If you’re not on the edge of your seat during the last 10 minutes of “Friday Night Lights” (8 tonight, NBC), you simply don’t have a pulse.

The final sequence in the premiere depicts the first game of the season for the Dillon Panthers, a Texas team that’s a perennial contender for the state championship.

The coach is new, the Panthers fall behind, and anyone who has ever attended a closely contested football game will recognize the sense of enraptured attention – shared by the crowd and the players – that “Friday Night Lights” so masterfully conveys in the closing minutes of the game.

This drama has a deep bench; it’s not only “inspired by” H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger’s enthralling 1990 book of the same name, but it also was directed by Peter Berg, an actor/director (“The Last Seduction,” “Chicago Hope”) who helmed a 2004 feature film based on the book. Berg’s feel for cinematic narrative is sure and subtle; he knows that the look on a tortured fan’s face says more than pages of dialogue and one long shot of a Hail Mary pass is more effective in silence than accompanied by a blaring soundtrack.

Few shows convey a sense of place more convincingly than “Friday Night Lights,” which is shot in Texas. Dillon is a town with one burger place for the high school kids, a strip mall with Applebee’s and the like, and not much else. Berg deftly portrays the wide-open spaces of this dusty, working-class town and the sense of claustrophobia that comes from not being able to escape your friends, neighbors or co-workers.

The cast of football players in “Lights” mostly look too old to be high schoolers, but that small flaw is not hard to overlook when the characters are etched so memorably right out of the gate. There’s the cocky runny back, “Smash,” who’s full of bravado and NFL dreams; the clean-cut, All American quarterback, who knows the entire town’s hopes rest on him but endures the pressure with gentlemanly grace; the outsider, a nervous second-string quarterback who lamely hits on a girl by telling her he’s gotten to hold the ball a few times during extra points.

The most compelling character is running back Tim Riggins, who is, on the surface, a wild man uninterested in anything but drinking beer and hurting other guys on the field. Without much in the way of dialogue, actor Taylor Kitsch conveys the anguish of a young man who has never been given the words to understand what he feels when things go badly.

The entire town of Dillon is populated by recognizable types that fall just short of stereotype; there’s the paunchy car dealer who unofficially runs the town, the local team boosters, for whom football is a religion and a sassy high schooler, Tyra, who is as risk-prone as her sometime boyfriend, Riggins.

Caught fooling around with another player, Tyra’s marched outside by the player’s no-nonsense mother: “I work at Planned Parenthood – you haven’t seen the last of me yet,” the mother snaps.

There are two problems with the mostly promising “Friday Night Lights”: The first has to do with the by-now overused conceit of the jiggly camera. A sense of motion and tension in camera movement is fine, but the series goes overboard in the use of jagged, jumping camera movement, to the point that it distracts from the fine acting and overall top-notch production values on display.

The other rests in “Lights”‘ depiction of life in Dillon: It may be too accurate to be enjoyable in the long run. In several scenes, we see the new Dillon coach, Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), bite his tongue as locals give him a never-ending stream of advice about the how to run the team, and the background noise of the show is the constant throb of talk-radio types ranting about this or that aspect of the Panthers.

Seeing Taylor constantly swallow that relentless pressure is realistic yet often uncomfortable to watch. A tightly wound man under a microscope is a fine subject for a film, but perhaps not for a TV show, unless there’s a chance for all that pressure to be released in some meaningful way.

Still, the show’s creators display many smart moves. They resist the temptation to make the show’s second episode conclude with yet another “big game” sequence, and they appear to know that the show rises or falls on what the players and coaches do off the field as well as on it.

It’d be giving too much away to reveal what happens to some key characters in the first two episodes, but the dramatic tension of the first two hours makes it clear the producers of “Friday Night Lights” have no need for a Hail Mary pass yet. This is one show that could, with the right kind of leadership, make it to the playoffs.