NBC Catches Upfronts Fever Early

Say this for Ben Silverman and the new NBC Administration: They practice what they preach.

Last fall, if you remember, NBC dedicated a whole week to going Green and the network forced all of its showrunners to to shoehorn in plotlines about solar power, hybrid automobiles and recycling.

Then on Wednesday (April 2), NBC jumped the gun on the upfront season by announcing a schedule that's heavy on recycling.

Silverman, Jeff Zucker and company have been nattering for weeks about how their year-round scheduling gambit and early upfront represented outside-of-the-box thinking, but does allegedly outside-of-the-box scheduling suddenly make inside-the-box programming seem more adventurous?

Not to my mind.

Check out NBC's three-tiered schedule over at Zap2it. It's too hard for me to feel like taking it night-by-night, but if you follow through after the bump, I'll go into a bit more depth on a few things.

Click through...

So yeah. NBC's outside-the-box programming includes a modern take on the King David story ("Kings"), an updated telling of the Camelot myth ("Merlin"), a revamped version of "Robinson Crusoe" ("Crusoe"), a fresh Jekyll-n-Hyde story ("My Own Worst Enemy"), a remake of "Knight Rider" that we already know sucks, a remake of an Australian comedy ("Kath & Kim"), a spin-off of an existing show ("The Office Spin-Off") and if "The Philanthropist" isn't "Brewster's Millions" meets "Batman" without the humor or the rubber suit, I don't know what it is.

My colleague Rick challenged my accusations of lack-of-originality by asking me what the truly original shows on TV are ("Pushing Daisies" and then... umm...). It isn't bad that so many of NBC's programs are rehashs. What's bad is that they're hyperliteral rehashes. There's the pitch where you say "It's *like* a hip retelling of..." and then there's the pitch where you say "It *is* a hip retelling of..." NBC has too many of the latter this season, while last season -- the last of Kevin Reilly's seasons at the helm -- had more of the former. I mean, "Chuck" is like a lot of stuff, but it isn't just a remake of the British format "Nigel."

[Incidentally, if anybody out there wants to work with me on "Nigel," the Britishification of "Chuck," I think it's a marketable idea.]

Everybody seems to agree that the best thing NBC did -- "best" for those of us who care about such things -- was bringing back "Friday Night Lights." I couldn't be more skeptical. For one thing, "FNL" is definitely reaching that "Veronica Mars: Season Three" point at which the hints of the show I once loved are tempered by the scars of corporate meddling and creative anemia. There's something to be said for a show leaving on top and "FNL" could have done that last year. Now? Not so much.

But even if you accept that renewing "FNL" is Silverman's gift to the TV critics, a way to avoid criticism for everything else he'll inevitably be criticized for, the actual mechanism of its return is dreadful. New episodes will begin airing on DirecTV in October, but DirecTV's exclusive window on the 13 episode third season will last until early 2009, an exclusivity that includes both NBC.com and Hulu. There aren't many "FNL" fans, but the fans there are are mighty dedicated. A few may even switch over to DirecTV to follow the show, though that seems like a really big commitment for 13 hours of programming. I thought about swapping to DirecTV last spring for the MLB Extra Innings package, but I decided that even for 162 Red Sox games, that was a lot of trouble. But for 13 hours? Not a chance. Now I'm not going to advocate digital piracy, but the episodes are going to make their way online somehow and what are the odds that tried-and-true "FNL" fans are going to say "Well, I'll just wait three months," knowing that the episodes are out there in the ether? I'm gonna go with "low." Then the show will return to NBC, it'll get plunked in the same Friday night slot that didn't really work this year (albeit after actual football season is mostly over, which could be beneficial) and nobody will watch. I wonder how many people currently subscribing to DirecTV are "FNL" fans, because those dozen people are the only real beneficiaries. NBC knows this, but it's all about finding different ways to manage failure.

