In 'All American,' High School Football Is Back On TV, As Is Taye Diggs

It's hard to make a show about high school football in 2018, even seven-plus years after the end of Friday Night Lights. FNL was so revered, so satisfying, so good, that a show that asks us to care about 17-year-old running backs faces a steep climb.

The CW's new drama is not that show. It is not that show by a long shot. Where was secretly about the adults a lot of the time, this really is about the kids. It's a solid, addictive, high-end high school soap, like the ones the CW (and Fox and, in its day, the WB) made into prime-time staples. Creator April Blair (who recently stepped down as showrunner), in fact, cited both and as influences when she talked about the show with critics earlier this year at the Television Critics Association press tour.