Which ‘Friday Night Lights’ Character Is The Most Devastating; A Ranking

We’re now a decade on from the inception of Friday Night Lights, a TV show that has probably ruined you so badly that you never want to think about it ever again. Well guess what, you have to, because the only way to be healed is to extract these feelings by bursting your heart open like an emotions piñata until all your tears spill out like candy. Sorry.

Friday Night Lights remains one of the best TV shows ever — I wasted so many years thinking it was just about football and I was so wrong, because the football is a metaphor (maybe, fact check this) — but it’s also unequivocally the most emo series of all time. There isn’t an episode of Friday Night Lights where someone isn’t breaking someone else’s heart, or crying, or becoming a paraplegic or making a devastating decision or having the shit kicked out of them because of a misunderstanding, or just getting like super muddy, the kind of muddy where it’s all on your face and in your eyes.

If you type any of the characters names in YouTube, you will immediately be offered hundreds of personalised montages of them to ‘Fix You’ or ‘My Hero’ or one of those three songs by The Fray.

This is one of the 520 reasons why I love Friday Night Lights but I also kind of hate it, because it’s brutal and wants me to feel so upset all the time. If an episode runs for 43 minutes, then four minutes is for lols, three is for lingering glances captured by a shaky cam, six minutes is for Tami Taylor and 30 minutes is just like, the most harrowing family conflicts, unavoidable injustices and tiny humiliations.

Now it’s time to rate Friday Night Lights characters by how devastating they are, let’s go:

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12. Buddy Garrity

Buddy Garrity is devastating in the way that you sometimes forget if you’re on his team or if you’re meant to hate him. For instance: having an affair with Tyra’s mum and breaking up his family, makes him devastating in that he’s a gross sweaty, middle-aged flesh sack of nonsense. Nonsense men are devastating.

Buddy Garrity makes us sad because he’s a man gone to seed who struggles to interact with people who don’t care that he used to be good at sports/has a prolific car dealership. This makes him fairly pitiable, but also someone who you don’t really care about that much, so it’s a sadness you can live with.

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11. Lyla Garrity

Lyla Garrity is a very annoying character but very bad things happen to her, so it’s hard to stay properly annoyed at her. She also can’t help it that she’s involved in some of the worst storylines, like the time she and Jason Street and Tim Riggins went to Mexico for reasons I am still entirely uninterested in.

This is the key to her being devastating: every time you think to yourself, ‘urgh, that is such a Lyla move‘ she does something like accidentally falls in love with Tim Riggins or catches her boyfriend cheating on her or her dad loses all her college money. And then you’re like, ‘damn, I am real asshole for feeling that way, I need to take a long hard look at myself’.

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10. Landry Clarke

Where do you even start with Landry? Landry is the comic relief, but he’s also the one who everyone makes fun of (Lance!) so every time you laugh you also feel a bit sad. Why does Landry stay in school longer than Matt Saracen? Since when were they not the same age? Landry is such a devastating character that even the writers on the show can’t remember his goddamn age.

Landry can make you very sad, but because he participated in the worst Friday Night Lights storyline to date (The One Where Landry Kills A Guy!) he also makes everyone mad. Jog on, Landry.

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9. Tim Riggins

Poor handsome Tim Riggins. Poor alcoholic, sweaty-in-a-good-way, ripped Tim Riggins. Tim Riggins is an upsetting character because he was basically abandoned by his parents, which left his dumb brother Billy Riggins as his sole guardian, and Billy is the sort of guardian who lets his little brother go to jail to cover his own ass. Billy is a bad guardian.

Tim Riggins is very handsome and gets to sleep with any and every woman in Dillon (which makes him slightly less devastating) but is also not very ambitious (which makes him very devastating). All Tim wants to do is build a house and stay in Texas forever, even though all his friends have moved away and the only person he can hang out with is his dumb brother. Although his favourite things are drinking beer and saying “Texas forever” so maybe it’s not that bad. You’re okay Tim Riggins.

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8. Julie Taylor 

Many people don’t like Julie Taylor and that’s their prerogative, but I kind of like her because she’s selfish and faux rebellious in the way that all teens are. Julie makes many bad decisions and makes her mum cry a lot — this is unforgivable, how dare you make Tami Taylor cry, how dare you — but the moment that she is truly devastating is when she sleeps with her tutor at college and then the tutor’s wife yells at her in front of a library of people and also slaps her.