I mean, "Knight Rider" is doomed. It was awful as a backdoor pilot and despite relentless promotion, its initial sample audience was smaller than the premiere crowd for "Bionic Woman." Now "Bionic Woman" wasn't much, but it was several steps above "Knight Rider" in terms of quality. But "Knight Rider" is so totally leveraged as a Ford commercial that it probably doesn't matter to NBC what the ratings look like. I guess NBC must get extra commercial dollars for airing encores of "Knight Rider" on Saturday nights. Since the entire show is one big commercial, I wonder if NBC intends to use that Nielsen loophole where they can add the audiences from two different airings together if the commercial spots are identical? Either way, NBC's fall Wednesdays, with "Knight Rider," "Deal or No Deal" and then "Lipstick Jungle" look disastrous.

NBC is just in an unfortunate position of having virtually no cushioned time periods. They thought "Heroes" was a cushioned time period last year and then "Journeyman" tanked.

Poor "Journeyman." At least it had a surprisingly satisfying fall finale. Meanwhile, I'm glad to have "Life" back, even if NBC is pushing it into the corner known as 10 p.m. on Fridays. That's a slot that practically screams "Quick cancellation and then 'Dateline,'" except that several NBC bigwigs have been quoted as saying that time slots may not be set in stone for individual programs, but they're committed to the genres.

I guess I'm glad that most of the things I watch on NBC staying stable. The Thursday comedies aren't going anywhere. They don't get ratings and NBC is well accustomed to that. "Heroes" isn't going anywhere, though another slow start like this season's and I might lose interest fast. It would be good if NBC could find some way to tease up interest in "Chuck" during the summer, rather than just assuming that the audience will remember to come back in the fall after nine months away. You can't count on viewers doing anything by force-of-habit after only 13 episodes.

Stupid me for asking this, but why was NBC in such a rush to announce this schedule? If they think that this is their best proof that they've figured out a way around traditional scheduling and development models... Well, consider me skeptical.

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Stripping players, but no football on 'Friday Night Lights'

Oh us pesky critics and our "Friday Night Lights" nit-picking! We get all frustrating and up-in-arms about Landry killing an unarmed man, dumping the body and then incinerating evidence with his police officer father. And then we get an episode without any meaningful time wasted on Killer Landry and his Unfortunate Killing Ways and we're about to complain about that, too! Those poor "Friday Night Lights" producers! How are they supposed to deal with the mixed signals?

Dunno.

What I do know is that stumbling through six episodes of Killer Landry drama was a problem, but spending an episode trying to ignore Killer Landry entirely and concentrating on poorly unified other things just felt like an example of ignoring the elephant in the corner of the room.

Last season, when "FNL" was perhaps the finest show on network TV, the producers told anybody who would listen that the show wasn't about football. That was a lie, because the ebb and flow of the football season was tied directly to the emotional journey that all of the characters were going through. What happened on the football field drove what happened in their lives and what happened in their lives drove what happened on the football field. Even in the episodes that didn't feature a second of game action, the dramatic tension came from the community and its expectations for the Dillon Panthers. It was unifying and the football made the non-football stuff better and vice versa.

This season, indeed, "Friday Night Lights" really isn't about football, but watching on Friday (Nov. 16), I'm not quite sure what it is about.

More discussion, with spoilers, after the bump. It's just the usual ranting and raving, albeit episode-specific.

Click through...

This week's episode didn't leave me cringing in the way that "Bad Ideas" and "Are You Ready for Friday Night" did. But it also didn't leave me with the sense of optimism I got from "Let's Get It On" and parts of "How Did I Get Here." I just felt like a lot of balls were thrown in the air and I don't know which I care about. One thing I do know: None of them have anything to do with how the Dillon Panthers football season is progressing.

Thoughts:

I get it. The Smash has to look out for Smash. How many times, though, did he need to say the exact same thing in this episode? This was an example of the writers throwing Gaius Charles a bone to make up for his marginalization up to this point and I won't quibble with anything that gives me more of Liz Mikel's Mamma Smash. This is the third or fourth or fifth different episode in which Smash has given the exact same speech about how he views both high school and colleges as a means to an end, how he's going to go all the way to the NFL to help his family. He's why he took steroids and why he hogged the balled and why he did several other things. Mamma Smash knows this, so why did she seem so shocked and betrayed this episode that Smash won't consider going to a historically black college with a 2-9 football team? Meanwhile, I've seen highlights from the way Smash has been playing so far this season and I'm not so sure if he'd still be getting this kind of recruiting heat.

