Can Friday Night Lights Live as a Web Show?

With all the talk about Friday Night Lights being on the verge of being canceled and then being leveraged to bring viewers to DirecTV, it begs the question…

Are the days of canceling a critically-acclaimed, but unwatched TV show over? We watched quarterlife try to make the jump from online to NBC… would it be a better business model to do the opposite?

Here’s what I’d do to make the show a viable web series:

• Keep shooting, but cut production costs. You might lose some locations, but you can certainly focus more on some of the story with a few less setups.
• Instead of delivering an hour, cut episodes to 20-ish minutes.
• Add cameras to every shoot and capture more little moments that can turn into short-form side-character spinoffs. Additional pieces of content for each character, further building out the story.
• Open the story to include more spinoffs featuring other schools. You’re then building a universe.
• Following the quarterlife model (building the show on top of a social network), partner with a company that is already covering high school sports to build a social network for high school football nationwide.

Sure this is naive on a couple of fronts… namely, revenue. But it’s a creative start to the conversation.

So, am I right? Wrong? Is there a home for brilliant but canceled TV shows on the Web?

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