"Friday Night Lights": Watch It!

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Published: November 8, 2007 at 03:01 AM GMT
Last Updated: November 8, 2007 at 03:01 AM GMT

By Ed Martin

Critics everywhere are worried about the future of Friday Night Lights. NBC's decision to move the show to Fridays for its second season seems to have resulted in an even more problematic performance for this ratings challenged show. If the Writers Guild of America strike continues for several weeks or months and leads to prolonged pre-emptions for this already vulnerable series the end result could be catastrophic.

Friday Night Lights certainly appears to have the support of the network. Asked about the future of the show at a Newhouse School of Syracuse University breakfast in New York City last week, NBC Universal president and chief executive officer Jeff Zucker remarked, "I love all my children equally, but Friday Night Lights is the best show on television. We are doing everything we can for it and we are totally committed to it. We'll evaluate at the end of the season and make a decision, but we want to do everything we can to support it."

I have always been a very vocal advocate of this fine series, but I have been deeply troubled by its performance this season. At the risk of facing the wrath of television critics across the land, I think one problem Lights is having this fall is its storytelling. Unlike its sublime freshman season, which movingly mined the emotional underpinnings and dramatic minutia of small town life, Lights' sophomore year has thus far offered up a largely uncharacteristic mix of stories that seem not to be drawn from real life at all. At the very least, the storytelling has comprised the characters as we came to know and love them last season.

Some examples:

At the exciting finale of season one, Eric Taylor, the high school football coach and quietly heroic everyman at the heart of the show, was recruited to coach the team at fictional Texas Methodist University in Austin, several hundred miles away from Dillon, the setting for the show. At the same time, Eric and his loving wife Tami learned that they were going to have a baby. Cut to the opener of season two, and Eric is living and working in Austin while a very pregnant Tami and their teenage daughter Julie carry on back in Dillon. While I could accept Taylor leaving his beloved Dillon Panthers in the interest of career advancement, it seemed wholly unbelievable to me that he and Tami would agree to live so far apart at a time when she needed him the most -- including the first few weeks after the birth of their baby. Tami suffered without Eric at home, as did the increasingly rebellious Julie. In reality, wouldn't a man in Eric's position have insisted that his wife and daughter pack their bags and move with him to Austin? It's not like Dillon has all that much to offer. Young Julie may not have wanted to move, but who is supposed to make the big life-changing decisions in a family, the parents or the children?

In the most controversial narrative development of the season, the dim but sweet Landry Clarke, who fell in love with town tart Tyra Collette after she was assaulted last season, accidentally killed Tyra's assailant when the guy attacked her a second time. Rather than call the authorities -- including Landry's dad, a Dillon police officer -- Landry and Tyra dumped the body in a river, something the freakish kids in River's Edge (or any daytime drama) might do, but not the boys and girls in Friday Night Lights! Then Tyra fell as hard for Landry as he had for her, and they became lovers.

Former Panthers quarterback Jason Street, who was paralyzed on the field at the start of the series, recently went to Mexico to investigate a controversial medical procedure involving stem cells from a shark that he believed would allow him to walk again. Somehow, Jason came up with $10,000 cash to pay for the treatment (which he eventually decided not to get). How could any teenager anywhere, let alone an average kid in an economically strapped town like Dillon, get his hands on ten grand? One of the strong points of this series is that, unlike almost every other character-driven drama on television, these people have very little money and manage to find joy in life without it!

Another gripe: Cheerleader Lyla Garrity, who was torn between Jason and his best bud Tim Riggins last season, this year has become a thoroughly uninteresting born-again Christian, totally undercutting one of the most interesting narrative conflicts on the show's canvas, and one of the hottest.

And one more: Soulful nice guy Matt Saracen, who gave this show much of its heart in year one, has been criminally underutilized this fall in a story that finds him at odds with teammate Smash Williams, also underserved.

These stories do not reflect the show that we all came to cherish last season. Instead, they suggest that the show-runners and network executives who are overseeing it this year have little understanding about why people are so passionate about this program.

On the upside, the humbling talent of virtually every actor on the show has kept Lights in fine form despite its story issues. Every last one of them continues to rise above the general material they are given and make it memorable. As portrayed by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, Eric and Tami are still the most realistic married couple on television, and the sexiest, too. The unassuming Jesse Plemons remains singularly sensational as Landry, a character who barely existed in the background at the start of the series but is now at the center in primary storylines. His scenes with the equally fine Adrianne Palicki, as Tyra, and Glenn Morshower, the actor who portrays his father, are reason enough to watch the show. Who can forget the scene in which Landry's dad asked the drop-dead gorgeous Tyra what she sees in his decidedly ordinary son? That is writing and character development on the order of The Sopranos.

Last week featured yet another gut-wrenching sequence in which Tyra, under orders from Officer Clarke to stay away from his son, harshly broke up with Landry at a party following his first game as a Dillon Panther, in which he excelled. Landry was enjoying the best night of his life until Tyra cut him down. It appears that in this week's episode there will be a confrontation between Landry and his dad about that body in the river.

Also outstanding is young Aimee Teegarden as Julie. In her most memorable sequence this season, Julie one night lied to her mother about her plans and rudely bailed on boyfriend Matt to sneak off to a bar and watch her new crush perform with his band, only to see first hand that he had a girlfriend. Forced to call home for a ride in the wee hours of the morning and admit to her deceit, Julie had to simultaneously deal with her dad's anger as well as her own heartbreak. Chandler and Teegarden played their highly emotional scenes to exquisitely modulated perfection.

The good news is many of the unfulfilling storylines that may have worked against Lights this fall are coming to an end. Coach Taylor has quit the Austin gig and returned home full time, Jason has given up on the shark injections and it appears that the Landry and Tyra may soon move beyond the body dumping. Obviously, somebody somewhere has stepped up to straighten out the show.

So far, Friday Night Lights has survived every challenge that has come its way, from bad time periods to outrageous Emmy snubs to compromising storylines. Now, let us hope it can withstand the stranglehold of the strike.

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