Friday Night Lights: What Went Wrong?
Last season, Friday Night Lights was perfect. Simply perfect. In the same vein as Freaks and Geeks, it lived fast, died young, and left a beautiful corpse behind. A flawless one-season wonder.
Except for the part where NBC shockingly decided to pick FNL up for a second season.
The fans (and critics) rejoiced, and rightfully so. So few low-rated, yet promising, series get a chance for that second season. To do what Hill Street Blues, Seinfeld, and The Office did and begin to catch serious fire — creatively and with audiences — in its second season.
Only Friday Night Lights didn’t catch fire. It exploded and melted into slag.
Okay, maybe that’s being a bit harsh. But the show’s second season, which apparently ended last week after its strike-shortened fifteenth episode, swerved about as far from the straight line drawn by the first season as you can possibly get.
The second season’s most controversial storyline involved two of its supporting characters, one of whom was largely portrayed as comic relief during the first season, becoming embroiled in a plot line involving a rapist, manslaughter, and dumping said rapist’s manslaughtered body in a river. Not exactly hijinks, to be sure.
But that plot — which wasn’t as mishandled in its execution as it was in the aftermath of its resolution — wasn’t the reason the show fell apart.
From looking at the evidence, those fifteen second-season episodes, it appears that the show’s producers realized they needed to change something in order to get people to watch their low-rated show. However, it’s unclear if they had a coherent strategy for what to change. Yes, there were more soapy plots and pretty young people wearing very little, and yes, there was the aforementioned rapist-manslaughter-river subplot. And yes, the show’s raison d’etre — uh, it’s a show about a small town that’s obsessed with football and how the football team is a prism for the social fabric of said town? — suffered with a de-emphasis on the football itself.
But the big failing of this season was simple: the first season’s tight-knit ensemble, adults and teenagers tied somehow to the Dillon Panthers football team, was blown into its constituent parts, and never really reassembled.
Take how the show parked paralyzed former quarterback Jason Street on the sidelines as an assistant coach, which potentially could have made for some interesting drama, watching him grapple with the end of his playing career and the beginning of his adult life. Just when it seemed like the situation was going to get interesting, Street quit his job, moved out of his parents’ house, started selling cars, had sex with a waitress, and got her pregnant. And the further the character got away from the show’s core story, the less interesting his storyline got.
The arc of Street’s former girlfriend, Lyla, followed a similar trajectory. In a show that’s theoretically about a football team, it always seemed a bit strange to be following a former cheerleader who was also the former girlfriend of the former quarterback. So for fifteen episodes we watched Lyla turn to religion at a local megachurch (kind of interesting), meet a random guy (interest… flagging… must… stay… awake….), and go to his parents’ ranch for the weekend to have dinner conversation with his family (zzzzzzzzz).
Look at the rest of the ensemble and you’ll see similar examples. Quarterback Matt Saracen went from backup to winner of the state championship, but instead of seeing him grapple with the trappings of fame, we watched him get dumped by his girlfriend and begin a strange, dull courtship of his grandmother’s Guatemalan live-in nurse. His best friend Landry, when not manslaughtering a would-be rapist and dumping his body in the river, also tried to overcome his nerdiness by joining the football team. (In a parallel universe without manslaughtered rapists, apparently.) And all without having more than a couple of scenes exploring what this meant to his friendship with his friend the QB.
Now the rumors have it that Friday Night Lights, which I gave up on as a guaranteed cancellation victim about three weeks into this season, might possibly escape the axe yet again. Turns out it’s got a small but dedicated audience with some good demographics, it’s a critical darling (at least for that shining first season — whatever you do, just don’t mention the rapist), it’s cheap to produce so far as scripted series go, and as a result it’s possible that NBC will keep it alive, either on its own or in cooperation with one of the NBC Universal cable channels. It’s even possible that, failing that, some other channel might pick it up.
Despite what’s happened this season, I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a third year of Friday Night Lights. Not because this season wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. But because after a year of perfection and a year of creative mistakes, it’s high time for a year of redemption. So long as the show’s producers figure out what their show is actually supposed to be about. (Here’s a hint: rapists and megachurches probably aren’t it.)
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