New Austin-filmed show goes back to high school circa 2000

You might have heard that Season 5 of "Friday Night Lights," which films in and around Austin this summer, might be the show's last. There's been no official word from NBC, but it seems as if the fictional denizens of Dillon, Texas, might soon be saying their final farewells.

It's bad enough that Zach Gilford and Minka Kelly are long gone, but how much fun will it be to walk down to Jo's Hot Coffee on South Congress Avenue if there's not at least a remote chance of running into Kyle Chandler? OK, it'll still be fun, but you get my point.

Fear not, celebrity stalkers, if Noah Hawley gets his way, you'll have a new cast of characters to hound for autographs and pose with for impromptu cell phone photos. Hawley, the former "Bones" staff writer and creator of the New York cop drama "The Unusuals," which ran on ABC for 10 episodes in 2009, is in Austin shooting a new pilot for that network. And if it gets picked up, it'll film here, too.

Hawley's hour-long drama, "Generation Y," sports a large ensemble cast and has plenty of flashbacks, but the premise couldn't be farther from that other time-tripping ABC property, "Lost." And the show's not much like "Friday Night Lights," either, despite a recent casting call for football players, cheerleaders and marching band members. Here's the premise: A documentary crew follows members of an Austin high school's senior class in the year 2000. Ten years later, that crew returns to see what became of those students.

"It's kind of a character mystery," Hawley explains. "We meet a kid who's an overachiever in high school, and then when you see him at 28 he's dropped out and he's a beach bum. We use the documentary format to figure out what happened, you know?"

If it seems odd that there's already a great deal of nostalgia for the '90s, Hawley explained why it shouldn't. "Here it was, the year 2000. You had a huge budget surplus, you had relative world peace and your biggest political crisis was an extramarital affair in the White House," he said. "So here we are 10 years later and it's just a sea change. The last 10 years have been pretty monumental."

Hawley has assembled an able cast, including Daniella Alonso ("One Tree Hill," "Friday Night Lights"); Keir O'Donnell (the odd brother from "Wedding Crashers"); and Austin's own Mehcad Brooks (late of "True Blood" and blissfully free from canceled "The Deep End," Brooks is the son of American-Statesman editorial writer Alberta Phillips) to play the same characters in both time periods.

"I thought about casting two actors for each role, but then I just thought, you know, it's really difficult when you have nine characters and you're trying to introduce them to people and every time you switch time periods it's a different actor," Hawley said, referring to the potential series as a real actors' showcase. "I think it's too confusing."

Listening to Hawley extol the virtues of Austin, it seems as if the setting might be "Generation Y's" de facto 10th lead character. Even location scouting during the great Austin blizzard of 2010 in February and filming during SXSW didn't dampen the New York native's praise for our city. Hawley's wife is from the area, so he's spent plenty of non-snowy, non-SXSW time here. And he said that although filming in Austin was a bit more expensive than some of his other options, it wasn't hard to persuade the bean counters to shoot here.

"I wanted to choose a place that was not L.A. or New York, that felt like it had a real cultural life to it," Hawley said, explaining why he set the pilot here. "It needed to be someplace ... that you're going to want to come back to after college. And someplace where if you have smart, creative, ambitious people and they want to make their mark on the world, you know, you have to believe that it's a place that they would go, and Austin certainly feels like that place to me."

The company has filmed at locations all over town, including the Driskill Hotel and a limestone quarry in North Austin that stood in for a military site that served as the backdrop for what Hawley called "Mehcad's big day." On Monday, the cast and crew were shooting on the Capitol grounds — a flashback protest scene taking place during the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election. Hawley and company will insert these scenes, "Forrest Gump"-style, into actual news footage from the time period.