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Friday Night Lights season 2 defense

http://ew.com/tv/2017/02/07/friday-night-lights-season-2-podcast/

The crucial importance and splendid madness of Friday Night Lights season 2
Darren Franich <http://ew.com/author/darren-franich/>•February 7, 2017 at
7:39pm EST

There’s no reason to defend season 2 of *Friday Night Lights*
<https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005CA4SOM/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=entertain07-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B005CA4SOM&linkId=a050b06c04330b9b1e9081cd832d4988>.
The show survived it and thrived. But it deserves study, close analysis,
and maybe a new cockeyed appreciation.

This is the season where Landry infamously kills a dude, one of those
GREAT-SHOW-BAD-PLOT memories cherished by TV fans as a What-Not-To-Do
tutorial. (Think Don Draper flashbacks, think Sand Snakes, think “He’s the
*real* Seymour Skinner!”) But revisiting Landry’s justifiable homicide, and
the ensuing Southern Gothic teen-noir that ensues, I realized that the
plotline makes sense amidst its own mad context. The killing of the rapist
is the catalyst for all that follows: An extremist plot-meteor strikes
Dillon and ripple-effecting extremism across all 15 episodes of season 2.
Everyone becomes their most aggressive worst self. Tami slaps Julie. Matt
tackles Smash, and kicks his car, and calls his teacher a “bitch.” Racist
teens hurl insults at Smash; when he punches back, racist society steals
his future and crushes his dreams.

This is the only season of *Friday Night Lights *where a football coach
hurls himself onto the field of play, tackling a high schooler in a fit of
unrepressed rage. This is the only season where someone steals $3,000 from
one of the biggest drug dealers in Dillon. Season 2 is when an opposing
football team shares Dillon’s practice space for a week, and so this is the
only season when a full-fledged fight breaks out in the cafeteria. That
fight’s only a bit less violent than the tornado that blows through town as
if Earth itself has started to declare war on Dillon.

It all builds up to the season 2 finale. Coach Eric Taylor is, usually, a
paragon of paternal Job-like restraint in the face of all-encompassing
societal abuse. Tami Taylor is, unquestionably, a paragon of matriarchal
power and can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on responsibility, strong against a
civilization run by good ol’ bros who love football and hate education. And
in the season 2 finale, Tami watches Eric tackle her old high school
boyfriend into a table, a drunken brawl that seems to destroy an entire
restaurant, one more tornado in this season of twisters.

Tami’s ex-boyfriend is Mo McArnold, a creature out of some florid Texas
fantasia, played by Peter Berg with maximum sneer. Mo is one of the most
elaborate guest-characters ever. In his single episode, he wears a white
cowboy hat and a black cowboy hat. He favors loud farmboy shirts; he rides
a helicopter. Berg plays McArnold not as merely a rich Texan but as some
rollicking money-mad ideal of TEXAS brought to life. Next to Mo McArnold,
Buddy Garrity looks subtle. Next to Mo McArnold, John Wayne looks subtle.
Berg was, of course, the guy who originally developed *Friday Night Lights*
as a TV enterprise. So here we have Eric Taylor, on-camera avatar of
authority, grappling with his off-camera overlord. You think of Jacob, the
gone-astray patriarch, fighting against his heavenly mystery man, the angel
some theologians say must be God Himself.

Certainly, the Eric-Mo restaurant brawl is the far boundary-point for this
show, a Great Barrier marking the fiery edge of the *Friday Night Lights*
cinematic universe. On a show where teenagers would struggle eternally with
grown-up concerns – their family’s financial future, the possibility of
existential ruin, sexuality as something discussed with dreamy frankness
between precocious teens and understanding parents – here are adults acting
like petty children. On a show where people could always talk about
anything, here are actions speaking drunker than words.
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“He was being an idiot,” is how Tami explains the fight to daughter Julie
the next morning. The Taylor women leave Eric in bed, moaning; they have to
get to Church. This season finale was accidental, because of the 2007-2008
Writers’ Strike, and could have been the series finale, due to low ratings.
So there is an alternate reality not far from our own where this was our
last image of Coach Eric Taylor is bruised, hungover, laid low and idiotic,
our beloved Coach gone Full Riggins.

