'FNL': What's the game?

They still play games, don’t they?

“Friday Night Lights” has been awfully short on football this season. Not so much football scenes as a sense of the season. This week’s episode opened with the Panthers getting trounced 37-0. But don’t ask me why, or what their record is, or how many games they’ve played. Because I don’t know.

Aren’t our boys supposed to be defending their state title? Are they experiencing a championship hangover? Did they lose too many players to graduation? Is it the turmoil of a season stunted by the surprise return of Coach Taylor and the sudden departure of that other guy?

It’s hard not to wonder whether Coach doesn’t long for the college job he left behind in Austin. Because that blue Panther cap-and-shirt ensemble is beginning to evoke not so much head coach of a storied football program as manager of a muffler shop.

Last year Dillon Panther football was presented as a religion. But this year it’s more like shop class; I feel no sense of urgency. It comes down to an issue of verisimilitude, Panther fans: How are we to believe that life in a small town stops for each week’s game if the writers themselves don’t stop to fathom a season?

It’s turned “Friday Night Lights” from an unusually penetrating TV drama into a highly watchable soap, the episodes gliding by before leaving you feeling slightly undernourished.

Yes, I know, he’s easy on the eyes, but I could do with less of Riggins, who finally made his way back onto the team Friday night. Meanwhile, Saracen dumped his young-astronaut wife-like girlfriend and finally made it with his grandma’s caregiver (touchdown!). Landry finally confessed to killing Tyra’s stalker. And Smash went on a recruiting visit that ended in slapstick, our star running back high-tailing it into the night in his underwear after bedding a big, scary lineman’s girl.

All is tearing at the seams in the Taylor household, where Tami can’t seem to stop hovering over the flirtations of her heavily lip-glossed daughter Julie. In what I take to be her postpartum mania, Tami (again, just give the Emmy to Connie Britton) went ballistic on Julie’s English teacher after discovering he’d given her daughter a copy of “The World According to Garp.”

I get her concern; the two were openly canoodling at the game, and Julie’s got a well-established thing for swarthy guys in their 20s. And what are this guy’s intentions, anyway? I mean, really, who does he think he is, plying an impressionable student’s fancy with John Irving?

More than the game-games, these are the games being played.

-- Paul Brownfield

(Photo courtesy AP / NBC)

Comments

[Bo]

Friday Night Lights was a great, don't miss show last season. It's still entertaining but nowhere as good as before. The new baby and the resulting stress are taking away from the focus of what was a great show with believable characters!