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RSSPremiereWatch: "Friday Night Lights" (On DirecTV)
Friday Night Lights is back! Sortta! If you have DirecTV, at least, one of the most adored, least watched shows on television returned on Wednesday (Oct. 1).
If you don't have DirecTV, Friday Night Lights will make it to NBC in three months or so. Or you could just go online and illegally download it from one of the dozens of places where it will be available starting tomorrow. I'm not recommending that sort of cyber-theft, especially if you happen to have a Nielsen box in your living room. Actually, if you have a Nielsen box, go ahead and steal the show, just make sure you also leave your TV on for the NBC airings. Oh and how about trying out Chuck while you're at it?
All kidding aside, stealing television shows off of the Internet is wrong, wrong, wrong and if I didn't have DirecTV in the office, I'd be forced to do it myself.
For future reference, these recaps will, presumably, be for thieves and DirecTV subscribers and they will contain spoilers. You've been warned.
To say that I hated the second season of Friday Night Lights would be an overstatement. To say that after loving the first season as much as any show in the past decade, I was disappointed by nearly every part of it might be appropriate. At its worst, Friday Night Lights is still a relatively observant drama with some truly special performances (Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler in particular, but also Brad Leland, Liz Mikel, Zach Gilford and Adrianne Palicki among others) and a bit more authenticity than One Tree Hill or 90210.
Wednesday's DirecTV premiere managed to ignore nearly every aspect of last season. Nobody mentioned Killer Landry, Saracen's sexy nurse fling, Tami Taylor's depression, that ruffian Lila Garrity brought home from juvie, Julie Taylor's inappropriate crushes and boyfriends, Riggins' dangerous associations with a crystal meth dealer or Jason Street's hypothetical love child. Lila's flirtation with born-again Christianity, which may have been one of last season's most sensitively handled storylines (or "least exploitative") seems also to have been jettisoned. Wow. That's a ton of misguided plotlines for just one season.
Friday Night Lights isn't exactly starting from scratch, but it's definitely wiped the slate mostly clean. The result was a premiere episode that was better than most of last season, but not close to the quality of the first set of episodes.
So where do we find ourselves one episode into the third season?
Coach Taylor is in trouble. They're only one year removed from a State title, but the residents of Dillon are already antsy about Coach Taylor and he's feeling the pressure.
Tami Taylor is the principal. Sigh. Large Texas high school with serious financial problems hires a first-year guidance counselor with zero administrative experience to run things? That sound you hear is me rolling my eyes. And yes, my eye-rolling produces an audible sound. I'm odd like that. As the new principal, Tami is SHOCKED to discover that her teachers are underpaid, the textbooks are out of date, the air-conditioners don't work and an internal revolt is brewing. She's also SHOCKED to discover that while the general populace suffers, the athletic department is rolling in dough, which shouldn't seem so odd to her given that her hubby might still be the athletic director. The real question: Is Tami still coaching girls' volleyball?
Tyra and Landry are on a break. The romantic bonds forged by semi-accidental manslaughter appear to be temporarily strained. Don't worry, Tyra/Landry 'shipper. They seem friendly and we suspect Tyra will be sneaking out of Landry's window again soon enough. Landry's still playing football for some reason. Tyra is realizing that the 1.9 GPA from her freshman year may hold her back. In fact, in order to get her overall GPA up to a 3.5, she'd have to get a 6.4 for her senior year, which both Landry and her obnoxious guidance counselor think is unlikely. The real question: Is Tyra still playing volleyball? And why didn't she mention her athletic stardom to her stupid guidance counselor.
Lila and Riggins are back. Dillon's favorite bad-boy fullback (now a bad-boy running back) and good-girl/bad-girl are dating again. Actually, they're not dating, but they're having sex on the sly, which ought to count for something. Unfortunately, Riggins yearns to have Lila publically acknowledge their love, while Lila yearns for some legitimate explanation for why she appears to still be in high school. As Billy Riggins says, "She went to bed with Jesus and woke up with you. Jesus. You. You're a rebound from Jesus. You can't compete with that." The real question: Are either Lila or Riggins still hosting a Christian talk-radio show?
Smash got smashed. Seriously injured in a postseason game that we never saw last year, Smash lost his college scholarship, lost .5 seconds off of his 40 time and now figures that the rest of his life will be spent working at the Alamo Freeze. Just as Tami encouraged Tyra never to give up, Coach Taylor is encouraging Smash to keep on trying. The real question: Who knew Smash played squash? Or racquetball?
There's a new QB in town. Matty Saracen is still the starting quarterback for the Dillon Panthers, even though he appeared to be horrible in every single game was saw last season. He's about to be pushed for playing time by a freshman phenom whose dad is so rich he can afford to deliver smoothies to Panthers practices by the truck-load. The thing you have to know is that Zach Gilford has a busy movie career, so this episode may be a sign of things to come in terms of just how little he had to do with anything in the episode. The real question: Where is Ray "Voodoo" Tatum when you need him?
A few quick thoughts on the episode:
So did anybody watch the Friday Night Lights premiere? What'd you think? If you're a fan of the show, how do you plan on watching? Will you DirecTV it? Wait for NBC? Or BitTorrent the sucker?
