Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."

In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects, including the comedy Web site, comicwonder.com.

He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. In this week's installment of the Screening Room, Mark looks at the TV series "Friday Night Lights."

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS (TV, 2006-present)

When I was a poor starving actor in New York City, and even when I wasn't poor and starving, and I would finish in the bars at bar time, I would take the subway home to the East Village because there was a harshness to it that soothed me somehow.

On the trains at that time of night, along with the other drunks and misfits bouncing around underground, were a lot of the women who cleaned the office buildings on their way to the night shift on the 43rd floor, or wherever, to make it neat and tidy for the advertising people in the morning.

Their conversation often had to do with their "stories." In "my stories" today, Vicki started having an affair with that nasty Mr. Jack. Doesn't she know he's a bad man? Their "stories" were the daytime soap operas like "One Life to Live," or "Guiding Light."

Those "stories" were their company in the afternoon, and the characters were as real to them, more real in the way that things we imagine over and over again are often more vividly real, than the dull stuff we really have to go through, they were as real to them as anything in their lives.

And because they were on the same schedules as the other ladies going to work in the middle of the night, they shared their stories with each other as though they were their own or part of their family.

I worked one of those soap operas once and was accosted a few times late at night and there was no, no, recognition that I was just an actor doing a job. To them, I was Stick Stickley, the man who kidnapped Vicki when she was actually her alter ego, Nicki, and held her captive in a cabin in the woods until her husband Clint came to rescue her and shot me in the snow.

They were mad at me for doing such horrible things to poor Vicki. Mad, but the way a mother might get mad. They wanted me to change my ways, become the person that they seemed to know I could become if I would only listen to Vicki and stop taking revenge for something that wasn't her fault anyway. They believed I could be redeemed. I never was. I ended up blowing myself up trying to blow up all of Landview. But that's another story.

I've never watched much television with any regularity. I can't keep interested enough from one week to the next to stick to a show and be caught up with it. Now, with DVD, of course, you can watch an entire season in a couple of nights if you like it enough. And I really like "Friday Night Lights."

I like it enough to miss it while I wait for Disc 3 of Season Two to come from Netflix. I like it enough to worry about what I will do when I have seen all of Season 2 and have to wait probably a year for Season 3 to come out on DVD.

It's like when you are reading a really good book and you are getting closer to the end and you start to slow down your reading pace because you don't want it to end. You do not want to leave that world. I am getting like that with "Friday Night Lights." And I'm not a football fan. And I'm really not a big fan of the biggest red state there is, Texas. I've worked there a few times. And I've driven across the state a few times, been caught in one of those Texas downpours where you have to pull of to the side of the road because you can't see nothin' in front of you. I've smelled the stink of sulphur around Amarillo and bitten into an orange that had the same stink because everything has that stink around there.

The people are nice enough, but they do think they are a country and not a United part of these States. And a sport where a bunch of men get dressed up so you can't recognize them and smash into each other all afternoon leaves me scratching my head. But I love the Packers. I do, really. So why do I want to put a bumper sticker on my car that says "Tim Riggins for President." Tim Riggins is the supremely mellow, drunk, womanizing, sweet, impossibly beautiful fullback on the Dillon Panthers. When he is sober enough to play, and not partying in Mexico with Street, the now crippled ex-quarterback trying to find a way out of his wheelchair.

Riggins doesn't seem to have active parents. He and his even bigger loser of a brother are kind of raising each other. Badly. He always has a beer in his hand and lately his roommate has been trying to stick a meth pipe in his hands. See, he had to move out of his brother's house because his brother started sleeping with Tim's girlfriend the single mom from across the street and ... I'm starting to sound the way those ladies on the train sound about their "stories."

At first, I thought "Friday Night Lights" was really unique television. The first season mad me laugh and made me cry. It brought me into the lives of a whole new group of people. And it is a unique and compelling way of telling a story. The camera work and editing are more like a film, fast and jerky. There is real adrenaline in the story telling. You get bits and pieces of the story, and you get it fast, in looks and quick cut-aways, but you get the whole story. And you get a lot of varied characters. The performances are spectacularly naturalistic.

These high school kids have pimples like real high school kids not like those simpering idiots on "Dawson's Creek." They behave like real stupid teenagers sometimes, but they are also capable of very genuine acts of nobility and courage. They talk to each other because the adults are too busy or not even there. It gives me hope for my soon-to-be-high-school-age son.

One of the difficulties with prime time television is that the bar is set pretty high because, these days, you are competing with films and DVDs. Therefore, you have to come up with something original every seven days, and if you are successful (and who wouldn't want to be successful?), you have to do it year after year for at least three and hopefully five years. I think the contract you sign on a series, hour or half-hour, is five years. It used to be seven.

It can be difficult making these "stories" new and interesting week after week; and finding ways for the characters to evolve, to grow and change. And what do you do when these high school kids graduate and go on to college?

I am two-thirds of the way through the second season of "Friday Night Lights" and I can see them struggling to not repeat themselves. Some characters are standing still while others are growing and changing. It's hard to tell if it's the writers that aren't giving them anything new or the actors themselves who just aren't bringing the depth.

I know from experience that when you work a series like this, you have to work the writers and producers, too. You have to encourage them to give you more and guide them in directions you want the character to go. You can just let yourself be at their mercy and whim, or you can grow your character yourself by seeking out the writers during lunch on the set and giving them ideas.

It is an interesting process, doing a series, because you discover a character over a long period and he/she evolves in ways that you never would have imagined at the beginning. You can get kind of philosophical about it and realize that we are never finished as people until we take that last gasp on the stairway and fall over backwards with a look of bewilderment and relief and the character you play in a television series is never finished, either, and is therefore a greater challenge than a character in a play because they have to continue to grow through time. But I digress, as I so often do.

"Friday Night Lights" is simply the best TV I am watching now. Other than "Entourage," which is like watching home movies because in the ‘80's in Hollywood we all lived like that except that for some of us the bread was a day old.