What's the deal with Santiago? The only on-field attention we've seen Coach Taylor pay to his football team since his return has been to a former delinquent with raw speed and no experience. I understand why Buddy was willing to do anything last year to get Voodoo on the team, but I don't get why Buddy's going to far to help Santiago. Is this all just a subplot that's playing out because Buddy's lonely and he needs somebody to nurture? And what position is Santiago playing these days anyway? I didn't blog on it last week, but it seemed weird to me that after Killer Landry became a school hero last week, as a tight end with no football experience, they'd be so eager to replace him with an equally inexperienced new kid. It's just a lot of work to go to to introduce a new character.

Speaking of new characters, aren't we pleased to see that John From Cincinnati is capable of reading dialogue without sounding like an autistic prophet? I'm sure some people had doubts that we'd ever see Austin Nichols again, but here he is playing a character beamed directly from "Beverly Hills, 90210" to "Friday Night Lights." His Noah Barnett, the hip young English teacher and newspaper advisor, is the unholy spawn of Michael St. Gerard's Chris Suiter, failed actor and student predator, and Mark Kiely's Gil Meyers, advisor on the West Beverly Blaze and alleged student predator. We're supposed to be uncomfortable that Julie -- having recently discovered a character trait that attracts her to inappropriate men -- is spending so much time with him, right?

And speaking of dynamics that make us uncomfortable, how old is Sexy Nurse Carlotta supposed to be? The show's message when it comes to age-problematic relationships is simple: Icky Stoner The Swede or Pretentious Teacher going after Julie? Baaaaaad. Riggins going after the MILF Next Door or Matt flirting with Sexy Nurse Carlotta? Intriguing. Except that I'm not. Intrigued, I mean. And I won't even begin to get into the racial dynamics of uber-honky Matt turning to sexy Latina Carlotta to give his stripping the necessary spice. But I guess Carlotta's better than Matt's new car obsessed girlfriend, who only makes out with him when Julie's about to walk over. Oh and they brought Brooke Langton back this week? For that?!?!? Get a "Life."

After cycling Tyra and Lyla through a roller-coaster that left them seemingly bonded by the first season finale, the producers forgot how to bring the two characters back together. So this week, they were reunited (As Ned on "Pushing Daisies" would have said, "It's a random proximity thing") and suddenly the character didn't have any sort of dynamic anymore. I didn't need Tyra and Lyla to do the kind of catty sparring that they did last season, but there had to be a dramatic payoff to making those two specific characters work together on Pantherama, there had to be a dramatic payoff to having those two characters instigating a football team strip-off. The only payoff was, after several emotionally trying weeks for both characters, to return them to a place of levity. I don't mind that, but it could have been better. The entire Pantherama subplot kept reminding me of the Powder-puff game last season, a true highlight.

But sure, I liked having sexy, flirty Tyra back. And Adrianne Palicki plays that side of Tyra very well. I also liked the extra time with Tyra's stripper sister and learning that her trademark song is "Devil Went Down to Georgia."

Do we think Lyla knows that Street has vanished? Nothing that's happened this season feels cumulative.

Line of the episode (everybody's gonna pick the same one): "Quote 'Athletic director and Panther football coach Eric Taylor had no comment.' She asked me through the bathroom door. What am I supposed to do? I was busy."

[I need to issue the usual reminder that there's still no Friday evening show I'd rather watch than "FNL," that it still kicks the qualitative snot out of "Moonlight." Wishing it were better isn't the same as wishing it ill.]

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"Friday Night Lights" gets closer to right

The bloom, as you may have heard, is off the USC rose, or maybe "Rose" (as in "Bowl," rather than should-be-a-Hall-of-Famer "Pete"). That's how I come to be sitting on my own couch on this Saturday afternoon watching the USC football game with my laptop on the part of my anatomy for which it's allegedly designed, rather than with amigos (my peeps, my crew, my homies, my posse) watching the game with an alcoholic beverage.