I mean, being slapped privately would be very upsetting, but being slapped publicly is the most devastating and savage of acts and is a deliberate way to also slap you in the feelings.

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7. Smash Williams

Smash Williams talks tough, but later on he becomes very devastating when it is revealed that he takes steroids to ensure that he gets a football scholarship, and then ends up getting badly injured so most of those scholarships evaporate. He does a lot of crying about both of these incidents.

The thing about Smash is that his sadness is so deep and layered and overwhelming that when you’re watching him you kind of feel full in the guts. It’s like you’ve eaten a real heavy meal, but you didn’t; you’re just full of sadness.

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6. Tyra Collette

Tyra is the most devastating when she starts to believe in herself, which sounds weird, but that’s when she truly has something to lose. When she decides to apply for college after much prompting by Tami Taylor, Tyra writes an emotional essay about how she’s learning how to dream and Tami starts crying, and the college starts crying and they can’t even finish the essay because it’s so smudged from tears, probably. Tyra gets a bad haircut, but it’s okay because she learns how to dream.

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5. Vince Howard

Remember when Vince said, “You’ve changed my life, Coach”? That was once voted the most devastating line in the history of television, citation not needed.

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4. Coach Taylor

Coach Taylor tries to impart life lessons on the field and tells you how important it is to have character in football, because being good at football is not enough. Then when he’s worried that you don’t have enough character, he just turns up to your house in the middle of the night and tells you hard truths that make you cry, but not in a sad way, in a ‘damn, I needed to hear those hard truths’ way.

When Coach Taylor says, “You listen to me” in a harsh voice, you listen, because you know he is going to tell you something so frank and insightful that your life will never be the same. When he says “well done” it’s like the best compliment you have ever received in your life. Coach Taylor always seems a bit angry at you, that’s why you will always listen to him.

Every time he shouts “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” you automatically start crying, your eyes haven’t actually been clear since 2006.

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3. Tami Taylor

Tami Taylor is devastating because she can completely ruin your life with one look. She can look at you for three seconds, and can wordlessly convey gut-wrenching tragedies like ‘My daughter doesn’t respect me’, ‘I feel unfulfilled in my home life’, ‘I don’t care if you fire me for advising that girl on how to get an abortion’ or ‘Why does my husband get to go to Austin when I am looking after a literal newborn’ coupled with ‘I am sick of football, let’s move to Philadelphia’.

When a tearful Tami finally tells Coach that she has put her career on hold for long enough and that it’s time for the family to prioritise her job prospects, by telling him that he didn’t even have “the grace” to congratulate her on her lucrative job offer, it’s the most heartbreaking thing you have ever seen in your life. When Tami cries we all cry. When she tells someone she believes in them, you start to think that Tami believes in you and that maybe all your dreams will come true. Then you remember that Tami isn’t real, then you cry.

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2. Jason Street

The first devastating thing that happens in Friday Night Lights is that Jason Street becomes a paraplegic while playing a football game. This is obviously very devastating. This incident acts as a warning that this show will ruin your life. We didn’t listen; we’re ruined forever.

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1. Matt Saracen

Matt Saracen is the most devastating character on Friday Night Lights. This is an unequivocal fact. Matt Saracen is basically a Mr. Men character called Mr. Sad, because Matt Saracen is the human embodiment of crippling anxiety, melancholy and inconsolable grief. There isn’t an episode of Friday Night Lights where Matt doesn’t someone encounter a tiny humiliation, a moment of being let down or something that further justifies his feeling that everyone he loves eventually abandons him.

Matt Saracen is so full of feeling and hurt that his career after football is literally ‘art’. His favourite musician is Bob Dylan, which is the saddest music you could ever listen to. Even just thinking about every bad thing that happens to Matt Saracen will make you cry. Matt’s dad, who has been fighting in Iraq for most of the show, dies horribly in the later seasons and has a very sad funeral, and this still isn’t the most devastating thing that happens to Matt Saracen on this show.

Matt Saracen is the most upsetting character of all time, and I honestly think we should all sue this show for emotional damages.

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