I know it’s a sin, but something rotten inside me won’t let me delete “Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll” or “The Bachelor: Officer and a Gentleman” or the insipid eighth cycle of “America’s Next Top Model.” For some reason, the baby ho donkey festival and sea donkerella pageant are my personal El Guapo. I can’t get enough of the skin-tight ass pants and the nasty little insinuations that Felicia can’t dance or Jolena has an eating disorder. Sea donkey, who are you, to take these many forms?

The More You Know
Then again, sometimes reality shows are really more like public service announcements. For example, did you know that it’s important to wear your “boob pads” if you want to “dance sexier”? You would if you listened to Pussycat choreographer Mikey Minden, who dropped that pearl of wisdom last episode. Or, did you know that, while rubbing shoulders with famous people at a swanky party, it’s usually not a good sign if 50 Cent tells you to go away repeatedly, then throws you into the pool? To be fair, aspiring “Top Model” Jael probably figured that the kinds of “famous people” who agree to appear as “famous people” on a reality show don’t deserve much more than outright harassment. (Nicole Richie appeared later and allowed the cameras to shoot her fluffing her hair in the bathroom.)

And then there was this conversation between “The Bachelor’s” Andy and aspiring wife Alexis, who the other aspiring wives loudly speculated must be a virgin, since she said she was conservative and she was wearing a white dress.

Andy: So, when was the last time you had a serious relationship?

Alexis: I’ve been engaged before. Um, like, for me, divorce isn’t even an option.

Andy: Me either! It’s, literally … it’s so important that I won’t even pass go if it’s not there. It’s that important.

Now, is Andra Dee really trying to tell us that he won’t go to bed ’til he’s legally wed? For more clues, you have to ignore the appropriate, agreeable sounds that are coming out of his mouth, and isolate that moment of abject horror that flashes across his face when he realizes that Alexis thinks it’s reasonable for him to frolic on the beach and clink champagne glasses once or twice for the cameras, then commit to spending the rest of his life with her.

Ladies, this is what we call a Yes Man (see also: Officer, Gentleman). No matter how stupid or odd a comment one of the “lovely ladies” makes, Andy acts like she’s touching the innermost reaches of his soul. If you doubt me, witness this exchange between Andy and Peyton, the sorority recruiter, about how incredible it is to be a sorority recruiter:

Peyton: We offer sooo much to our collegiate women. I want to change their lives! I have to tell myself, “OK, Peyton, you can’t change everyone’s life!”

Andy: That’s great. To be a good, inspiring mentor to others, it’s what I’m all about.

Peyton: What are you looking for in a woman?

Andy: Someone who wants a family. Someone with integrity. Someone who likes to inspire others. A lot of things that you have!

Peyton: Good, I’m so glad!

Peyton at least made it to the next round, which is more than can be said for Alexis, who found out that Andy isn’t about to pass go without collecting his 200 donkerellas, if you know what I’m saying.

Yes, it’s true: The Most Sincere Man in the World is the one you should warn your daughters about the most. Proving once again that a gentleman is a wish a guy makes when his penis is fast asleep, and a little white lie is a check your mouth writes that your ass can’t cash.

Name that festoon
See how educational reality TV can be? Take Bravo’s “Top Design.” If I didn’t watch this show, I’d never know that, in order to be a world-class interior decorator, all I need is a 10-foot-by-15-foot neon-lit white box and a few minutes in the overpriced shops of the Pacific Design Center.

Yes, the fine contestants on this show, who had so little to say that the producers were reduced to showing them bickering with their appointed carpenters over and over again, spent most of the season strolling around the PDC’s indoor mini-mall, searching for a stodgy-looking chaise or a boring mahogany ensemble that looked like a “dinette set” straight off “The Price Is Right” Showcase Showdown.

Now, it’s true that, just as Elle Decor editor in chief Margaret Russell appeared tanner and more youthful as the show went on, presumably to match her costar Kelly Wearstler (who looked like she got mowed down by the Stupid Fashion Trend Bus on more than one occasion), “Top Design” got better as the season progressed. By Wednesday night’s finale, I barely even noticed Jonathan Adler’s cartoonishly strange facial expressions, or the fact that Todd Oldham was painted bright orange.

And even though the contestants were pretty dull, the show did have its moments, like when aspiring designer Goil blurted, practically through tears, that he didn’t want to be “a Jan Brady” (meaning wishy-washy, emotional or envious?) or when Carissa narrowly avoided allowing her reckless carpenter, Carl, to inadvertently smash to little bits the rustic dinette set on loan from the PDC.