On the bright side, it cuts down on the amount of interruption caused by the game, interruption to a thrilling afternoon of DVR emptying. I've made it through the past three weeks of -- heaven help me -- "Moonlight," leaving me with time to catch up on "Cane" and "Life" a bit later. That, though, is for another blog post.

This blog post? About last night's episode of "Friday Night Lights," which I only got around to watching this afternoon thanks to collapsing into an exhausted heap fairly early last night.

The nutshell review: Parts of last night's episode came as close to feeling like the "Friday Night Lights" of old since the season premiere. Or maybe "since Landry became an unrepentant killing machine."

I'll go into more detail after the bump.

For a generally rapturous take on the episode check out murderous Landry apologist (but otherwise smart guy) Scott Tobias over at The Onion.

For a take that's an awful lot like mine (as per our contractual agreement), you can always check out Sepinwall's take.

For mine? Click through...

Does anybody remember Bobby Reyes? I didn't think so. I like referencing Bobby Reyes, because he was the only defensive player ever to suit up and get dialogue for the Dillon Panthers. Bobby was a great player, but he was kicked off the football team because he beat up a student, a student who mouthed off with great hostility about the football team and the team's privilege within the Dillon community.

Now I ask you: When Bobby Reyes went down, who could possibly have guessed that despite not having a defense, the Panthers could still win the state championship that same season? And, even more improbably, who'd have guessed that the nerdy student Bobby beat up would, just one year later, be the star of the Dillon team?

The evolution of Landry Clark, from anti-football nerd and outcast to local legend happened so fast that even the announcers of for the Dillon football team didn't have time to learn his last name. Did everybody notice that during Friday's episode, the Dillon play callers knew Matt as "Saracen," Smash as "Smash" and Landry Clark? He was just Landry, both when the announcers said his name and when the Dillon crowd started chanting his name after their victory. After all, what high school football crowd wouldn't start chanting the name of a player whose contribution to the climactic game winning drive was... picking up a dubious pass interference call on the game's penultimate play. "Landy! Landry! Landry!" Way to be interfered with!

Realistically, that made every bit as much sense as Coach Taylor deciding to call a passing play to a tight end without a single game-time catch ever on the biggest play of the season (unless that was a call Saracen made himself, which makes still less sense that after having been benched for the entire game he'd go off the reservation on his first play). But since when was Landry a tight end anyway? We saw him make a catch during a reverse squad (defense playing offense and visa versa), which suggests he had previously been practicing on defense. But suddenly he's a tight end, getting into the game, getting the final play called for him? It's amazing what you get for standing up at half-time and making a speech that perfectly explains the important lesson coach was trying to teach all week.

Let's just say that all season long, I've had a much easier time believing Landry as a Tyra-banging killer than accepting him as a productive member of the Dillon Panthers.

[Side note: Bobby Reyes wasn't just the last speaking character to play defense for the Dillon Panthers. He was also the last Latino. A quick glance at the website for the Permian Panthers lets me know that roughly a third of the players on the team that inspired Dillon have Hispanic sur-names, which makes sense, given the geography. We made a big deal last season about Assistant Coach Mac's problems with black players, but is anybody planning on protesting against Coach Taylor's failings when it comes to fielding a team that represents the ethnic make-up of the Dillon community?]

Honestly, though, that's all I have to say about Landry. Sepinwall goes into some depth on his frustrations involving that subplot. So I'll leave it to him. Except for to ask why nobody's thinking of poor Crucifictorious in the midst of this whole thing. Poor not-quite-Stigmatilingus.

I'm just going to talk about what worked and what didn't work in this week's episode:

The Good

Oh Coach and Mrs. Coach. How nice it is to have y'all all reunited and whatnot. I loved that Coach, always a paragon of positive marital behavior had to accept relationship advice from Mac, but also that he followed it to the letter (tulips+book club=nookie), but that it still didn't work. I'm also relieved that Mrs. Coach's postpartum unsteadiness hasn't been pushed completely under the rug (though it does seem to have been soft-pedaled since Coach got back). Really, though, any time spent between Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler is fantastic.

