Mikey Likes TV

The mere thought that this was the last I’ll ever get of Friday Night Lights hurts too much to bear, so I’ll abandon speculation until after the rundown. Friday’s episode, “May the Best Man Win,” wasn’t a remotely fitting end to this season (much less the series). It offered a bittersweet resolution to the Smash dilemma and opened up a cliffhanger-y pregnancy storyline for Jason Street, but the majority of the episode deviated to two uncharacteristically comedic storylines of gentlemen vying for the affections of two of Dillon’s loveliest ladies. It wasn’t as phenomenal as some of the recent weeks’ episodes but definitely another solid offering from the greatest drama on television.

Well, we last left Smash in a situation I prognosticated as a bit more dire. TMU is dunzo, but it appears that other colleges are still quite interested. They may not live up to the expectations Smash had set for himself, but there seems to be a solid sense of community at Whitmore College, and it beats the living hell out of a mortifying dead end in Arena Football or working at that damn ice cream parlor. Call me crazy, but there still seems to be a bit of ambiguity around this matter. Smash may have found the place he really belongs, and he may just be cooling his heels until some later planned rectification of the TMU debacle.

It seems like poor Jason Street has been rolling around in the shadows since the beginning of the season. He had epiphany after epiphany, and despite his efforts to get out of Dillon, is now working as a car salesman for Buddy Garrity. What better way to vault him back out of obscurity than a pregnancy scare? Though it is anything but scary for Street, who thinks that he inseminated the boring waitress by the sheer grace of God. She wanted an abortion but seemed to buckle under the pressure of a handsome cripple. If there really is another baby headed to Dillon, may I suggest casting one without alien eyes?

Elsewhere… Riggins is not taking no for an answer – especially not when his competition is an uber-yuppie born-again who, as we learned last week, is deeply afraid of sex. Matt Czurchy is a great guy, but he kind of breaks the suspension of disbelief on Friday Night Lights. I’ve already seen him on too many shows. It doesn’t much matter though, because Lyla can’t possibly deny Riggins for much longer. The goofy romantic story between Eric, Tami and her high school sweetheart was a bit more gratuitous. It was really just an opportunity for executive producer Peter Berg to finally show off his acting skills. It had also been a least a month since the last really good dude fight.

Back to the matter of the show’s future, here is what we know: With the end of the writer’s strike, likelihood that FNL will be one of the series to resume production is of the slim to none-ish variety. Some are reporting that there is a chance, but I’d take that with a considerable amount of salt. As for a return next season, poorly media-trained NBC entertainment honcho Ben Silverman is not optimistic – he is about 30 Rock, and I can’t say I care a hell of a lot. So what can be done to save FNL? Probably nothing, but as this week’s return of Jericho proves, anything is possible in this changing TV landscape. I generally don’t participate in these efforts, but my faith in FNL is enough to motivate me. Best Week Ever is currently the hub of all things save-our-showy, so I encourage you all to check it out.

The season may be over, but I’ll definitely keep the updates coming as the efforts continue and the fate of Friday Night Lights becomes clearer.

Just one week off from the season’s unceremonious finale (my heart, it hurts!), and pretty much everyone on Friday Night Lights is an emotional wreck. Saracen, fresh off his live-in girlfriend’s abrupt exodus from the country, is drowning his sorrows with Riggins in all sorts of seedy hillbilly dives (also frequented by born-agains, of course). Smash’s post-high school plans are falling under question thanks to his very public mishandling of a racially charged feud with some jackholes two towns over. Tyra is coming to realize that her rebuffing of Landry’s affections may have been a tad premature. And Julie… poor Julie further solidified her status as Dillon’s resident “Dawn” by once again overreacting to her poor mother’s good intentions. The night was filled with emotional breakdown after emotional breakdown, but where did they fall on the sympathy scale? Let’s start with the least tragic and work our way up.

Tyra Collette – The World’s Smallest Violin
Come on. As if that charming albino was ever going to choose a pixie-haired early 90s reject over the hotness that is Tyra. The revelation of her Landry love was long overdue, and the payoff was inevitable.

Julie Taylor – That Stain Will Never Come Out
Sure, her insecurity is legitimate. Her dad has his team, her mom has her team and they both have that bug-eyed baby to fawn over. There isn’t a whole lot of time in the Taylor house to dote on the unathletic, adolescent first born. Julie’s whining and angsty theatrics, though warranted and completely pivotal to her family dynamic, are still damn annoying.

Matt Saracen – Left at the Altar
My attention isn’t the only thing that’s abandoned poor Saracen this season. During a drunken confrontation with Coach Taylor, Matt went through the laundry list of people who’ve left him hanging. His father, his girlfriend, his coach, his other girlfriend, his grandmother’s lucidity… it just goes on and on. I’m wept a little, but mostly out of guilt. I’ve been so preoccupied with other characters this season – I accidentally left him too.

Brian “Smash” Williams – Cancer of the Puppy
If Matt’s bathroom breakdown didn’t dampen your ducts, Smash’s locker room speech and ensuing sob-fest probably did the trick. He lost his scholarship to TMU after he was suspended for the rest of the season, and I think he may have been the only one who was surprised. The real tragedy of the Friday Night Lights book and film was the futility of small town sports heroes. They have a lifetime’s worth of praise poured over them before their 18th birthdays, but then they end up going nowhere. The show has given us a taste of this with some of Dillon’s adults and with Jason Street’s catastrophic misfortune, but none of the current Panthers have ever faced the highly undramatic reality that playing ball after high school just isn’t always in the cards.

Smash’s fate is anything but sealed. Considering the unjust origins of his current situation, I really doubt he won’t find his way to TMU somehow. But when exactly will that happen? This Friday is it, folks… all they flippin’ wrote! After that it’s just the gaping abyss of uncertainty over a third season. 2008’s fairly nonexistent pilot season lends me to believe that FNL will probably see a junior year, but we won’t know for some time.

