Friday Night Lights (Extended Episodes)

After season 2 of Friday Night Lights. NBC and DirecTV started splitting the production costs for the show, and DirecTV had the rights to run all the episodes on their own channel before NBC. In addition the DirecTV episodes were extended, featuring additional dialogue and extended/deleted scenes.

This was the case for nearly every episode of seasons 3, and at least one episode of season 5.

I would like to start restoring the extended episodes. I have the blu-rays, which contain the shorter NBC-broadcast versions of the episodes, but I only have low quality (624x352) AVI downloads of all of the extended episodes.

Does anyone have higher quality versions of the DirecTV extended episodes I could use for this project?

SpacemanDoug said:

Considering the era in which these aired, it’s possible that these are the highest quality you’d get

But can I possibly get access to these captures too?

I might be able to help stitch these together

PM incoming…

I have been PRAYING that something like this, official or otherwise, would come to fruition!

UPDATE:
While looking over these episodes with @SpacemanDoug, we discovered that there are extended versions of nearly every episode in season 3. There is also an extended version of the series finale. However, the rest of the episodes (all of season 4 and all but the final episode of season 5) appear to have the same episode runtimes as the versions that were released on blu-ray. (I’ve edited my original post to reflect this.)

That being said, every episode I’ve checked from seasons 3, 4, & 5 has altered music on blu-ray (& streaming) compared to what originally aired.

I have started the process of restoring season 3. I’ve completed the first episode, and I have mixed feelings about the end result. I’ve tweaked the upscaling settings to achieve the closest possible look to the 1080p versions on blu-ray, and many of the shots look very good; a few shots definitely do not. (When upscaling low resolution footage, close-up shots tend to look great, medium shots are hit-or-miss and wide shots with people’s faces in them often get weirdly distorted.)

As a proof of concept, I can make the completed version of episode 301 available to whomever is interested.

If there is enough interest in the complete season and/or seasons 4 & 5 with the original music, I will continue to work on this project. (It will certainly take a lot of time, as the process is quite tedious.) If not, I’ll probably put it on the back burner or abandon it. The additional footage and extended scenes are interesting to have access to, but they’re clearly not necessary for the enjoyment of the show. In my opinion, having just done the one episode so far, most of the DirecTV exclusive content adds very little.

For those interested in what was changed for episode 301, I’ve included the list of changes below. (Note: In order to preserve the original music, I used the stereo TV audio for the entire episode, except where noted.)

List of changes:
00:00:30-00:00:35 - Extended shot
00:03:37-00:03:40 - Extended shot
00:03:46-00:04:58 - Extended shots, additional footage
00:08:36-00:10:39 - Extended scenes, credits adjustments (the beginning of this section is perhaps the best example of how bad certain shots look when upscaled)
00:13:03-00:13:08 - Extended shot
00:14:26-00:14:29 - Additional footage
00:17:37-00:17:41 - Extended shot
00:18:37-00:18:41 - Additional footage, extended shot
00:19:54-00:20:27 - Extended scene
00:25:52-00:26:02 - Used ADR audio from blu-ray, which was recorded to correct a continuity error in the original dialogue
00:28:04-00:28:44 - Additional scene
00:41:17-00:41:36 - Extended shot, re-ordered scene
00:41:36-00:43:29 - Extended scenes
00:44:19-00:46:21 - Extended scene

I personally would love to have this project seen to completion. It’s an excellent show.

For the altered opening credits, are you using the full frame or are you cropping the TV footage and overlaying it on top of the BD footage?

I’m using as much of the blu-ray image as possible, and I’m overlaying the televised credits on top of the blu-ray image.

Are you still doing this. This is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I am interested in helping

Long-time Friday Night Lights fan here! I’d love to see what you’ve achieved so far & encourage you to do more (though I see I’m a couple of years late to the party).

I was aware of the separate NBC/DirecTV airings, aware of the music changes, and aware there was a shorter version of the series finale on streaming. But I had NO IDEA the episodes as they appeared on DVD/Blu-ray (how I’ve always watched) were also shorter than what aired on DirecTV!

Feel free to follow up with me over PM if you’d like!

For whoever might be interested - it seems like the latest streaming versions of seasons 3, 4, & 5 have had their original music restored!! It’s the stream that is on Paramount Plus (bizarrely) that has the updates. And I think it’s the original, non-extended episode lengths.

Pretty awesome! Unfortunately it seems like season 1 didn’t get the same treatment. Obviously lots of the original tracks were retained, but many are replacements.

SpacemanDoug said:

P+ is using the uncut version of the finale I can instantly tell you that. But I bet it’s the slightly re-edited version that re-arranged some of the scenes compared to the original 101 broadcast. No footage was cut but certain scenes were moved to different spots I guess to get around the contractual obligation of 101 having exclusive access to the extended episodes.

Do you happen to know, does the blu-ray/dvd version of the finale match the original 101 broadast? I know it’s the extended length, but is it re-arranged as you mentioned the streaming version is?

So, not wanting to lose a chance at having those original music cues for S3,4,5 (in case they revert back to the replacements) I ripped the Paramount Plus streams. The video quality is for shit though.

Perhaps I can rip my blu-rays at a higher video quality & mux in the audio tracks from the P+ streams. I’ve never tried that before.

Season 1 & 2 physical are a mixed bag. Some songs retained, many replaced. I never saw the original broadcasts so can’t personally compare, but looking at TuneFind etc, you don’t hear most of the songs listed there.

EDIT: for clarity, s1&2 physical exactly match what’s on streaming. Same mix of original/replaced songs.

ICYMI - Liza Richardson, the music supervisor for FNL talked in a couple of interviews about how they offered artists a 2-year term contract to license their songs for less money, meaning they were original only on the first broadcast:

http://www.fuelfriendsblog.com/2010/08/30/the-musical-mind-behind-friday-night-lights/

And this is exactly why I’m after the NBC captures for the first two seasons

Seeing all of those unattainable entries on TuneFind is so painful 😦 Wish we could see who input those & message them about their source, but it’s all like 15+ years ago.

I saw Liza Richardson (who I mentioned before) is active on Instagram. I doubt she will reply to me and/or be able to do anything / provide info, etc… but I DM’d her mentioning my excitement about S3-5 being restored. I guess if she replies, I could say something like, “So how did that happen? Could it happen to S1-2?”