Way to go Matt! Saracen stood up to Smash, he stood up to Coach Taylor and finally, in his best move of the night, he stood up to Julie. Perhaps my favorite scene in the episode was the conversation between Matt and Mrs. Coach, where she stopped just short of calling him a chump for letting Julie get cozy again. I liked the return to cute, stuttering conversations between Julie and Matt, but once she mentioned The Decemberists, I tuned out. There's a limit to how much punishment I think Julie deserves for the Swede indiscretion, but I agree with my dad, who notes that until she holds bug-eyed baby Grace, Julie's in trouble.

We've always liked Glenn Morshower, because he's versatile enough to play any sort of government official or law enforcement officer you need to cast. But did we really know he could ACT? When this "FNL" run is over, I think Morshower could advance from his current status to being the go-to guy for parts turned down by David Morse. I assume there's good money in that niche.

Adrianne Palicki is so very good, because she's being asked to sell an unsellable plotline. She had one great scene with Morshower and her final conversation with Landry would have been devastating except that everything she was saying MADE SENSE.

What wasn't so good:

I'm iffy on Mexico because everything that has happened there has been out of a different series, from last week's karaoke confessional to this week's teasing near-threesome, which looked less like "Friday Night Lights" and more like the set-up for a Zalman King movie.

I understand that the producers have been swearing for a year that "FNL" isn't about football, but you see how true that is with Riggins off in Mexico. It's game night and the only players we know on the sidelines are Smash and Saracen (I refuse to acknowledge Landry). I can't figure out how they've been unable to expand the show's universe. I'd gladly sacrifice the killer Landry subplot if we could get to meet one of Saracen's Samoan offensive tackles or a Latino quarterback. I think Coach nodded to how thin his roster is when he said, "Saracen and Smash don't play defense. They don't play special teams. And last I checked, Saracen and Smash were supposed to be, supposed to be two members of an 11-man offense." Next week will we get more of Brett Weston and Calvin Brooks [that would be the second string QB and RB]? I doubt it...

Carlotta's still around. She keeps coming to the games. But we aren't seeing anything between her and Matt. That means that when the writers go back to the budding relationship in an episode or two, it'll seem even more random than it did in the beginning.

That's all for now. Back to my 3-3 football game.

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So about that "Friday Night Lights" premiere...

I spent nine months last year on this blog and Zap2it's myriad outlets trying to get everybody I know to watch "Friday Night Lights." I told my friends. I told my family. I told the occasional people who would interview me for the radio or whatever. I would occasionally shake random strangers in the street, grab them by the shoulders and yell, "You fool! Why aren't you watching 'Friday Night Lights'?"

So I'm not going to sit here at my keyboard and say, "I'm not sure that the 'Friday Night Lights' that's premiering tonight is really the 'Friday Night Lights' I wanted you to watch last season." I'm not going to tell you that you should skip tonight's season premiere, because what are you gonna do instead, watch "Moonlight"? Watch "K-Ville" repeats on FOX? Seriously?

Everybody else I know (I only know odd people) has already written their "Why I'm uncomfortable with the start of the 'Friday Night Lights' season" article, review or blog post, so here's another. I hate to be original.

Follow through after the bump. There are going to be huge spoilers for the premiere and rather vague spoilers about the next two episodes, which have also been sent to critics. You've been warned.

Click through...

In the past week, the industry trade paper Variety has run both a review of "Friday Night Lights" and a roundtable critical discussion of the show's opening episodes. In the process, at least three alleged critics have said almost the exact same thing: The things that happen at the end of the season premiere are bad, but I can't say anything negative about them because the show's creative team has earned my faith and my unqualified acceptance that if they make mistakes, they'll fix them so fast that they weren't mistakes at all.

Bullshit.

That's not the job of a critic, kids.

The producers of "24" start off every single season with six great episodes, dick around for 12 episodes and then close with six strong episodes, during which fans say, "Yeah, those middle episodes *all* sucked, but I had faith that the producers would right the ship." But. But. But. But those 12 episodes were horrible, they floundered and stumbled and bumbled and meandered and maybe they righted the ship and maybe they didn't, but the half a season in the middle was worse that "Threat Matrix." Fans have faith in show creators to fix things, they have confidence that they'll make things right. Critics look at what's there and that's what they address.

