Bravo's fine tradition of torturing creative professionals continues with "Step It Up & Dance" while NBC's "Friday Night Lights" gets another chance to shine.
STEP IT UP & DANCE -- "Baring It All" Episode 102 -- Pictured: (l-r) Cody, Nick, Oscar -- Bravo Photo: Isabella Vosmikova(Credit: Isabella Vosmikova)
When my sister and I were kids, we made our Star Wars action figures go on dates with each other. First we’d take turns picking our favorite action figures, then we’d set up “apartments” for each of them. (We knew from “Three’s Company” that single people always lived in apartments.) Next, Luke would knock on Leia’s door, but she’d usually say she was busy or had to wash her hair, because she secretly wanted to go out with Mark (that was the hunkier “Empire Strikes Back” version of Luke) or Harrison (the hunky “Empire Strikes Back” Han Solo). Finally, once everyone went on dates and kissed good night and went on dates again without any broken hearts or unexpected pregnancies, we needed to mix things up a little. So Mark would dump Leia for Bespin Leia (the fancy “Empire Strikes Back” Leia who Lando said truly belonged with them “among the clouds” of Bespin City), and Bespin Leia would cheat on Mark with Harrison, or Luke would start stalking Carrie (“Empire Strikes Back” Leia in “Hoth” garb). But even with so much drama and intrigue in the air, the second we started to mix and match the couples, we’d quickly begin to lose interest in the game. Who cared if Bespin Leia dated Mark then Luke then Harrison then Luke again, really? After a while, the relationships felt arbitrary, and sometimes Leia would elope with Chewbacca just to piss everyone off.
Whenever a solid teen drama like “The O.C.” (in the early days) or “Gossip Girl” or “Friday Night Lights” starts to stumble down a soapier and soapier path, and the quarterback pines for the coach’s daughter who likes the bad boy who wants the cheerleader who likes the strait-laced geek, and then everyone changes partners and do-si-dos? I think about our hormonally charged action figures, knocking on doors as we put the finishing touches on their apartments: That was the best part of the game. The heart-pounding anticipation of love, waiting to see if the devil-may-care smuggler pilot liked you, too, and hoping against hope that he’d take you out for a ride in the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
That’s why, when on “Friday Night Lights,” former cheerleader Lyla started dating a good Christian boy and quarterback Saracen fell in love with his grandmother’s nurse and bad boy Riggins was pining for Lyla and geek Landry loved bad girl Tyra who secretly loved him, too, I wanted to say to the show’s producers, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!” In other words, cut this soapy musical chairs routine and give us something with some heart and a little grit, damn it! Put away the dolls and write a real story, for Chrissakes!
Knock-knock jokes This week, NBC announced its new lineup, and “Friday Night Lights” is coming back for a third season, thanks to a strange deal with DirecTV, which dictates that the show will air on DirecTV in October and then on NBC in early 2009.
This means I finally have a reason to watch the last episode of the (strike-shortened) second season, which has been sitting on my TiVo, unloved and forlorn, for weeks now. Thank God FNL’s producers will have another chance to recapture the soul of the show’s first season. In the second season, they clearly wanted to prove that FNL wasn’t really about football, but as a result, the football team felt like an afterthought. During the first season, we understood the role of the team and its games in the town of Dillon. We saw how many lives were wrapped up in the teams’ victories and defeats. We met ordinary people with ordinary problems.
You can’t just make all your main characters fall in love with each other, confess their love, break up, change partners, rinse, repeat. All we saw, show after show, was some character knocking on the door to some other character’s house to confess his love, and then she’d say she had to shampoo her hair or they’d kiss and the music soared and that was it. What really went on between Saracen and that nurse? We never knew. Why was Riggins hung up on Lyla? How did Lyla feel about Riggins? Who can say?
