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.
here ye here ye!
why are people so worried about the direction it’s going when its still so good? people. enjoy it for the ride! (the same can be said for Pushing Daisies)
[...] I have evangelized this show (often ineloquently) till I’ve been blue in the fingers. Accusations of a sophomore slump, dummying down and pandering to demographics have all fallen on my deaf ears. Friday Night Lights was the show of 2007 here at Mikey Likes TV. [...]