Friday Night Lights — Mud Bowl
It was a flawless episode before the climax. Since I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone (especially this week), I’d like to invite you to join the rest of this post by clicking below.
That game. For a show ostensibly about football, it rarely gets down and dirty with the game. This week was different. That game looked awesome. I wanted to be there on the field playing and on the sidelines cheering. Coach Taylor’s efforts to return the game to its old glory worked not just for his team, but was an audience knock-out.
The fact that that excitement was juxtaposed against the near rape of the increasingly great Tyra kind of blew me away. There was such a battle of raw emotion I felt like my body honestly didn’t know how to react. I swear to god that sequence made me simultaneously horrified and thrilled. I was happy and shocked and angry and energetic. The perfect punctuation mark was Landry’s unheroic though obviously comforting arrival to the scene of the crime. That might have been the best 4 minutes on television this year.
Elsewhere in the episode you had to love some of the more interesting character pairings: Street/Seracen, Landry/Tyra, Lyla/Smash. Eric and Tami’s exchange while standing amongst of group of cows was also a highlight, as was his hardware store line, “We’re building a football field, Seracen. Stop asking questions.”
Love it. Love it. Love it.
March 30th, 2007 at 12:09 am
The end of the game gave me goosebumps. If they had a show that was just about the Taylors, I would totally watch it.
March 30th, 2007 at 10:25 am
when i first saw the guy jogging up to tyra in the parking lot, i was weary about sitting through another “damsel in distress” plot device on tv. but, again, this show pulled it off. credit to the actors— they didn’t make the scene seem like an audition for law & order. great episode in general.