This is a common problem for dramas, particularly those that bring to life the often fickle concerns of teenagers. You introduce a big group of characters who fit into a story organically: Landry is Saracen’s snide buddy and sidekick, Tyra is Riggins’ lost ex-girlfriend, Lyla is the handicapped star quarterback’s supportive girlfriend. Once you start dreaming up new story lines, though, you make the mistake of putting your sidekicks and exes in the spotlight, and suddenly you not only have way too many characters to service, but you’ve got sidekicks trying to hold down their own stories. Of course we love Landry as the snappy sounding board for Saracen’s angst and confusion, but do we really want him front and center? No. He’s just not all that charismatic — he wasn’t made for a leading role. Giving him a major plotline is like having Leia elope with Chewbacca.
Worse than all the changing partners, of course, are the moral dilemmas faced by these teens. “Should I really dump this body in the river?” “Should I invite my thug friends to my surrogate daddy’s house?” “Should I beat that racist guy’s face in and risk losing my scholarship?” “Should I skip practice and get wasted with Riggins?” While Landry’s murder plot was as ill-considered and unbelievable as Chewbacca opening fire on a crowd of lovelorn action figures (I’m pretty sure that happened in our childhood games at least once), these other, smaller indiscretions are the lazy equivalent of “The O.C.’s” endlessly repeating “Welcome to the O.C., bitch!” style of fisticuffs.
Surely there’s more to being a high school kid than unrequited love and big, stupid mistakes! But at least now FNL’s writers have another chance to show us the sometimes mundane, always heartfelt concerns of the down-to-earth, sentimental, small-town folks we grew to love in the first season.
Step by step If down-to-earth, regular folks are your thing, you certainly won’t find them on “Step It Up & Dance” (10 p.m. Thursdays on Bravo), yet another reality dance competition for the millions of viewers who just can’t get enough of dance shows, of all things. Doesn’t that make you feel like it’s the early ’80s and you’ve just gone to see John Travolta’s Tony Manero try to become a Broadway dancer in the deliciously awful movie “Staying Alive”?
As easy as it would be to write off “Step It Up & Dance” as just another dance show, it’s actually pretty different from either “So You Think You Can Dance” or “Dancing With the Stars.” Best described as a dance version of “Project Runway” or “Top Chef,” the show features contestants who are mostly professional dancers, either members of modern dance troupes, performers in Broadway musicals, or dancers who’ve toured with pop and R&B stars. So, while “Dancing With the Stars” attempts to turn celebrities into dancers and “So You Think You Can Dance” takes mostly twentysomething dancing amateurs and turns them into versatile dancers-for-hire, “Step It Up & Dance” takes a group of proficient, professional dancers and basically tortures them with impossibly difficult choreography (think “Quickfire Challenge”) for the chance to win $100,000.
This has become a time-honored tradition with Bravo’s reality competitions: take talented professionals and make them do insanely difficult tasks while the clock ticks and the cameras roll. You can tell these dancers are much more professional that the ones on other shows, because when they’re learning new choreography, they’re focused and self-possessed and they don’t laugh and chat with each other. Unlike, say, “America’s Next Top Model,” this isn’t about young people, giggling and squabbling. These are intense, motivated, seriously egocentric people. For this reason, Bravo’s reality competitions seem to target adult viewers who can relate more to neurotics and control freaks and stubborn, overconfident thirtysomethings than they can to naive teenagers with no notion of how to play nicely with others. While some of the contestants on “Step It Up & Dance” are very young, most of them have already had careers: Mochi has performed with “The Lion King” on Broadway since 2001, Cody went to Juilliard and performed in the Broadway shows “Moving Out,” “Grease” and “Mama Mia,” Adriana (who was eliminated for her “Staying Alive”-style moves during the first episode) is in a contemporary jazz dance company in New York, and Michael has toured with Mary J. Blige and Beyoncé. These dancers are familiar with hard work, and they mean business.
