Friday Night Lights

We are two episodes into the second season of last year's best new show (possible the best show, period). The return of Friday Night Lights was far from certain, and so the producers ended the first season on a note of closure, just in case. The Dillon Panthers won state and an almost perfect season of television walked off into the sunset, able to hold its head high alongside the likes of Freaks & Geeks.

Maybe what happened to F&G stuck in the mind of someone at NBC. After all, it's not like that show has retained a rabid following, sold multiple DVD sets, and launched one or two or a dozen rapidly burgeoning careers. For whatever reason, FNL was not sent to the long pine bench in the sky, but returned.

As the Dillon Panthers set out to defend their title, Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is gone to Austin to coach quarterbacks at MTU. His wife Tamy (Connie Britton, I bow before you) is at home, trying to care for new baby Gracie and cope with the hormonal storm that is her daughter Julie (Aimee Teegarden in that rare performance of a teen by a teen that feels like a teen, if you know what I mean). New coach MacGregor (Chris Mulkey) has decided that Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) isn't welcome on the sidelines at practice or as the host of the team's kickoff rally. Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) is trying to put the wood to every available woman (sometimes two at a time) and Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) has decided that maybe Jesus can help her through this mess. Landry (Jesse Plemons) is trying out for the team while trying to get closer to Tyra (Adrianne Palicki).

Oh, and Landry killed Tyra's rapist.

Notice how that last sentence just lays there, like a cow pie on the dining room table. Much of the first two eps has been stellar, but that one development threatens to hamstring the whole show.

Let's start with the stellar stuff. Mulkey's casting is beyond perfect. He's just about twenty years older than Kyle Chandler and that generational difference is a perfect metaphor for their differing styles. MacGregor is a jen-you-wine hardass, and his attitude toward Buddy has brought Brad Leland to the fore. Buddy was the character most ripe for stereotyping, but the writing and acting did him justice, and so far this year he's turning into a figure of real pathos. Connie Britton continues to just nail everything about Tamy; she's utterly fearless. My brother once said of Alyson Hannigan that she "[was]n't afraid to cry ugly." Neither is Connie Britton. When Tamy dissolves into tears over her impossible situation, Britton goes all-in. Combined with the show's penchant for extreme close-up, it stabs you in the heart.

In the second episode, Taylor had to accompany an MTU player to a disciplinary hearing. The subplot was well-scripted, but what made it really work was Chandler's subtle non-verbal reactions. By the end of the scene we realized that we were seeing what happens to young men like Smash Williams if they are in the care of someone less morally rigorous than Eric Taylor. Sometimes even if they are in the care of someone like that.

The Lyla/Riggins story is on low simmer now, but I would like to comment on something that most reviewers don't notice. FNL is about the only show on TV that really gets the part religion plays in the lives of small towns. First, the show notices that most of these people are Baptists and Assemblies of God, not Catholics. That may seem insignificant, but trust me, it's a real difference. Jason Katims and company also realize that many children and teens are completely sincere about their faith, while simultaneously behaving in ways forbidden by it. This doesn't make them hypocrites so much as it makes them kids.

That also goes for the Julie/Matt Saracen thread, where two nice kids are breaking up just because that happens when you're sixteen or seventeen. Nobody's bad, nobody did wrong, you just kind of grow up and out. So far it's been perfectly played, although I'm a little scared of the fact that the new home health-care worker for Matt's demented grandmother just happens to be the smoking-hot Carlotta.

Against all that good stuff you have the Landry/Tyra/murder arc. Landry and Tyra are both great characters, the two who really stand outside all the Dillon Panthers bullshit and realize that there's more to life than football. That the stunning Tyra would be drawn to Landry isn't much of a stretch; not only are both of them outsiders, but once anyone gets to know Landry, he's pretty irresistible (see Riggins, Tim).

Landry is trying out for the Panthers in order to impress Tyra and and his dad. That development alone should have been a rich and fertile field. Clear-eyed (in a way that the team slogan doesn't begin to appreciate) Landry in the middle of Panther mania? Playing football to impress a girl who sees through all the posturing herself? You can get five or six whole episodes out of just that.

But no, they had to kill the rapist and try to dispose of the body. How very One Tree Hill. Say hello to season two of The OC. Now they've added a complication; Landry's watch is missing. Is it on the body? As if a morally responsible, sensitive kid who's killed a man with a pipe wouldn't feel enough regret and sorrow unless he was also threatened with imminent discovery via one o f the oldest tropes known to drama. To make matters worse, Plemons and Palicki have acted the shit out of their scenes together. There's a beat in the season opener, right before they roll the body into the river, where Landry looks at Tyra. Every smart guy who's done a dumb thing for a girl will cringe in self-recognition at that moment, and yet Tyra is not manipulative. Palicki plays her as someone who is scared out of her mind, and whose experience with the people of this town is such that she knows who'll end up guilty in this scenario. It's all there in her performance. They're so good that they almost make the ridiculous twist seem palatable.

Does it ruin the show? No. It takes it from 100% to 89%, or from an A+ to B+, something like that. I'll be there every Friday night. Just like Tamy Taylor, I'm all-in.