*RELATED: Get more FNL goodness in the latest episode of EW’s Binge
podcast. Subscribe here
<https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ews-binge/id1162878324?mt=2> and
listen here:*

We’ve become too precious about TV shows as works of steady coherence. We
overvalue a certain kind of embalmed clarity, a hysterical continuity
ensuring that the story told in every premiere will flow directly into
every finale. Seasons have gotten shorter, and sometimes one filmmaker
directs every episode, and some shows have become two-hour movies
overstretched to binge capacity. The middle half of any Netflix season –
and any FX show with episodes consistently rolling past the one-hour mark –
will start to feel like deleted scenes cobbled together for contractual
purposes, the motion picture equivalent of juking your font size to make
your essay longer. There is a greater visual quality in modern television
than ever before, but there is a dispiriting narrative safety. Any show
that takes a big swing runs the risk of angering fans. And fans have never
loved TV more, but have never been so willing to hate the people who make
the TV they love.

*Friday Night Lights* season 2 was not much beloved while it was happening.
That was almost a decade ago, when fandom was blogs and comment boards. If
season 2 happened today, there would be Tumblr riots. Any rage is
justified, maybe: From the beginning, this season is so different from
what *Friday
Night Lights* seemed to want to be.

In season 1 (and forever after season 2), *Friday Night Lights* was about
people who talk. This was always the show’s brilliant problem: The reason
why it is so great, but also the reason it struggled to find an audience
back when television was still merely something you watched on television.
Characters work out everything, gradually but eventually. Precocious
teenagers debate the merits of losing their virginity. Dreamers explain the
agony and ecstasy of their impossible dreams. Sons talk about the emotional
void created by their absent parents; frequently, those sons talk *to *those
absent parents, and their parents hear them, and try to respond with
appropriately careful words.

It is a show about football, and so there was always intrinsic violence
dangerously lurking under the surface or safely sealed away under the
lights. The show started in 2006, a year after Dr. Bennet Omalu published
his first paper on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (and a decade before
anyone from the NFL would acknowledge a link between regular headbashing
and brain injuries.) *Friday Night Lights* was not so gutless, would never
shy from the tragic possibilities of violence; “debilitating spinal-cord
injury” is the show’s inciting incident, after all. But the show was always
sensitive, skeptical of the sport’s brutality and the madness of its
fandom, hopeful in its fundamental belief that humans could talk through
their issues toward some higher truth.

But then there is season 2, bloodthirsty with soap operatics and
pseudo-fantasies. All sensitivity is thrown out the window. Julie falls for
a Julian Casablancas body double nicknamed “The Swede,” who doesn’t look
Swedish and who barely talks. Given license for single-dude horndoggery,
eternal grandma’s-boy sweetheart Matt Saracen smooches a rallygirl but
falls in true wuv with Carlotta, the Guatemalan caregiver who lives in his
house. Carlotta massages away Matt’s pain while she sings him a lullaby,
and she unburdens him of his helpless virginity, and then she leaves. If
people made fan theories 10 years ago the way people make fan theories now,
everyone would think that Carlotta was a ghost or a waking dream, some
Saracen family mass delusion shared by dementia-addled Grandma and
heartbroken Matt. (Wasn’t the ghost in *Vertigo* named Carlotta, too?)

Essential character arcs from season 1 are tossed aside as if the
characters forgot their own catharsis over the summer. By the end of season
1, Smash Williams had experienced a political awakening, developed a close
relationship with an activist intellectual, become less egocentric and more
team-focused. In season 2, it’s the Smash show all over again, his id
re-unleashed. He visits a college, takes a girl to bed, and winds up
running through the streets half-naked when her boyfriend shows up.

*NEXT: Much ado about Jason Street*


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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