Of course, this also makes them seriously smug and full of themselves, and somehow a dancer’s pretensions are particularly amusing. Miguel begins by telling us, “My dance style is called jazz funk, and I would say that I’m a pioneer of the genre itself. I am the most amazing performer you’ll ever see on the stage.” He says that telling him he’s not talented would be “like telling Da Vinci, ‘I’m sorry, you’re not a good painter.’” Later, James describes himself as “23 years young and beautiful.” Even the dancers who don’t brag a lot make it clear to us that the art of dance is a force of good that will eventually end global warming, cure world hunger, and make all the little children of the world hold hands and sing in the streets.
And you have to love the unbridled cheese of the “Pack your knives and go” scene, in which the freshly eliminated dancer enters an empty, dramatically lit studio and does a somewhat melancholy farewell dance for the viewers at home. Through my movements, I express my regrets and hopes for the future! those pointy toes and graceful, sweeping arms seem to say. Or maybe they’re saying, I’m one of the pioneers of jazz funk, damn it!
Sometimes it’s tough to tell the difference. But at least one thing is clear to these dancers, as it should be to you: Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter!
Next week: The finale of “The Real Housewives of New York City” features more classless, tasteless lessons in class and taste. Then, the suspicions and paranoia build on “Battlestar”!
If you’ve had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we’ve culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren’t here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they’ll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
1. Clear eyes, full hearts, secret speech?: Entertainment Weekly has the mother of all Easter Eggs in the form of a special finale pep talk from Coach Taylor on “Friday Night Lights” that was supposed to play over the end sequence. Well, here it is, in all its gruff-but-lovable glory. (Though it is kind of awkward, the way he talks about never forgetting the feeling of “that hot breeze slapping my face.”)
2. All about the Bitcoins: If you haven’t heard about the Internet’s new form of currency that takes hundreds of dollars in computer equipment to “mine” and is vulnerable to hackers stealing all your fortune in fake (but kind of real?) money, count yourself lucky. Or just read this story.
I wonder if he had this shirt custom-made, or if he found it in a Salvation Army or something. Maybe Marie is the name of a new ride at Six Flags?
4. Paula Abdul wants to be the new Khaleesi: It’s common knowledge that Paula is a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs, so why anyone would take on a job as her assistant is beyond me. Maybe it’s so they can come back and report how the “X-Factor” judge needs to have her entourage constantly remind her that she’s a “warrior, survivor and gift.” Dragons!
5. Dissecting the Coens: David Haglund over at Slate watched every single Coen brothers movie. (Who hasn’t?) At first he thought they were self-indulgent. Then he thought they didn’t make any sense. Finally he came to the conclusion that we aren’t supposed to like these characters-bordering-on-caricatures, and it was all a broad, meandering metaphor for real life. Kind of like this article is for a Coen brothers film. Wait … brilliant!
6. Fergie, Duchess of York, can’t make it through a whole interview: I guess we’ll have to wait until Australia’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday to find out what made Fergie “go off the rails.” (Though we kind of already know it’s the infamous 2010 tape where she begs for money to see Prince Andrew.)
We can only hope the reporter didn’t try something akin to that Dalai Lama joke. You know how those Australian newscasters are. Where is Barbara Walters when you need her?
7. Mark Zuckerberg dares to call “Chill” Facebook app “lame”: Guys, not to freak you out, but the fallout from this could be devastating. Especially because the Zuck wasn’t talking about FarmVille.
8. Bizarro Twitterverse even scarier than the real thing: Check out “fake Twitter” site Heello. It’s by the same guy who founded Twitpic, but it’s a hell of a lot weirder. Though honestly Twitter is such a mess sometimes that reading a CNN tweet all in caps about Justin Bieber doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary.
At least they are a step up from those real teeth tattoos? Or maybe they are like a gateway drug for permanent images that look like red rot on your chompers. Moms, don’t let your kids start putting decals on their baby teeth, or else they will grow up to be this guy.
