over again from different angles and lighting. This allowed for a more organic feel, and the actors were able to perform more naturally. This style actually worked really well for them and the first takes typically made the final cut!
Coach Taylor's house is located at 6805 De Paul Cove, Austin. Really the only change with this house is the placement of the mailbox. For the show, there was a standard mailbox right next to the driveway, but in real life I cannot seem to find one. Is it that black box on the wooden address marker? Maybe! The grass is also completely dead in the screen grab from the show.
Next up is Tim Riggin's (Taylor Kitsch) house, which is located at 2604 Lehigh Dr in a regular neighborhood in Austin. His land, however, is actually located at 7252 Burleson Manor Rd in Manor, Texas.
Since filming, the house has been completely renovated to an adorable blue and yellow home! The brick textures are still there but the garage, front door, and the area surrounded the front windows have changed a lot.
As a tribute, however there is a "Riggins" sign in the window. It appears that a very similar one is placed in the front yard, sporting his football number, #33.
(Austin.curbed.com)
At the time of my visit, I had never seen the show, but my dad was absolutely thrilled about going to each of the locations. We actually had no idea that the show was filmed in Austin, but when we were talking to the concierge at the Omni Austin Hotel where Spy Kids was filmed, they informed us of all of the different locations. Naturally, we had to go see them!
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