How Hard Can It Be For 'Friday Night Lights' To Rustle Up Some Background Mexicans?
When the producers of critically acclaimed but struggling™ NBC drama Friday Night Lights needed to find a suitable replacement for Mexico for an upcoming episode set in our friendly, NAFTA-compliant neighbors to the south, they chose that of Brownsville, TX—a 91% Latino community bordering the Rio Grande. As reported by the Brownsville Herald, however, a casting call seeking Mexican-American extras turned up scant few hopefuls. It's a disappointment producers are blaming on the rain:
As a sudden wave of thunderstorms rolled through Brownsville Tuesday, staff with the Los Angeles-based, On Location Casting shook their heads in disappointment.
The crew, a casting director and assistant, flew into Brownsville Monday in hopes of finding extras to cast on the NBC series, "Friday Night Lights." Only a handful of TV hopefuls showed up for the audition.
"As soon as I saw the gray clouds I thought, 'OK, people are not going to come out in this weather'," said Tina Kerr, extras casting director for On Location Casting.
"We just have to hope it's not like this when we're filming."
Skeptical of the bad weather excuse is the Guanabee blog: Citing Census statistics that ranked Brownsville as "the most impoverished city in the nation with more than 40 percent of the city's 171,000 residents living below the poverty line," they wonder how a little moisture could have been all it took to discourage residents from answering the casting call. We strongly suspect the poor showing was simply the result of the casting department not adequately getting the word out; alternatively, it may also have been a case of the industry-savvy locals closely following the seismic power shifts at the network, and being all too aware that Kevin Reilly's departure didn't bode well for the fate of his unwatched pet project. Brownsville's day players might have instead opted to hold out for a more dependable paycheck, such as a background gig on NBC 'Rock Star' Ben Silverman's upcoming adaptation of Columbian whore-augmentation telenovela hit, Without Breasts There is No Paradise.