10. That “Russian Dolls” show actually happened and you missed it: You probably skipped the premiere to watch “Jersey Shore,” right? Shame on you! There is a whole world out there of trashy cultures you have yet to experience! Well, here’s the first episode in its entirety. Try to keep up, it moves fast. Brighton Beach forever!
1. Ouroboros of the day: NBC’s cult series “Friday Night Lights” may have ended, but show execs have just confirmed a film script is in the works. So this movie will be based on the popular TV series that was a reimagining of the 2004 film of the same name, which was already adapted from Buzz Bissinger’s nonfiction book. Just so we won’t be confused when we order from Amazon.
2. Weird TV show concept of the day: In an opposite move from “FNL,” NBC will be picking up “The Firm,” a series based on the Tom Cruise movie taken from the John Grisham book. The cast is stellar — Juliette Lewis, Josh Lucas, Molly Parker from “Deadwood” — but how much mileage can they get from a plot where the audience already knows the twist ending?
4. Raise of the day: After rounds of negotiation, Jennifer Lopez will be bleeding a fortune out of someone other than Marc Anthony. Her new paycheck for another season of “American Idol” will be “a smidge over” $20 million for the season … which is $8 million more than she made last year as a judge.
5. Art porn of the day: Lars Von Trier may be shooting his latest film “Nymphomaniac” in two forms: hardcore and softcore. But if “Antichrist” was his version of a softcore film, I don’t even want to know what he’d put in an X-rated feature.
The final episode of “Friday Night Lights” airs tonight, ending a scrappy five season run. It took the DirecTV satellite network co-financing the show — in a unique deal that allowed it to air “Friday Night Lights” before NBC — to keep it on the air. So for Satellite subscribers the story of Dillon, Texas, has been concluded for months. For “Lights” fans, those concluding episodes — and the delirious reviews they garnered — have been a kind of shadow broadcast, a resonance from the void. The show has been haunted by its own ghost, these last weeks. It was kind of appropriate. This cat had only five lives, after all — not nine, and it’s lived in the shadow of its own mortality for every one of them.
It was never a hit. It always lacked the ingredients of escapism and weekly closure that make for profitable network comfort food. But that was what we loved about it. In the very first episode, golden boy quarterback Jason Street seems headed for a college scholarship and a legendary career in the NFL. He even looks a little like Tom Brady. Then Jason throws an interception and tries to tackle the other team’s free safety, as he runs it back for the touchdown. Jason makes the tackle but injures himself catastrophically. By the end of the show’s pilot we know that Jason Street has become a paraplegic. Peter Berg, the show’s creator, said somewhere that the NBC executives couldn’t quite believe this development. “He gets better, right?” They kept saying. “When does he walk again?”
“He doesn’t,” Berg told them.
And he didn’t. Instead the first three seasons of the show dramatized this extraordinary young man’s valiant efforts to come to terms with his handicap — from trying out for a professional wheelchair rugby (he didn’t make the team) to working as an assistant coach to Eric Taylor and selling cars for Buddy Garrity, his girlfriend’s father. Nothing works out for Jason until he lands a job as a sports agent late in the series. You can see how his persistence and passion could make him a success in that field. Along the way he loses the lovely Lyla Garrity to his best friend Tim Riggins, but not before Buddy explains in no uncertain terms that he won’t allow his daughter to throw her life away on a cripple.
“Friday Night Lights” was a show about a town, not just a football team, and Buddy Garrity is a perfect example of the program’s depth and humanity. He starts out as a loudmouthed overweight mover and shaker, the classic big fish in a small pond — plankton in a thimble. He’s a salesman to the core, and the biggest booster of the Dillon Panthers, lobbying for a bigger stadium and a Jumbotron … while the school can’t even seem to find chalk for the blackboards. This is an echo of the real Odessa, Texas, where Buzz Bissinger lived for a year while writing the original book-length reportage. His harsh view of a dirt-poor, football-crazed town earned him so much hatred that his cousin Peter Berg had to apologize, beg and grovel to shoot the film there. He kept his word: The movie was kinder to Odessa. The TV show left it entirely, setting its stories in a wholly fictional town that somehow seems more real than its actual counterpart, a fully realized setting, as vivid as Grover’s Corners or Winesburg, Ohio.