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Zap2it Twitter Talk 
Yay!!! It's back. Thanks for a great write-up...I couldn't agree more. Loved seeing Grandma Saracen in the stands at the end. It's the tiny details that makes this show so special.
Finally, my DirecTV subscription is paying off.
There were a few details (or more likely gaps in my memory) that pulled me out of the show a little - wasn't Smash suspended for the end of the season? And didn't we have some form of closure with him attending that small school to play ball?
I understand what you're saying about the football writing inconsistencies. In fact, I thought he was going to have the new hotshot repeatedly hand off to irk the dad (and yes, it would've been the sporting thing to do). On the other hand, the racquet ball/squash scene was well conceived because recovering from a knee injury is all about regaining lateral movement, which their game proved Smash still has.
The show reminds me a bit of an old favorite of mine, The White Shadow, where they introduced new characters each season to replace the ones who graduated. Perhaps they're planning the same here.
As for Smash's mom, he does have a younger sister and if they start to feature her as a student at Dillon High, they can easily keep the mom in the picture.
Regardless, great to have the show back and nice to watch without commercials.
I don't have DirecTV!! So I can't wait till the show comes back to NBC. Thanks for the recap!!
Best show on tv! With great acting from all the actors. (I have a huge crush on Julie Taylor.) cant wait till they reply it on nbc. But im afraid the ratings wont be good, and will be suprised if it comes back for a fourth season. Which is sad cause there is sooo many sucky shows that get to stay on.
I watched the premiere and can't wait for next week's episode! I hope the run this week's again because I missed spots and need to get filled in.
Smash was suspended for only the first game of the playoffs last season. When this season started they hurt his knee in the second game of the playoffs. Because of that, the small college that was going to take him took his scholarship away.
One of the best lines in the show was from Coach Taylor was at the after game party telling the new hotshot QB's dad after he thanked him for letting him get some snaps in the game - "We give all the other players a chance to play once the game is out of hand".....
Thanks DirectTV for picking up part of the production cost for this season. Smart move!
Haven't watched it, but I will say that I actually liked Santiago, Lila's born again storyline, and Street's accidental baby. However, I've never liked the idea of Riggins and Lila together. I find him to be a good character, but not a very good guy. And their relationship (first a melodramatic love triangle, then a will they/won't they) has benn too soapy for me.
Tyra is made of awesome! I wanted to throttle the guidance counselor when he told her to apply to an appropriate school. I was so glad that she came back at the end of the episode with a list of schools to apply to. Colleges love stories of students who came back from academic troubles to be solid students who use their brains. With a good essay, she could spin her bad academic performance and get into any of the schools she chose.
On another note, I love Tami. But I agree wholeheartedly that she is a smart woman who should know how the money flows in a sports-minded school. She must have gone to college. I might be biased with the crazy amounts of money spent at my alma mater (University of Oregon) on athletics, but I can't imagine that it is much different at most schools. Athletics brings in the $$ so it is the financial focus.
DANIEL: WOO-HOO! Friday Night Lights is back, and I'm glad you're doing the recaps! I agree with you 100% that the second season of FNL seemed to be so over the top with the LANDRY MURDER!, Tim's roommate/drug dealer dilemma, Matt having an affair with the home nurse, etc. I commented on the FNL blog last year that I felt that NBC must have pressured the show's writers to come up with more risque or outrageous storylines to boost ratings. I really didn't like how FNL was turning into a typical trashy teen drama because I always felt that it was supposed to be a FAMILY drama.
I really liked the season premiere, as it seems they wanted to start off with a clean slate. No mention of murders, illegitimate babies, inappropriate relationships with teachers, nurses, etc. I agree that Coach Taylor and Tami are the heart of the show, so I thought it was fitting that they personally tried to help Tyra and Smash get into college.
I was so happy to find out that DirecTV would be showing new episodes, but I still had my criticisms. I agree that a large public high school wouldn't just hire a first year guidance counselor to be the new principal. What about picking the vice principal or a teacher who has been there for a long time? Anyway, I figure the writers had to come up with a reason how Tami's job could conflict with Eric and Julie's lives. Also, I highly doubt that the principal has full veto power to re-allocate a private donor's money from the athletic department to whatever resources that she wanted (she took Buddy's money for the Jumbo-tron and decided to use it for school supplies, text books, etc. As far as I know, public schools' budgets are tightly monitored and presided over by the districts school board, not individual principals, who could easily abuse the power and use the money to buy themselves a new car or something.
Another small nitpick is that Tim, Lyla and Tyra look like some of the OLDEST teenagers in TV history (Taylor Kitsch is 27, and Minka Kelly is 28 respectively). Seriously, they are starting to look as old as Andrea Zuckerman and Steve Sanders from 90210! ;-) It's hard to believe that Tim, Lyla and Tyra were supposed to be sop****res in the first season, considering Jason and Smash have already graduated. At least Julie and Landry look more like actual teenagers. Maybe Tim, Lyla and Tyra were held back a few years in kindergarten or something?
Good episode-definitely better than most of last season,but why doesn't anyone in the town care about all the underage drinking going on,especially with Riggins?