“Friday Night Lights” — Seeing Other People
I’m sorry, what show is this?
This show –Â this once amazing, realistic, funny, sad, visceral, captivating show –Â has turned into a complete and utter disaster. Believe me, it hurts to say it, but it’s true. More after the jump…
Worst episode to date? Perhaps. Does that even matter anymore? Honestly, I’m not sure. With no new episode last week due to Thanksgiving the momentum the show had built the past few weeks was stopped dead and with the damn Friday graveyard of a timeslot I (and probably many) just plain forgot the show exists. Not like they’ve given us a lot of reason to keep it high on our radar.
For me the highlight of the episode was Riggins’ new meth-cooking roommate, which is saying something since it is also one of the lamest plot developments in a season packed with lame plot developments. Still, you have to give props to that scene where the two are hunting and “the dude” (because really, he’s pretty “dude”-like) grabs a pair of binoculars, unscrews one of the eye pieces and then procedes to drink out of it. What this has to do with anything escapes me, but damn if it wasn’t funny.
I also liked the idea of Tami telling off John From Cincinnati because he was getting too buddy-buddy with her daughter and then Eric telling off Tami because she was getting too buddy-buddy with Glenn causing Tami to reassess her handling of the Julie/JfromC relationship. The idea was good. The execution seemed forced, which really is the series biggest problem right now — the writing has gone stale. Perhaps this show could have benefitted from a writers’ strike (as it is FNL has more episodes in the can than just about any other series). All season long things have had a very A to B to C lineage, whereas last season thrived because it felt organic; the destination not being all that important. Now, things are almost exclusively about getting to some magical moment in the plot that surely won’t leave us refreshed. Whether it’s Seracen with the cheerleader only so that they can put off his eventual hookup with the home healthcare worker, or all of the stupid Landry/Tyra murder dances just so we could get to the point where Landry spills the beans, or the coach at TMU or Riggins off the team, obstacles have been thrown in the characters’ paths left and right but for what?
Worst of all, the football has taken such a backseat to the rest of the series’ soapy nonsense, the initial thesis has long but disappeared. It’s a show with no focus, but at least we’ve got “the dude.”
Tags: Friday Night Lights, NBC
