You can’t help but compare Stan’s new series Rise to the cult TV classic Friday Night Lights.

They’re both the work of writer Jason Katims, both meditations on middle America and class, both structured around the hyper-localised microcosm of a good ol’ US high school, full of apple pie and the decline of the working class. They’re both television shows which attempt to elevate the stories of ordinary people into high art. They’re both obsessed with “Jumbotrons“.

Watching Rise is like being forcibly reminded of everything you loved about Friday Night Lights. The shows are shot in deliberately similar ways, structured in the same panoptic meandering narrative style, soundtracked with the same kind of sincere, nostalgic music.

The problem with all these similarities is that the more Rise reminds you of Friday Night Lights, the more it suffers by comparison. It’s the small child floppily parading around in its father’s suit pretending to be a businessman. It’s the serial killer sewing together a mask of rotting human skin. It’s the Danni to Kylie Minogue.

Rise Is Chock Full Of Nonsense

Rise is set in the small steel town (except the factory has closed down, of course) of Stanton in Pennsylvania. It follows a plucky high school English teacher who dreams of revitalising both his own creative ambitions and the spirit of the town through a school musical production of Spring Awakening.

In itself, the story of well-intentioned if slightly pretentious Lou Mazzuchelli (Ted Moseby nee Josh Radnor) struggling to get a football-obsessed town to care about musical theatre is a lot to deal with. But unfortunately, that whole thing is just the tip of the big sad iceberg. The pilot for Rise is absolutely stuffed with characters and tragedy, an escargot of gritty small-town woes that quickly moves from overwhelming to just plain ludicrous.

Within the first episode we’re introduced to, amongst many others, a young musical loving closeted homosexual boy with strict religious parents and a sister with Down syndrome, a good natured teen in the foster system who has been sleeping in the theatre to escape the home, a sullen-yet-gifted performer whose parents are struggling through infidelity, and a shy Latinx singer who dreams of getting out of this town. At the heart of the musical is the star football player who just wants to sing, a weirdly serious homage to Troy Bolton.

There’s a trans character who seems to pop up to deliver lines relating only to their trans journey — we first see them when they let the group know about their preferred pronouns, disappearing entirely until it’s time for them to use the men’s changing room. On the one hand, it’s great that Rise is seeking out representation and diverse stories on the screen — but there’s something slightly patronising about the sheer number of capital ‘I’ issues being served to us at one time.

It seems like every character ticks off a million boxes in a game of middle American tragedy bingo, forcing us to immediately feel the melancholy, the sadness, the overwhelming middle American realness of it all. Unfortunately, instead of delivering, it almost becomes a parody.

High School Musical, But Not Fun

Putting the producers behind Friday Night Lights and Hamilton together almost seems like a match made in heaven. But right from the first episode, the drama in Rise feels contrived.

Friday Night Lights was an odd beast, a cult TV show that created a high art drama out of a football narrative. It managed to cleverly establish that high school football was important — dang important, at least to the town and its citizens. A million essays have been written on the precise alchemy that managed to get an audience of prestige TV-loving elites to care about football towns.

But Rise struggles to make the audience believe that the weirdly expensive production of a musical is vital to the town (they asked for USD$14,000 for a musical at one point???). Heck, it struggles to even make you believe it’s a good idea.

Ted Moseby basically steals the job of running the musical from the hardworking Rosie Perez midway through the rehearsal of Grease, forcing everyone to change to Spring Awakening because it’s somehow more “elevated”, despite the entire conservative town hating his pretentious play about homosexuality, self harm and atheism.

In fact, one of the weirdest leaps the show makes is earnestly pitting art against sport, which is mostly evidenced through awkward speeches that talk nebulously about the importance of expressing yourself and creating, and casting football as something soulless in response. In the first two episodes, we’re delivered a hundred moist speeches about the importance of art, which makes you yearn for just one terse “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” from Coach Taylor.

It seems like each character has been given a lucky-dip of tragic backstories instead of believable narratives.

A Bad Milkshake Full Of Good Ingredients

The thing about Rise is that it’s not all terrible. It has plenty of the same ingredients that made Friday Night Lights great and the cast are generally pretty good, especially the younger, school-aged actors.

It’s also one of those rare shows where the actors genuinely look like they’re in high school. But Moseby is no Coach Taylor, and Robbie Thorne struggles to reach a Matt Saracen-level of escalated sympathy. Perhaps he could in the right circumstances.

Unfortunately, in the first three episodes at least, those circumstances do not come along. The show reaches for the moments of poignancy, melancholy and profundity that Friday Night Lights managed to achieve, but Rise fails to get lift-off — and it’s these strives for greatness that highlight how far it falls short. Perhaps the show will be a hit among people who never watched its predecessor, which is fine.

Rise isn’t necessarily a terrible show on its own, but it does let down its much more successful family dynasty.

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Rise is currently streaming on Stan.

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Patrick Lenton is an author and staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.