'Friday Night Lights:' What Happened After the Forfeit

Have I said how much I love Friday Night Lights?

The second episode of the fourth season, “After the Fall,” was a beautiful bookend to the premiere, where Coach Taylor’s brand new, ragtag, no-resources East Dillon Lions football team had to be rebuilt yet again, less than a month after he’d cobbled it together in the first place, all because he’d made the gutsy move to forfeit their first game when they were down 45-0 at the half and the team was physically in shambles.

Eric Taylor spent the bulk of this episode going around town and apologizing to everybody for making a call he knew in his heart was the right one and trying to coax the team members to show up to the field. After facing off against a defiant, delightfully awkward Landry in the cafeteria and a stone faced Vince on the basketball court, Eric was surprised to later find Vince in his office and appealed to Vince to help pull the rest of the team back together and meet with the coaches for a special Saturday night practice. All the players actually showed up -- imagine the drama we would've seen had they NOT -- and they all purged the demons from the first game in a fire in the middle of the football field, encouraged by Coach Taylor to start anew by pitching their ripped football jerseys into the flames, an idea spawned by a strange guy Eric ran into at a gas station, but one which left the team without jerseys. But that's another story for another episode.

The other big story of the episode was the revelation that a star running back for the Panthers didn’t really live in West Dillon territory and that he should be attending East Dillon and playing for Coach Taylor's Lions team. This news had to be delivered by West Dillon Principal Tami Taylor to Luke Cafferty, after which she was “jokingly” threatened with lynching by Joe McCoy, who also threatened to harm Coach Taylor's reputation, and then Tami found herself nastily jeered at a high school pep rally by the student body while Joe McCoy laughed. Being placed in the middle of this controversy, between her husband and her school, is a sticky place for Principal Taylor will almost certainly cause tension in the Taylor household.

And how very depressing is it to watch the story of Tim Riggins, or "the guy who used to be Tim Riggins,” who used to be a star, a VIP in Dillon, but who’s now just a garden variety college drop-out (attended college classes only briefly) has-been who was rendered homeless and sleeping in his truck? This is one aspect of the Texas high school football star saga that I’d always hoped this show would address, the fact that, in this fictional town (and many real towns), one’s high school football career is, all too frequently, the pinnacle of these young men's lives. Everything else is downhill and the rest of life seems like a disappointment by comparison.

What do you think of this season thus far?

'Friday Night Lights' Returned with Gutsy Premiere

*Warning: Spoilers ahead from the season four premiere of Friday Night Lights.*

How amazingly gutsy.

Losing 47-0, at halftime, his team -- possessing little-to-no experience, precious few resources and no confidence -- sits in the locker room. The grossly undermanned team of less than two dozen teenage high school football players is bloody, broken, physically unable to continue. Their huge-hearted coach -- who had taken his former high school team to win the State Championship, who was humiliated in last year's season finale by being fired and re-assigned to another high school in town, one with no money and no football team – decided, on their behalf, to forfeit the game. They weren’t going to win and going ahead and playing the game would’ve just savaged those kids’ bodies. And for this crucial decision, Coach Eric Taylor, will pay a price.

This season of Friday Night Lights is taking wonderful creative risks this year by having Eric work for East Dillon and his wife Tami Taylor run the more affluent school in West Dillon. My pop culture column this week on Mommy Tracked is all about really fantastic this fourth season is shaping up to be. (I’m about halfway through watching review copies of the fourth season.)

I was a big fan of the 1990 book, Friday Night Lights by Buzz Bissinger on which the show is based. The non-fiction book examined not just the mania that is Texas high school football, but issues of class, socio-economic differences, race and gender, as well as valuing sports more than academics in an economically depressed community. It was tough to read sometimes but much of it has stuck with me all these years later.

The TV show, inspired by the book, has always been good (with the exception of that Tyra-Landry murder business a while back), and I’ve always recommended that people watch it, even if they hate football. But this season it seems closer to the original source material than it ever has, and harder to watch on occasion, which is a very good thing. Maybe they'll finally get a well-deserved Emmy afterall . . .

This coming Friday’s episode, “After the Fall,” has Coach Taylor repenting for his decision to forfeit the game, plus, it hurls one big, giant mess into Principal Taylor’s lap, one that’s gonna cause a heap ‘o problems for her. Here’s NBC’s preview:



Image credit: NBC.