It’s a place where things don’t turn out well, as a rule. Buddy has an affair and gets divorced, loses his car dealership, and winds up running a local bar, trying to raise his estranged son alone. The smart people, like his daughter Lyla, get the hell out of town. Tim Riggins lives the apex of his life as a football star and then just drifts. His dream of “living large in Texas” with football star pal Jason Street falls apart before they even graduate from high school. He tries college and fails — he only got through high school because of local nerd Landry Clarke’s relentless tutoring. He winds up running a chop shop with his brother and going to jail to protect him.
In any normal TV show, when Tim came out of jail he would have changed for the better — taken some college courses, or found Jesus like Lyla did. He would have met some jailhouse mentor who would have steered him straight or given him connections for a better life on the outside. Not on “Friday Night Lights.” Riggins returns from jail bitter and angry, even more lost than he was before. If Tim finds any peace now, in the show’s closing minutes, it will be in tiny increments — reconnecting with his old girlfriend Tyra, giving up his crazy dream of working on the Alaska pipeline, coming to terms with his brother. It’s not much but it’s what we’ve come to expect from a show that never blinks as it stares down the harsh facts of real life. The moment last week when Tim, working behind the bar at Garrity’s, watched his old team-mate Smash Williams on TV score a touchdown for his college team reverberated with the whole history of their troubled friendship, and all the years we’ve spent with them in Dillon.
Matt Saracen is another good example of the subtle way “Friday Night Lights” uses the high school players to reveal the life of the town around them. Matt is in love with the Coach’s daughter, and the primary custodian for his grandmother, who is slipping into Alzheimer’s. Matt’s father is serving in Iraq and his return to town only reveals the unbridgeable gap between him and his son. Even the eventual funeral doesn’t solve or soothe anything. Matt is angry and frustrated and that’s the whole of his patrimony.
Fathers are scarce in Dillon anyway — star running back Smash Williams’ father is dead, Tim Riggins’ dad is just gone. Season three quarterback J.D. McCoy’s father Joe is an overbearing prick; season five quarterback Vince Howard’s father is a drug-dealing ex-con. The mothers carry the burden of raising their kids, from force of nature Corinna Willams to fragile Regina Howard.
The primary intact family on the show is Coach Taylor’s. Eric and his wife Tami have the best, most believable, most nuanced and realistic marriage in the history of network television. The day-to-day struggle of their relationship — Tami’s eighteen years of being a coach’s wife — feel inspiring daunting and familiar to anyone who has tried to raise a family under less than perfect conditions.
It’s a dense, teeming world, developed lovingly over half a decade, and because there’s no “hook” to the show (except high school football) it’s always been a hard sell, and not just for network advertising departments. I tried to get my ex-wife Kim to watch the show for years with no success. Even when it won a Peabody award she was unmoved. She just had no interest in football of any kind — but especially high school football. Nantucket, where we live, is almost as crazy about the sport (Go Whalers!) as Odessa, Texas, and indeed Buzz Bissinger who knows the island well, was originally planning to write his book about our town.
In desperation I gave Kim the DVD of the “Friday Night Lights” first season for Christmas one year. She never watched it. The next Christmas, after the presents were unwrapped and we were trying to digest the home-made sticky-buns, we were rummaging for something to watch and I found the still shrink-wrapped DVD in the cupboard under the television. Busted. She had no choice at that point.
Well, we watched the fist six episodes that day. Finally I had to leave. When I stopped by the next day Kim was upstairs watching season two on her computer.
Victory!
