Friday Night Lights, Season 3

D.W. Moffett as Joe McCoy Sr. in Friday Night LightsRain, wind, tears, smeared mascara—FNL drenched itself in emotion and storm this week. The big end-of-season nemesis is Joe, who clashes with Eric, J.D., and (go, sister) Katie. As I've said before, I wish that Joe weren't so flatly and predictably villainous. The heart vs. money dichotomy you set up awhile back, Hanna, feels overdetermined here.

Still, I believed Joe's explosion of rage against his son, the desperate pummeling in the parking lot as the rain poured from the post-game skies. Joe has always been tightly wound, coiled around his obsession with J.D.'s talent, and it made sense that he would lose it after J.D. won the big game by ignoring his father's insistent, unwanted instructions. Eric and Tami, of course, are called on to come to the rescue. It turns out that springing Tyra from Cash's clutches a couple of weeks ago was just a warm-up. Now, as Joe stalks off into the night, Tami comforts Katie, whose perfect life is running down her face with her makeup, while Eric listens to J.D. admit that he can't abide his father.

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Is it unfair of me to complain that J.D. talks only in clichés? "Nothing I do is ever good enough for him" and "I can't take it anymore" and "Is it my fault?" OK, I think I am being unfair, because a kid in such a situation might say exactly those things—that's why they're clichés, after all. I do think, though, that the show missed a serious character-development opportunity in J.D. I don't know if it's a failure of acting or writing or the two in combination, but to me he's still two-dimensional. The one exception this week was the flash of his wide and startled eyes when his father barked and glared at him from the front of the car after hearing that he'd been Romeo-ing Madison at practice. For a second, J.D. was fawnlike and real to me. But then he went back to texting gossip girl Madison, who, Meghan is right, seems like a hottie from a different show—one I don't want to watch—and I lost interest again.

This does not bode well for a potential fourth season. I'd rather go to college with Tim (and Lyla and Tyra, fingers crossed) than hang out in Dillon with the McCoys. What do you think, though, about a more immediate question: Did Katie and J.D. overreact by deciding not to go home to Joe? If this is the first time he hit his kid, as Katie implied, should they go back and try to get Joe into an anger-management class rather than contemplate splitting up their family? Or should the show take a stand against what might become a cycle of violence by cutting Joe off?

Matt, meanwhile, has the weight of his grandmother's illness pressing down on him. A few weeks ago, I complained that Lorraine's senility turned on and off too conveniently, but in this episode, when she opens the door of a moving car and falls out and then screams out in anger and panic for the slippers that are already on her feet, the scene captured memories of my grandfather's tormenting slide into Alzheimer's. The phase when he didn't know us was terrible because it was numbing; the phase preceding it was terrible because it was raw with rage and sorrow. I'm almost ready to forgive the writers for Shelby's implausible Return of the Prodigal Mother out of relief that Matt has an adult to turn to as Lorraine declines.

Tyra's mom is also busy redeeming herself this week, and good for her: It was time for Angela to come through for her kid already. The reassurance she gave Tyra wasn't beyond her ken. She didn't say, "Let me pay for your SAT tutor" or even "Let me drive you to the test." She said, "You surprise me." She told Tyra to "keep reaching" while being a bit inchoate about where that reaching might lead. It made sense to me that Angela could offer this reassurance after Tyra planned and executed her sister Mindy's bridal shower. If Tyra is reaching for a future that's better than the Landing Strip, she's doing it without turning her back on her family. The increasingly real chance that she might have to move on from Dillon is bathing her scenes in pathos. This can get cheesy, as Meghan pointed out last week. But I forgave it in Tyra's scene with Angela. What did you think?

One more question: What did you think of Eric's lie to Tami when she asked him if he knew that the boosters were tinkering with the line for bisecting Dillon into two high-school districts in order to keep the football team together? At first I was leery of this plot line dropped in out of nowhere, but then the tension between Tami and Eric, as coach vs. principal, drew me in. Eric is putting his team first, as I guess he has to, and Tami is thinking about what's best for the school as an educational institution, since Dillon is eligible for more state per-pupil funding only if it approves the redistricting. We've been here before with the JumboTron; this time, Tami has become wiser and Eric more morally conflicted. I'm not sure why the football team shouldn't be grandfathered in on one side of the line—what's to be gained by breaking it up? But Eric isn't making that argument. He's just slinking out of the boosters' meeting, and avoiding looking his wife in the eye. Trouble in Taylor paradise of an intriguing kind.

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