One fabulous season of TV hasn't earned the producers of "Friday Night Lights" a pass. Unfortunately, it's raised expectations. The first three episodes of "FNL" for this second season are *not* bad. It really hasn't become "One Tree Hill" while it was on vacation.

The things that work in the first few episodes still work gloriously. Eric and Tami Taylor remain my favorite couple on TV and an Emmy-giving universe in which television professionals fail to recognize that Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton are at the very peak of the profession doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. The new season finds Coach and Mrs. Coach separated just at the moment they need each other most, him with a new job in the big city and her (within minutes of the start of the premiere) with a new baby.

As their daughter Julie, Aimee Teegarden is sculpting the most believable portrait of teenage femininity since Claire Danes in "My So-Called Life" and the relationship between Julie and Zach Gilford's Matt Saracen has always rung true. The premiere finds Julie and Matt experiencing their own tension and distance, as Julie deals with the changes in her family and Matt faces another season of football.

While there were plenty of moments early last season when certain actors -- Minka Kelly, Taylor Kitsch, Scott Porter -- did show certain signs of just how green they were, every member of the cast has the chance to shine before the end.

If I'm being frank, the show's problems began with the finale of the first season. As I wrote extensively at the time, they made a finale that felt like they almost hoped the show didn't come back. They let the Panthers win, which was a mistake. They let wheelchair-bound QB Jason Street suddenly become a football strategic mastermind, which was a mistake. They pushed Landry (the marvelous Jessie Plemons) and Tyra (the always better-than-expected Adrianne Palicki) in the direction of a romance, which was a mistake. They did a bunch of things that were aimed at bringing the show to a happy, hopeful, satisfying series conclusion. And then NBC brought them back (and canned Kevin Reilly, the man who brought them back).

The second season begins roughly eight months later, which has allowed the show's producers to reboot several characters in ways that dismiss the journeys they went on last season. It was a long road for Gaius Charles' Smash to regain the support of viewers and become a smarter, more humble, heroic character, but in the eight months we were away, he's back to being the brash, ego-driven Smash from the pilot. It was a long road for Kitsch's Riggins to go from a drunk, womanizing burn-out to a mostly sober, responsible teammate, but in the eight months we were away, he's back to being that guy who shows up at practice drunk and takes pleasure in bedding twins, just because he can. Here again, the producers obviously realized that they'd made everything too stable by the first season finale, so they pushed the reset button. The transitions for Teegarden's Julie (more pouty than we remember), Kelly's Lyla (more Christian than we remember), for Brad Leland's Buddy Garrity (more drunk than we remember) are all much more plausible.

When talking about what goes wrong with the premiere and what hasn't been fixed or smoothed out in the two subsequent episodes, it's necessary to talk about Tyra and Landry. But first I wanna note that lots of things happened last season that even the biggest fans had trouble defending and they were usually the biggest plotpoints, the moments of high drama amidst the minutiae of small town life and football-as-religion. "That's such a 'Star Is Born' cliche!" people cried when Jason Street was injured in the pilot, forcing Matt Saracen into a featured role. "How are they ever going to redeem that character?" people wailed when Lyla screwed her paralyzed boyfriend's best friend. "Are they seriously doing *this* plotline," folks groused when Smash began taking steroids to improve his ranking in a touting publication. The team staging a walk-out due to a racist coach, a Katrina victim nearly getting the team put on probation, Riggins and the MILF next door... The season was full of moments that seemed iffy and many of 'em (most? nearly all?) were worked out satisfactorily, albeit faster and easier than might have happened in real life.

The things that went wrong last year were, if anything, a product of being too perfectly designed for a show of this nature. They were attempts to use the conventions of the sports genre to touch on the obligatory conflicts of the genre.

[OK. Last warning. Spoilers and some such!!! STOP READING!]

Landry knocking a guy upside the head with a pipe and killing him? That's just the producers coming up with big plot points to get buzz, because even crappy buzz isn't worse than no buzz. And I don't much care what Jason Katims has said to the contrary in interviews. I blame Ben Silverman. Just on principle.