I will not accept the fact that Friday Night Lights is wavering in its realism until one of the many scenes at the Dillon Applebee’s is punctuated with a sassy comment from a Red Delicious voiced by Wanda Sykes. That said, last week’s tornado and this week’s thievery coming so hot on the heels of the insta-resolution murder plot is not doing much for my faith in the story supervisors. What makes that crying shame a little less teary is that the bread and butter of Friday Night Lights is not suffering for the more sensational storylines. The interactions between characters and the gradual developments in their relationships are strong as ever – just set against some commercial-friendly clips of firearms and CGI funnel clouds.

So last week poor Tim Riggins was finally on the up and up. He was no longer living with an overweight, nudist meth dealer, and he and Coach Taylor had found a symbiotic father/son rapport – something both of them desperately needed. Then, in a moment of true chivalry, Riggins pulled a slimy sophomore off of an intoxicated and lovelorn Julie and snuck her home so that her parents wouldn’t find out what a train wreck she’s become. Too bad Eric walked in right as Riggins was tucking the unconscious tart in and assumed he was taking advantage of her. He kicked him out of the house, and gave him one of his signature scary looks. The shunning continued this week, with the worst part being that Julie knew exactly what happened and was just too ashamed to tell her father. After a particularly tense half-hour, she did. Coach Taylor went to offer Riggins his mea culpas, but only after the sorrow had driven Tim to steal three grand from his drug-dealing former landlord. Bad, bad decisions. There was also the small matter of the game, the rival coach’s awkward breakdown, and Smash’s decision to go to college at conveniently located TMU (you know, should FNL get a third season), but the focus of these 2008 episodes has been on Riggins and Eric.

There’s no doubt that Riggins’ latest screw-up is going to frustrate me in upcoming episodes, but his lost boy complex makes it kind of excusable and a much easier pill to swallow than this season’s other curveballs. No, the only thing that will truly piss me off on Friday Night Lights is if they continue to completely ignore Jason Street. At least have him wheel by in a scene or two!

People are fickle. People are so damn fickle. This is why I am officially done reading what they have to say about Friday Night Lights. I disagree with almost all of them, and there are some folks in life that anger me to the point where I just have to ignore them. Overreact-ers to FNL Season 2 have officially joined vegans, Australians and Pepsi drinkers on the nefarious list of people I will never understand.

Now let’s take a moment to discuss subtlety. In all facets of art, subtlety is something frequently attempted, rarely achieved and sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, perfected. Friday Night Lights accomplished the latter in their first season, and, in doing so, royally screwed itself out of being anything but a disappointment to the majority of viewers in its sophomore year. They could have continued telling the story the way they had and risked boring the audience and stifling creatively, or they could take advantage of the fact that they’re a still just a TV show (yes, please keep that in mind) by changing the formula and taking more risks. They were truly damned either way, and now they’re under the inevitable fire that comes with deviating from the norm.

So what in particular warrants all of this hullabaloo? Increasingly snotty teenagers and a long distance relationship are high on the list, but it’s the bizarre Fried Green Tomatoes-ish accidental manslaughter/cover-up that’s really driving people up the wall. It is possibly the least predictable move they could have made. A means to drive two very different characters together, it doesn’t seem like the most natural choice, but it has served its purpose. The vagueness of the actual circumstances and the infrequency with which they choose to address it have also left it on the backburner. Like a disjointed Venn diagram, it doesn’t have any effect on the other stories or the show as a whole. Only a show with the style and skill of Friday Night Lights could make such a dramatic move and then act is if it were really nothing. Some watchers see this as a betrayal of the subtlety and realism that defined the first season. But real life is generally not as engaging as it was on the show last year. Real life is usually boring.

Reading criticism is fun. It can open a dialogue, help us better understand why we like the things we do or just help us kill time while we’re pretending to work. But when people are overly critical of something we love, it can be depressing and frustrating. Sometimes we’re better off looking the other way. Friday Night Lights is certainly different this season, and maybe it’s not as good as it was this time last year. The fact of the matter is that it would have to go pretty far downhill before it wasn’t still one of the most compelling things on television. And I don’t think that’s anything we need to worry about anytime soon.

The devastating loss of Veronica Mars only truly sank in during the last month when her name was notably absent from all of the talk of the new season. It seemed like none of the 700 series on my DVR roster could replace what she took with her, what I really love about television: perfectly executed prime time drama. And while some new shows come close, and sporadic cable offerings come even closer, there is still one show on television this fall that scratches my itch for blissful TV nirvana: Friday Night Lights.

It’s quite possibly the greatest thing since sliced bread (and by “sliced bread,” I mean Buffy, Veronica and Battlestar Galactica). After a successful season on and off the field, we pick them up again this evening, eight months later, in their new, more logical (if slightly annoying) Friday night timeslot. With all that time passed, things are not where we left them. Our protagonists are as physically and emotionally scattered as you could imagine. Characters have such complicated and interweaving relationships that you would think the show demanded the attention you normally reserve for French cinema, but it’s almost palate-cleansing in its crisp simplicity. It’s the easiest, most satisfying show to watch, and you can check out my full review of the season premiere over at Metromix.

FNL is not above criticism though. The season opener, while awesome, has an uncharacteristic plot twist towards the end of the episode. To be as vague as possible, it’s a little too I Know What You Did Last Summer. But if Friday Night Lights completely avoided the traps of high school TV melodrama in their first season, who’s to say they can’t embrace them a little in the much-deserved second? As long as they execute them with the quality we’ve grown accustomed to, I see nothing wrong with it.

Friday Night Lights airs Fridays at 9pm on NBC