[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]
Dads and football: That's what this week's largely about. On one end there's J.D.'s dad, well established as a fanatic. On the other there's the new-to-the-show (unless I'm forgetting a previous appearance from Sinqua Walls) Jamarkus' dad, who can't make his feelings any clearer than when he says, "Football doesn't mean anything to our family." And somewhere in the middle (well, obviously more toward the fanatic end) there's Buddy, who learns his namesake and his other daughter have abandoned football for soccer and abandoned meat for veganism during their stay in California with their Mom and Kevin.
Uncharacteristically for FNL, two of these stories get snap resolutions. Jamarkus' family watches a game and sees the light, which seems a little easy. (But at least we got the great scene of Coach and Tami tag-teaming Jamarkus' mom and dad.) Buddy's kids go from a series of scenes that illustrate just how hurtful petulant teens can be to grown-ups (even if they're overgrown kids like Buddy) to the familial harmony of the kind of only ice cream sundaes can bring about. Did we miss a scene somewhere? The Garritys' conflicts had the uncomfortable feel of real-life–"Could you please stop texting," "pubic hair," etc.–but the final exchanges felt sitcom flat.
Still, if neither of these storylines worked as well they might have, the J.D. story did, particularly the moments of Coach trying to tell his new star quarterback his dad's an asshole without actually saying it. And the football game brought all the strands together in a way that let them work better together than apart.