Some reviewers have said that the premiere subplot in which Tyra is arbitrarily stalked by the man who assaulted her last season and in a tragic twist he ends up [last spoiler warning!!!!] dead and, presumably, dumped in the river is less like something from "FNL" and more like something from "One Tree Hill," though as dedicated "OTH" fans know even that silly, silly show didn't go so far as to have Peyton (or any of the other Ravens) kill her crazed fake brother. It's bad enough that the stalker plot returned in the premiere. Sure, we knew it was going to return eventually, but what was the guy doing for eight months? And why is he suddenly menacing her at all hours and in relatively public places? What does he think is going to happen? And it's bad enough that the scenes with the aspiring rapist are shot like they were taken from a slasher movie, rather than from the best directed show on TV. But did Landry need to kill the guy? Did they need to reshoot the scene, in fact, so that Landry kills the guy in cold blood, as he's turning away vanquished, rather than in total self-defense as in the original version of the premiere?

The mechanics here should be beneath the writers of such a good show. For most of last season, Tyra was the strong and capable girl, the girl you'd bet could take care of herself. She reduced Landry to a stuttering boob as a girl of that sort would do to a guy of that sort. But the producers realized that Plemmons is really good and that his scenes with Tyra, however awkward, were gold. So they said, "What can we do to make this work? What can we do to make her weak enough to need him and to make him manly enough to somehow be worthy of her?" How do lazy Hollywood minds accomplish such things? Naturally, they made Tyra into a victim, a sexual victim. Even that wasn't enough. So they made Landry try out for football, despite the fact that in a community like Dillon, a kid with no athletic interests doesn't magically say, "OK, today I try out for football" and even make the JV bench, given what we've seen of Dillon's Pop Warner devotion. That's stupid and I found it nearly unforgivable when I heard it was happening. That was before I knew we'd be introduced to Landry: Killing Machine. Basically the writers realized that the only way they could bring together these two characters loved by fans was to make them into two entirely different characters, incompatible with the characters they once were. To hell with it.

It's not a little mistake. For a show even an iota less wonderful than "Friday Night Lights," it would be "Jump the Shark"-level "Bad."

[Those are only spoilers for the premiere. Here come vaguely spoilers for other upcoming episodes.]

The so-called-reviewers at Variety said they had faith that "FNL" would work things out, but the Landry-Tyra subplots get worse in subsequent episodes. The characters get further and further from where they used to be and become more and more removed from the universe of the show. A change in Julie and Matt's relationship makes sense, but the new arrival in Matt's house is laugh-out-loud silly. You knew Coach Taylor wouldn't stay away from Dillon and the Panthers all season, but his path back into fold jeopardizes some of the things I most respect about the character. And Riggins and Street are heading someplace wacky at the end of the third episode and nothing good can happen there.

You know, this is long enough. I just wanted to chime in.

Now watch "Friday Night Lights." Its problems shouldn't excused and I don't have faith that they're going to be fixed to my satisfaction, but damned if I don't want to keep the show around.

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'Friday Night Lights' Finale: Lengthy Thoughts

It's looking fairly likely that in some form or another NBC will bring "Friday Night Lights" back next season, so I'm not going to get all sobby about how Wednesday (April 11) night's season finale could possibly be the show's series finale. I'm just going to knock on wood and refuse to accept that NBC will let a show this good get away.

I've seen the finale and I'm gonna attempt some sort of posting hocus pocus so that people don't have to see spoilers without clicking through. But I do wanna talk a little bit about the episode, why it disappointed me and why I still loved it anyway.

The "Friday Night Lights" finale was, most simply, a darned fine piece of network television which had the misfortune of falling so soon after the "Mud Bowl" episode (2007's finest hour of network TV to date) and after the "Best Laid Plans" episode, which ought to serve as the Emmy nomination tape for stars Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton.

Titled "State," the finale is a rushed affair. You'd say that NBC owed the series a two-hour finale, but what with the show's ratings, NBC doesn't actually owe it anything. Regardless, the show's creative team deserved a two-hour finale and they're left with the unenviable task of tying up a season's worth of plotlines, of forcing a satisfying resolution upon the whole thing just in case the unthinkable happens.