She’s mourning with the rest of us and she’ll be watching tonight along with a small dedicated group of die hard fans, as “Friday Night Lights” closes down its fragile, miraculous five-year run. Its audience over the years would have been enough to make a cable show like “Breaking Bad” into AMC’s biggest hit ever. It would have been enough to make any novel a bestseller to rival “Harry Potter” or “Gone With the Wind.” But it was on NBC, and it barely scraped by.
But the fact remains that watching this show felt like reading a novel, with a level of immersion that it takes hundred of pages of prose to achieve. This morning I’m feeling the same bittersweet dread I’ve felt so many times before, turning the last pages of books as diverse but enveloping as “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Corrections.”
I hate to leave Dillon, Texas, a fly-over fly speck I would never would have even wanted to visit in real life. Now I feel like some part of me will always be there.
Cancellation is a defeat, but this unlikely show had tremendous spirit, and admirers who fought for it, and it wound up doing much better than anyone ever predicted… just like the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Dillon Lions football team that Coach Taylor took to the state championships in this final season.
Win or lose, just getting there was a triumph, and you could say the same thing about these remarkable five seasons of “Friday Night Lights”.
Or as Coach Taylor always said, rallying his troops: Clear eyes, full hearts — can’t lose.
1. Not-so-”Gleeful” news of the day: Chris Colfer, Lea Michele and Corey Monteith won’t be returning for a fourth season of “Glee.” Ostensibly, they’d be graduating, right? What, did everyone else fail high school?
2. S’Paz of the day: “Empire Boardwalk’s” Paz de la Huerta got more than a slap on the wrist for her bar brawl back in April. Though prosecutors were going to let her off on the condition she enter an alcohol treatment program and do a couple of days of community service, Judge Diana Boyar said Paz had to be evaluated by a rehab facility before she signed off on the deal.
3. “Friday” of the day: Grantland has compiled an oral history of “Friday Night Lights’” successes — and failures — throughout the years.
4. Fashionista of the day: Kanye West, who certainly knows a thing or two when it comes to coordinating your bling, may be designing a womenswear line for Fashion Week this fall.
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS -- Episode 103 -- Pictured: Kyle Chandler as Coach Eric Taylor -- NBC Photo: Dean Hendler(Credit: Dean Hendler)
While not the biggest fan of sports culture, I was hooked on the show “Friday Night Lights” from its premiere episode. The soaring music that crescendoed when a ball was mid-air was somehow just as mesmerizing as watching Taylor Kitsch take off his shirt.
Now that the show is in its final season on NBC (though technically the finale played back in February on DIRECTV), there’s no denying that the tragically under-awarded series has been held together by some amazing performances. In particular, Kyle Chandler as the stoic Coach Eric Taylor has imparted five years of wisdom, not all of it about football. What has Coach T. really taught us? He taught us all how to fail, and how to fail well.
Here are some “Friday Night Light” tips for when you lose at life.
1. Get rid of that pride, boy
In the “devil town” of Dillon, everyone must eventually answer for their sins. Whether its conning your church out of money to buy steroids, making an off-handed racist remark to the press, or screwing your crippled best friend’s girlfriend — and hey, we’re still in season one! – there is no moral or ethical slip that goes unpunished on “Friday Night Lights.”
And while that could turn another type of show into a real downer, Coach T. is always there to pick you up when you fall … as long as your hubris doesn’t stand in the way. When QB Matt Saracen skips practice to get drunk at the local strip club in season two, and misses his grandmother’s trip to the hospital (yikes), it’s hard to imagine anyone getting back on their feet from that kind of screw up. But as Coach knows, there’s nothing like an ice-water bath and some primal crying to start the healing process.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have the McCoy family: with son J.D. too proud (or scared) to break away from his over-achieving, physically abusive father and side with the protective coach, he ends up taking on more and more of his old man’s nasty qualities. Both Matt and J.D. make bad decisions because of their daddy issues, but only Matt is strong enough to ask for help. Guess who ends up better off in the end?
