Friday Night Lights, Season 3

Friday Night LightsI got out a box of tissues and let the finale take me away. The next morning, I woke up to the hollowed-out comfort that comes after a good cry. With the distance of a few more days, I grant that this season didn't have the impact, heft, or grittiness of the first one. And I've started picking apart the logic of this last episode. But in the moment, it all rolled over me in a wave of satisfying television. The ending worked (and endings are the hardest part to get right), because it held in tension resolution and open-ended possibility. No one working on the show knew whether FNL would be renewed or canceled; maybe behind-the-scenes uncertainty is a recipe for good TV.

What did you think of the "five months later" opening device? I say, smart gimmick. It gave the writing and the characters a little room to breathe. The central conflict, as we predicted weeks ago, is between Coach Taylor and Joe McCoy, heart and money, and the clash has gotten high-stakes and nasty. My husband pointed out that this is at least the third time that a nosedive in Eric's career has stirred up interesting trouble in the series. It's part of why we love the show: We see Coach exposed. In plenty of moments this season, the show has trafficked in standard masculinity and femininity. But then it gives us moments of real gender shake-up, and this is another reason we love the show. In this episode, the men man up, and they lose. The women man up and win.

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Hanna, you pointed out early on that Peter Berg loves women, even if he doesn't always get them exactly right—this week, his affection runneth over. Lyla gets to go to Vanderbilt. Tyra gets to go to UT, God bless Landry and all his SAT tutoring and essay help. Julie gets to keep Matt. Meanwhile, Eric loses his job and his team, to "a man with a lot of money and a boy with a good arm," as he puts it to the school board. Riggins loses Lyla because he doesn't want to stand in the way of her going to the better college she got into. "Don't make me that guy," he says. And Matt, dear deserving Matt, gives up art school to bring his grandma back from the nursing home he has just moved her into. This last continues to be one of the most important plotlines the show has brought us. The split-screen shot of Matt standing in the hall outside Lorraine's new room, shoulders strained, eyes down, mouth set, while she sits alone in her chair, staring before her, was pretty exquisite. If ever that's a word to apply to network TV. What did you think of Matt's choice?

Tim's self-doubt about college, and his selfless parting from Lyla, felt more hackneyed, but I confess it still broke me up. It's hard to imagine he's gonna make it at San Antonio State, no matter how good a pep talk Billy gives him about their unborn children. And Eric? In the final image of the season, he is facing the hard road and humiliation of starting all over, on a rundown field at a school no one much wanted to reopen on the other side of the tracks. By rights Season 4 should be filled with the Hispanic characters we've complained are lacking so far, because if we're following FNL the book, that's who will be the student-body majority at East Dillon High.

Eric isn't alone—he and Tami are holding each other, and we know he'll never be bereft the way Riggins might be. But Dillon has chewed him up and spit him out. Now I'll start to quibble: The town's rejection felt underdeveloped to me. With all the kids Coach has coached and all the games he's won, no parent or player would have been ready to stand up to Joe and call the town on selling its soul by hiring Wade? Really? I'd have believed in this plot if the writers had made time for a countermovement, which then could have gotten squashed. But, you know what, while I was watching, I didn't worry about any of this. His defeat felt sober and stark. And the closing shot of him and Tami on East Dillon's field made me care about next season's showdown. Bring it, Lions vs. Panthers.

Another memorable image: Those doggone Riggins brothers, tinkering with their truck and then wrestling in the long grass under the roiling, flung-open Texas sky, while a steer they bought for no good reason waits mutely in its trailer. My whole firsthand experience of Texas is three days in Houston and one stint of driving with broken air conditioning across the northern top hat of the state, hot air rushing by and the sweat pooling beneath me. But based on the mail I've gotten from readers, I'm pretty sure that this show gets its part of Texas right. Tim and Billy are the fuckups I most want to meet the next time I go southwest. Until then, hang in there boys. Maybe next year Peter Berg will show you more love.

PS: A question from a reader—did those cleats that Tim laid down on the field last week oh so gently belong to Jason Street?

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