The facet of the episode that suffers worst, alas, is the climactic football game, the Texas State Championship. As we critics have told you over and over again, this show has never really been about football and since the Peter Berg-directed premiere, the episodes have shied away from extensive pigskin action. As a result, it's seemed as if every single game this season has hinged on the Panthers coming from behind thanks to a perfectly orchestrated trick play. To some degree that's reflected how tenuous this team's success has been, but it's gotten cheesy at times. The Championship game represents the worst of that. Worse than the coming from behind and the trick play, though, is the fact that the game has to be taken care of so swiftly that it has no dramatic momentum whatsoever. The Panthers are behind routed at halftime and in the second half they rout the other team. There's no sense that anything has changed, no sense of how our established heroes have changed and, because we never met a single active defensive player for the Panthers, no awareness that the defense toughened up in the second half. It's momentum-less.

The result of the game is flat-out wrong. The team lost in the book, they lost in the movie and darnit they had to lose on the TV show. That's just the way it's supposed to work. The season was about the journey this team took over the course of the fall, the adversity they had to overcome, the tragedies and trials that touched every single one of them. What they would have gained in losing, in bring the team together and bringing the town together, was far more important than anything they gained in winning, particularly since I don't understand how they won. Was Coach Taylor's halftime speech *that* good? Nah. The ending of Buzz Bissinger's book wasn't dramatic enough, so Peter Berg created a more dramatic ending for the movie. I'd have been perfectly happy seeing Berg's ending recycled or letting the writers find a different creative way to end things, but they didn't. Actually, I'd bet they had an ending with Dillon losing, but things got rewritten either because of doubt on their part or the network's part, but I'd love to see that ending. Even the recent dud of a "Bad News Bears" remake knew not to have the Bears win the big game, knew that that wasn't what the movie was supposed to be about.

The finale had a few too many of the conventional elements that have plagued lesser episodes this season. I, for example, didn't need Jason Street to suddenly become Vince Lombardi and that's not a plotline I want to see carried through next year. And while I love the friendship between Landry (frequent series MVP Jessie Plemons) and Tyra (Adrianne Palicki, improving with every episode), I don't buy a romance between them for a second and that's not a plotline I'd want to see carried through next year.

The finale was at its best when it continued the maturation of several characters who looked like pure cliches in the pilot. How much have Giaus Charles' Smash and Brad Leland's Buddy Garrity grown over the season? Well, they seem like people now, darned near as real as Matt-and-Julie and Coach-and-Coach's Wife, the two best couplings on TV, bar none. And how remarkable is the chemistry between Chandler and Britton? They played the pregnancy subplot beautifully, but I kept thinking how awful that stunt could have seemed in lesser hands. With these two? I got misty eyed when Coach smiled that "Get out of here!" smile to Mrs. Coach.

So much singing has been done about "FNL" this season that it's almost impossible to find unsung heroes, but let me mention a few: Kevin Rankin, who will always be the bumbling RA from "Undeclared" to me, was an anchor for the season-long arc involving Street's partial recovery and he kept me from excessively grousing at just how fast Street became a world class Murderball player. Then there's Alexandra Holden, who has totally shed the stigma of being a dull "Friends" love interest (Ross's inappropriate teacher-student romance) to become just about the sweetest, coolest tattoo artist in the word on "FNL." I've even liked Brooke Langton as Riggin's MILF neighbor, though I'm not likely to forgive her for romancing the head scab in "The Replacements." Nearly everybody who has entered the "FNL" universe has served a purpose and been an asset. That's amazing.

If NBC chooses to cancel "Friday Night Lights," I'm not going to be one of those people who blames the network. Fans probably shouldn't expect much interest from the network for petitions or mini-footballs or whatever "Save This Show" campaigns get lost. Guess what? NBC knows that the people who watch "Friday Night Lights" really like it. The network is aware that critics have been beating their drums from September through April without stopping. The network is also aware that ratings have showed no sign of going up, not even an iota. NBC has moved "FNL" around its schedule trying to find the right time slot. It's promoted the heck out of the show with a variety of different campaigns. And guess what? Still nothing. The people to blame for the failure of "FNL" are TV viewers, the sheep who never even sampled the show and will probably be complaining next fall about how there's nothing on TV that the whole family can watch together.

Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

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