[For those just tuning in: I first covered Friday Night Lights here at TV Club when it ran on DirecTV back in the fall. I'm rerunning those posts as it runs on NBC to a much larger audience. I'll be checking the comments regularly, as will FNL fans Scott Tobias and Noel Murray. A further wrinkle: My satellite crapped out on me shortly before the season finale so I'll be covering that as it airs on NBC. —Keith]
[Note 2: If you haven't watched this episode yet, bring tissue.]
Whether we like to admit it or not, nitpickery is hardwired into these TV Club blogs. Of course we're here to talk about themes, and performances, and the subtleties that become apparent when a show is consistently on its game week after week. And when a show is on its game then we get to focus on those qualities. But singling out "on the nose" moments and discussing weak links is usually part of the conversation too.
Not for me this week. This was just an exemplary outing from beginning to end.
And I wasn't necessarily expecting one from DirecTV's plot synopsis, either, which noted that, "Tyra breaks with Landry to take up with Cash, the new bad boy in town." So I guess if I were to nitpick, I'd start with Cash, who arrives studdus ex machina to sweep Tyra off her feet, with a container of "cowboy candy" in his pocket. Or at least I could do that if the subplot, so far at least, didn't play so well. Tyra clearly loves Landry as a friend. It's a cliché, but it's true here, and the show has spent the season building to their big confrontation at the Alamo Freeze this week. When two people love each other but have some radically different expectations it's not always possible to find middle ground, as this storyline messily illustrates. It's beautifully acted, too. I don't want FNL to end any time soon, but I hope both Jesse Plemons and Adriane Palicki get the roles they deserve when it does.
(I will nitpick this much, and this doesn't really have anything to do with this episode: Doesn't it feel like the Landry/Jean relationship was going to go somewhere else before last season ended? She was, after all, "God's own gift for Landry." But now Brea Grant's off shooting Heroes so we'll never know what was to be.)
On the adult front, both Tami and Coach faced difficult choices. Tami had to deal with her losing attempt to reassign the Jumbotron funds; Coach had to deal with the need to reassign his starting QB. For Tami that also meant dealing with the unspoken sexism that Janine Turner's Katie McCoy talks around when she points out that "nobody likes an angry woman." In other words, there are avenues of getting one's point across that aren't available to women. (Or minorities. Maybe it's just that we're in the middle of the election as I write this, but I couldn't help thinking of the restraint Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have had to employ this year that a white male candidate would not.) She also discovers that she's being held to a much lower threshold of anger later in the episode, though I don't know whether or not the ability to get legitimately angry would have made a difference. Fighting the Jumbotron always seemed like a losing battle in Dillon. At least she goes down honorably.