Saturday, April 16, 2011

Friday Night Lights Returns

A nice little article on how Friday Night Lives managed to stay around for five seasons.

The DirecTV partnership allowed Friday Night Lights to shake off a disappointing second season—despised even by ardent fans for a nonsensical murder storyline, among other questionable character choices—and return to the quiet moments and small-scale dramas that it rendered so beautifully in its first season. Still, by the time season 3 kicked off, the show was straining credulity with the amount of time its teenage characters had spent in high school. Were we really supposed to believe that beefcake fullback Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), who easily looked 25 in the pilot episode, was just a sophomore when the series started?


I trust this writer because she deftly picks up on the two biggest pieces of strangeness in the show in the above quote.

She does seem to miss the major thing FNL discovered - the coach. He didn't necessarily start as the centerpiece of the show - it was going to be about the football players and the chicks - Street, Riggins, Cerecen, Smash, Tyra, Lyla - but like the Simpsons began as a show about Bart and then discovered it was a show about Homer, FNL rather quickly discovered they had a couple around which the show could be based - coach and his wife.

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