2. If you’re going to lose, lose honorably
The Panthers lost the state championships at the end of Season 3, and it cost Coach T. his job at the school. That’s the part of life where most people would give up and crawl under the covers with a bottle of Xanax. But Eric Taylor knows he made the right call by benching J.D. and putting Matt in, even if that meant losing the game and hurting his career.
This theme is repeated off the field as well: Tim Riggins going to jail for his brother when the police raid their chop-shop; Lyla Garrity continuing her cheerleading after her affair with Tim makes her a social pariah; Jason giving up his dreams in order to raise the child he accidentally fathered. After all, losing is half the game, and as Tami Taylor puts it, “Either way, the sun is going to come up the next morning.” Sure, it’s a rehashed line from “Annie,” and the point is even more cliché, but it still holds water … win or lose, in life it’s all about how you play the game.
3. Surround yourself with your people
Even Coach Taylor isn’t infallible, and when he does screw up, he has the support of his team, his family, and even Buddy Garrity to rely on. No one on “Friday Night Lights” can do it alone, and woe to the person who tries to remain tough and aloof when trouble comes knocking. Everyone on the show has to learn this lesson – some people like Tim Riggins have to learn it over and over – but the nice thing about football metaphors is that they work even when you’ve heard them a thousand times before. There is just no “I” in Taylor’s team.
Unfortunately, that does means the show occasionally takes a small-town mentality when it comes to characters trying to leave Dillon to move on with a life past high school football. This is usually shown as a bad decision, like when Coach goes to teach college ball at the end of season one, or when Riggins goes to college. Whatever happens to Jason Street or Smash or Lyla after they head out into the big scary world is their own affair … by leaving the Dillon nest, they are removed from the sacred circle privy to Coach’s pep-talks. We can only imagine that they’re all gutter junkies now, turning tricks and wishing that they’d stayed in Texas.
4. Failure is a state of mind
Living in Dillon isn’t easy. This is doubly so if you live in East Dillon, which is so completely different from (West?) Dillon that it’s basically “The Wire’s” portrayal of Baltimore dropped down in the south. East Dillon is so messed up that no one on the show really even talks about its existence until a Katrina-like natural disaster somehow decimates the poor, black side of town (but not the affluent suburban area). Or when Coach T. is exiled to run the East Dillon Lions as punishment for not throwing himself at the mercy of Mr. McCoy. But looking around the decimated playing field of East Dillon High, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor make their first move together: picking up the garbage strewn on the grass, one piece at a time.
By the end of the fifth season, the Lions are the new Panthers, thanks to tough love from a coach who won’t let his team be defined by their poor track record, bad attitudes, or shady after-school activities. If you want to act like a coward, you best get the hell off the field and out of the coach’s house.
5. …except when it isn’t
On “Friday Night Lights,” almost every episode includes a character learning something about themselves and becoming better for it: a better friend, a better son or daughter, a better teammate. But for all the emotional manipulation that the show cleverly steeps itself in, it grounds itself with the memory of its very first episode, when star quarterback Jason Street is paralyzed from an injury during a game. Sometimes life is suffering, princess, and there is no way you can “better yourself” out of the pain.
Coach T.’s voice leading the team in prayer at the end of the pilot episode sums this up better than I ever could:
“Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable. And we will all, at some point in our lives, fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special, and that it can be taken from us. And when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls.
We will now all be tested. It is at these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.”
In other words: just because you can’t fix it, doesn’t mean you can’t grow from it. Clear eyes, full hearts … yes, even if you lose.
STEP IT UP & DANCE -- "Baring It All" Episode 102 -- Pictured: (l-r) Cody, Nick, Oscar -- Bravo Photo: Isabella Vosmikova(Credit: Isabella Vosmikova) 
Your weekly dose of popsam and jetsam. 
Happy "Spy" Day! 
FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS -- Episode 103 -- Pictured: Kyle Chandler as Coach Eric Taylor -- NBC Photo: Dean Hendler(Credit: Dean Hendler) 
