Entertainment

FIRST AND GOAL

“Friday Night Lights” may be the first TV show to offer viewers a money-back guarantee.

The favorite new show of the intellectual set is putting out its first season DVD tomorrow with the unprecedented pledge that you’ll like the show – or NBC will refund the $29.98 suggested retail price.

It is only the latest push for the show that’s claim to fame has been a small corps of devoted and influential fans – and staying on the air despite less-than-stellar ratings during its first year.

The noise surrounding the release of the DVD tomorrow has some in the TV world wondering if “Friday Night Lights” may find the audience on video disc that has escaped it as a weekly show.

Comedian Dave Chappelle’s sketch show on Comedy Central was the first to pull off that kind of coup when his DVD became the best-selling comedy set of all time – after the show barely made a ripple in the weekly ratings.

One of the least-talked-about developments of the DVD era is the money certain types of TV series can make from disc sales – even without the broad support that most shows need to stay on the air.

Pre-release orders for “Lights” have already pushed it into the top-25 best-selling DVDs on Amazon.com, which also features several, rare, five-star reviews from viewers who watched the show on NBC.

Even though the package has no extras or commentary – only a 22-minute “making-of” mini-movie and 22 episodes – buzz around the Internet for the upcoming DVD has been going strong for a week.

James Fallows, a former editor of U.S. News & World Report, now living in China and blogging for The Atlantic magazine, last week wrote: “We left the U.S. before the series began and caught up with it only when visiting friends told us about it and bought a first-season [bootlegged] boxed set as a gift.”

Now, “I tell Chinese students that to understand the U.S. they should watch this rather than their current favorites: ’24’ and ‘Prison Break,’ ” he says.

If the money-back offer was intended to get media attention, it has worked.

Several newspapers have broken the DVD embargo and published early, glowing reviews.

“This is a phenomenally good series that you probably didn’t watch last season anyway,” wrote one Bay Area reviewer.

“Of course, the real point of putting ‘Friday Night Lights’ on DVD is to encourage more people to watch come Oct. 5,” the Washington Post wrote.

The show is about a small Texas town and its obsession with its high school football team.

The cast did not include a big name star. And without a recognizable face to put on the promos and billboards, NBC had a hard time promoting the show – which won the TV critics award for best new show anyway, beating out the more popular “Heroes.”