FNL isn’t just worth watching despite the time spent on the field; it’s so well crafted, you might even find yourself suppressing the urge to cheer out loud.

Set in the small town of Dillon, Texas, Friday Night Lights centers around a football coach, his family, his star players and their girlfriends. It follows the team’s struggle living up to the expectations of a town obsessed with their success; the cultural void of the semi-rural southwest providing little else for the townsfolk to get excited about. At first glance, it’s a show about the awful pressures of Texas high school football — boo-fucking-hoo. And it sounds like the exact opposite of something I’d want to watch.

See, I was the kid on the chess team. The kid who always wore headphones so he wouldn’t have to talk to the other kids on the bus, and gave anyone wearing a jersey a wide berth in the halls. To me, football players were people to be resented for getting so much undeserved attention, or at least avoided so as not to invite comparison of their physicality to my total lack thereof. Way more Freaks & Geeks than Friday Night Lights. But a handful of people whose opinions I respect (and who probably had similar high school experiences to mine) said this was a show worth checking out anyway. So lacking anything better to watch over a slow month, and because the first two seasons are available to stream directly from Netflix, I broke down and gave this jock chronicle a try.

Suddenly, despite never going to see a single high school football game, not caring much about sports in general, and being the polar opposite of the type of people in this backwater Texas town, I was completely sucked in. I was staying up late to squeeze in another episode, and if my final one for the night involved a nail-biting setback or heartbreaking loss for the team, I’d have a hard time getting to sleep afterward. It’s safe to say I went from assuming I wouldn’t care about this show to absolutely loving it in only a few episodes, obsessively powering through until I was caught up three seasons later. So for anyone like me who’s still hesitant, I owe you this review to explain why Friday Night Lights is worth watching, just like you owe it to yourselves to give it a try.

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The reason Friday Night Lights excels as a television drama is the way it works at every turn to make its characters real, to make you care about them as people first, no matter your preconceptions of football jocks or small town life. The players aren’t just popular bullies riding high on their celebrity. The coach isn’t just their hard-ass after-school drill sergeant. The fans aren’t just dumb hicks with nothing better to do on Friday nights.

In fact, the episodes wisely spend most of their time on the characters’ lives outside of the weekly games, delving into so many other issues, it’s hardly about football at all. Every character is part of a tight-knit community of families struggling in their own way. Subplots about drug use, race relations, crumbling marriages, aging loved ones, and every manner of family tension get as much weight as whether or not the team wins or loses.  While one person’s dreams are crushed and have to be rebuilt, another gets a chance they never thought they’d get. It’s the time-tested formula for getting us to root for the underdogs by showing all the painful steps it took them to even have a shot at success.

But instead of a highly staged Hollywood comeback story with the usual schmaltzy pre-fab plot line, it’s an honest portrait of the small battles and minor victories real families face, on and off the field. Friday Night Lights is a healthy mix of tough dilemmas and playful friendships, where characters argue and make up and move on with their lives like actual human beings, minus the heavily music-supervised soundtrack of introspective Starbucks sampler tunes.

That genuine quality is helped along further by the presentation. The visual style is more documentary than blockbuster, and dialogue is primarily improvised and natural. Each actor speaks volumes in close-ups, humanizing their characters by wordlessly conveying what they wish they could say but aren’t quite able to  express. Every scene takes place in a real house, locker room, restaurant, or office that feels as lived in and worn out as you’d expect a modest Texas country town to be. All the gritty details, shaky camera movements and authentically awkward conversations combine to make it seem as if you’re spying on something really happening in small-town America, not just watching a show set there. It’s impossible to take your eyes off of.

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Making a football show that even former mathletes and drama club geeks can appreciate is an achievement in its own right, and Friday Night Lights deserves credit for that. But make no mistake: the show isn’t worth watching despite the time spent on the field. It’s so well crafted that you might even — like me — find yourself suppressing the urge to cheer out loud for the Dillon Panthers during the climax of a big game. Their ability to make you care about the outcome of a high school sporting event may be what proves Friday Night Lights isn’t just good, but great. It accomplishes what all the best fiction aspires to: it paints such a vivid world of characters that we empathize with the desires of people totally unlike ourselves.

Every kid on this team is finding solace in football, and for some, the team is all they really have. Most of the main characters, players or not, are essentially fatherless. The pitch-perfect Coach Taylor and his amazing wife, the real centers of the show, are these kids’ de facto models of strength and integrity. Even while dealing with their own family struggles, they maintain that strength for the people around them, and provide far more guidance than just tackling drills or academic counseling. Sure, they make mistakes too. But at the center of those two characters is compassion, and a desire to help these kids become the people they want to be, that any decent person can see and aspire to. Through them, we see the kids struggle and falter and get back up and keep going. So when they do, it all builds to one of the most satisfying dramas out there, and almost certainly the most sincere show on television right now.

That’s the point where no matter how you feel about rural Texas or high school sports, you start cheering for these kids and their families. When you get a pit in your stomach before they play a big game, it’s not because they’ve convinced you that football matters, but because the people on the field matter. You know it might not mean everything will work out for them, but you want so badly to see them succeed, even if only one night of the week, it’s hard to help but cheer along: Go Panthers.