Friday Night Lights is Back to Basics

Friday Night Lights just might be the best show on television that you aren’t watching, but it isn’t too late to start. Season 4 premiered on Wednesday on DirecTV (hang tight NBC viewers, it’ll be back in February, similar to last year), and the series is heading in a very different direction now that East Dillon High School has reopened and the town of Dillon has been divided into two school districts. This spelled bad news for Coach Taylor’s (Kyle Chandler) tenure as head coach of the Dillon Panthers after losing at State championship, as he was moved to coach the new East Dillon Lions while his wife, Tami (Connie Britton), remained principal of Dillon High.

As for the rest of the main players, Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) ultimately decides to stay in Dillon with his grandmother rather than go to art school in Chicago while Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) surprised everyone by heading off to college on a football scholarship. Well, Saracen is miserable at his local art school but is still dating Coach Taylor’s daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden); and Riggins walks out of class, drives home while tossing his school books out the window, and after an awkward confrontation where his brother kicks him out, sleepswith a cocktail waitress named Cheryl (Alicia Witt). One thing you can always count on in this show, is that Riggins will always drink beer and have an entertaining storyline. As for Saracen, he’s now delivering pizzas and putting up with current Panthers star quarterback JD McCoy (Jeremy Sumpter) giving him crap about losing State for them. Last season I felt bad for JD, all the pressure placed on him, this season, wow…what a dick.

Panthers and former Panthers aside, Coach Taylor has his work cut out for him turning the underfunded, misfit East Dillon Lions into a legitimate football team, and it looks like it’s going to be a long season. Landry Clark (Jesse Plemons) is among few returning faces to Taylor’s roster, and from the looks of it, he’s going to have to step into a leadership role, and probably fill an overall larger role on the series as Saracen is fazed out. New faces include Vince (Michael B. Jordan), a troubled kid who will have to juggle his role on the football team and his role at home, helping support his family, and Luke (Matt Lauria), a talented player from Dillon’s JV team and one of JD’s good buddies who will be forced to transfer to East Dillon. If nothing else, I’m looking forward to seeing the dynamic between these players as they grow together, similar to the first season with Saracen, Riggins, and Brian “Smash” Williams (Gaius Charles).

One concern this season is that there are a lot of major changes in the cast. Gilford will be around for a few episodes, but he’ll be leaving the show similarly to how Charles and Scott Porter, who played the promising star quarterback Jason Street, left the show. Adrianne Palicki, who starred as Tyra Collette in the first three seasons is notably absent this season after graduating, as is Minka Kelly, who played Lyla Garrity, Riggins’ on-again-off-again love interest. The latter of the two, is absolutely heartbreaking, keep your fingers crossed for guest appearances.

Hopefully the show is able to smoothly transition and survive with so much of the former principle cast having been or being fazed out. So far the writers have done a great job at rotating characters in and out of the cast, but this is a fairly critical season for the future of the show because they are losing so many original characters, so my curiosity is certainly piqued as to how it will play out. One thing that makes this series so good is how real the characters are, and how compelling they are as a result. I’m confident that the writers will uphold that same standard with any new characters that are brought on board, ensuring that they will be just as memorable and compelling as past characters. Based on the first episode, it looks like there are some great new characters joining the show, and hopefully they can handle filling the void left by their predecessors.