<em>Friday Night Lights</em> Reboot: Peter Berg on the Show's Return

Turn the lights back on in West Texas, because Friday Night Lights is officially green-lit for a reboot on Peacock. Director Peter Berg will return to helm the popular high school football series, based on his 2004 film starring Billy Bob Thornton and Buzz Bissinger's 1990 book, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. But I wouldn't view the new Friday Night Lights as a sequel. According to Berg, it's a full "reinvention."

"We want to do it with a whole new cast," Berg tells Esquire. "Obviously there'll be football in it. But the original show was done a long time ago. There were no cell phones. No social media. It was a very different world, and yet the same values still exist, and the same family dynamics exist."

Berg continued: "Football's only grown in its relevance in communities all over the country. So, the core themes of Friday Night Lights—that were revealed by Buzz Bissinger when he wrote the book—are very much present. There's just so many new elements, so we want to look at that. And if certain cast members come back, have appearances, that's great. But if Friday Night Lights works, it'll be because it works as a reinvention."

The series will reportedly return to Texas following a devastating hurricane, according to Deadline, when "a rag tag high school football team and their damaged, interim coach make an unlikely bid for a Texas High School State Championship and become a beacon of light for their town."

Taylor Kitsch, who starred in Friday Night Lights as well as Berg's recent Western American Primeval, is not signed on return, nor is anyone else from the original cast. Peacock also has yet to confirm a release date for the new series.

"I’m always flattered," Kitsch recently said on SiriusXM's The Spotlight. "Never say never. But I would come in and maybe do something for an episode I don’t want to go and do the whole thing. I’d go and have fun, but I don’t want to lead a FNL or a reboot or anything."

"We've traveled around the world together and know each other like brothers," Berg told Esquire. "I know his family, and he knows my family. You develop this friendship and create a bond. It’s good to know that if you say the wrong thing, it's going to instantly be forgiven and forgotten and vice versa. You have a shorthand. Someone like Taylor, we have that relationship."

That's all well and good, but we'd love a release date. Who do we have to call to give the Friday Night Lights reboot the ol' tush push over the goal line?