The lights will not go out on Friday Night Lights, even if the critically acclaimed, low-rated first-year drama fails to score any high-profile Emmy nods when the nominations are announced Thursday. The betting is that Friday Night Lights will be shut out. It’s too fresh, too unique — and too new — to be spotted by Emmy voters accustomed to filling in their ballots by rote.

The occasionally poignant, often profound ensemble drama about high-schoolers coming of age in the American heartland was the longest of long shots from its inception. It fought off early rumours of cancellation and eked out a last-minute renewal for a second season, despite winning the coveted Peabody Award and being compared by some to the great family dramas of the past, My So-Called Life and I’ll Fly Away.

When the startlingly young supporting cast appeared alongside series leads Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton Wednesday at the summer meeting of the Television Critics Association, there was a palpable charge of electricity in the room. Aimee Teegarden, who plays Chandler’s daughter, Julie Taylor, in the series, is just 17. Vancouver’s Taylor Kitsch, who plays bad boy Tim Riggins, is the elder statesmen of the group at 26. They blinked into a sea of lights, and then the questions came, one after another, like a series of short, sharp passes up the middle. The session came at the end of a long day of press conferences, but none featured as fast a frenzy of questions as this one. For a program that is watched by so few — or so the ratings suggest — interest could hardly have been greater.

Chandler and Britton fielded most of the questions, but the younger players in the ensemble intercepted their share of verbal passes along the way.

Zach Gilford, who plays reluctant quarterback Matt Saracen, said there is no typical fan of the show.

“I think we all feel that there are two kinds of people,” Gilford said. “There are a few who come up to you and are obsessed with the show and love every second, know every line you’ve said. And then there are the people who are, like, ‘I haven’t seen an episode, but I hear it’s good.’ Anyone, once they watch it, it seems they really, really like it.”

“It’s not only once they watch it that they like it,” Scott Porter chimed in. “It’s that once they watch it, they get their family to watch it, they get their friends to watch it.” Porter plays a former star quarterback who has been crippled for life by a game injury.

“This show is a genuine reflection of real life,” he said. “There’s so much escapism on television. There are so many other TV shows that do that. That’s why we have such a fervent fan base. That’s what everyone latches on to. This is real life. This isn’t a show that overplays the drama. It’s a show based on real characters in a real town.”

Kitsch was born in Kelowna, B.C. As a struggling actor living and working in Vancouver, he wasn’t certain he would get the part of the team rebel, but once he landed it, he knew he could nail it. He had faith that Friday Night Lights would make it.

“I wasn’t working and thinking, 'This is going to be my last scene on Friday Night Lights,’” Kitsch said. “I don’t know, you just have that confidence that you’re working on something special. Everyone is on the same page in making the season better and greater, and giving it that extra. You just have that confidence. You really do feel that it’s going to get even better and greater. We still have so much to prove, and that’s just going to fuel the fire for us.”

Longtime football veterans admire Friday Night Lights, but not for the reasons football fans — or casual TV viewers — might expect.

Sportscaster Bob Costas, a fixture with NBC Sports since the early 1980s, told CanWest News that Friday Night Lights is flat-out “one of the best shows on television.”

“I think it has a character of its own, while still being true to Buzz Bissinger’s book,” Costas said. “I think the television show is better than the movie, and the movie was pretty good. I just hope it finds an audience.”

Retired NFL Pro Bowl receiver and Sunday Night Football analyst Cris Collinsworth said the whole point of Friday Night Lights is that it’s not about football.

“To me, it has more of a dramatic feel to it,” Collinsworth said. “It’s about relationships — and that’s what my kids like about it.”

Dick Ebersol was even more blunt: “I happen to believe that Friday Night Lights is the best show on television right now,” Ebersol told CanWest News.

Ebersol, the chair of NBC Universal Sports, has supervised NBC’s entire slate of sports programming, including the Olympics, since 1998.

“We promoted the hell out of it on Sunday Night Football in September last year, and in hindsight I think that may have hurt it,” Ebersol said. “We have the best platform from which to promote any show on NBC — frankly that’s the biggest reason why GE and NBC wanted back into football.

“I think Friday Night Lights does a much better job than The O.C. ever did in portraying, in realistic terms, the lives of teenagers in this country. It does an equally good job of showing what it’s like to be a married couple in America today. It may be our best soap opera.”

Friday Night Lights’s producers learn Thursday whether their program has been nominated for any Emmy Awards. More importantly, they know it will be back this fall — and on Friday nights.