The final challenge was at least new and ambitious: Design a loft that you’d like to live in. While Carissa’s black, white and red-all-over loft looked like a funky, reasonably skilled imitation of a room you’d find in Jonathan Adler’s design book, minus the chartreuse glazed dildo-shaped vase and the 3-foot-tall Dalmatian statuette, Matt’s loft was the usual subdued, somnambulant showroom. Yes, the judges praised the pink girly bedroom for his daughter and the eggplant-colored walls and the whimsical hanging lamp in the bathroom. But other than those two rooms, all we saw from Matt was decent taste and nice furniture placement. At least Carissa designed a sunken platform bed (covered in Adler-esque pillows, of course) and some shelving (straight out of West Elm catalog, but still). If the whole point was merely to shop for dumb furniture, why not just call it “Top Consumer”?

Even worse, the pickings were so slim at the PDC that producers expected us not to notice that Carissa chose the same dinette set for her loft that Andrea had chosen as the main feature of her dining room design a few weeks earlier. In short,”Top Design” often felt cheap, lazy and unimaginative, as if the producers only had a few days to create and staff a show that they were told should be “just like ‘Top Chef’ or ‘Project Runway,’ except it’s about design!”

Here’s a cool idea for a show, guys: “Top Reality Show Producer”! We’ll get a bunch of lazy wannabe producers to throw together sloppy, uninspired reality shows overnight. After all, a reality competition is just a pitch your broke buddy makes when his brain is fast asleep.

Yow, man!
OK. Time to get to today’s challenge. Say what you like about the repetitiveness of the “Survivor” series, at least the show found a winning formula and stuck with it. After experimenting with a muddy, claustrophobic corner of the outback in Australia and a dusty, featureless expanse on the plains of Africa, Mark Burnett and Co. decided that “Survivor” really belonged in a photogenic tropical island setting. Instead of digging for grubs or crouching in the mud, neither of which were particularly pleasing to watch, we should be able to see the survivors climbing for coconuts or frolicking, half-naked, in crystal-blue shark-infested waters.

Why change the theme song significantly or cast aside the “eat this disgusting thing” challenge or the “stand on a platform” challenge, or even offer Jeff Probst something other than his Safari Ken Doll outfits to wear? Last season’s Battle-of-the-Races “Survivor” aside, the producers know better than to mess with a good thing. After all, in the world of television, immunity is always up for grabs!

“Survivor: Fiji” (8 p.m. EDT Thursdays on CBS) has been solid but unremarkable so far, with a few exceptions: Rocky, the confrontational dummy, brought a few laughs to the picture, as does Boo, the nonconfrontational dummy, and Dreamz, the Man Who Cannot Tell a Lie (who, incidentally, you should never align yourself with if you want to win this game). But my favorite by far is Yau-Man, the strange little old guy who not only found the immunity idol (after digging for it ineffectually on a few different occasions), but who’s suddenly figuring out ways to win challenges, either by scurrying as fast as his feeble little legs will carry him, or by choosing “the straightest possible arrow” and shooting it near the bull’s eye to secure a win for his team.

Yau-Man, in fact, represents the one element of “Survivor” that its producers have continued to finesse: casting. For the first few seasons, producers looked for irritating overconfident freaks and angry sociopaths likely to hurl spitty insults like Richard Hatch and Susan Hawk did during the first season. That approach soon fell apart because there were so many annoying jerks that audiences had no one to root for. (Remember “Survivor: Thailand,” when Brian the car salesman won? I didn’t think so.) Next, producers focused on trying to stock their island with mostly outrageous hotties (“Survivor: Palau,” anyone?). Again, audiences enjoyed the meat Chiclets and the fake boobs, but no one did much but stir the rice and blather on about their yoga routines.

“Survivor: Cook Islands” (aka Race Survivor) demonstrated that a diverse group of interesting people makes for much better television, and “Survivor: Fiji” turns out to be a major experiment in casting out the token black or token old guy for whatever mix of people happens to be interesting. What other season of “Survivor” has featured not one but three black men? And would the producers have cast two hot Asian girls, Michelle and Stacy, before this season?

Yau-Man, though, is the crowning glory of this new era, the polar opposite of the protoypical “Survivor” hottie. He’s a tiny man with a weird little shrill voice and huge Coke-bottle glasses, prone to saying geeky things about how crazy it is that he has an alliance with “a big black man” (Earl). Far from an outcast, Yau-Man was an accepted member of his tribe, and since he has the immunity idol and his tribe is in the majority since the two tribes merged, he’s sitting in the catbird seat right now.

If Yau-Man wins the million-dollar prize, it would be a huge victory for diminutive dorks everywhere. Like voting for Sanjaya on “American Idol,” rooting for Yau-Man is a subversive act that buoys the little guy against a rising tide of meaty-chested refrigerator monkeys (see also: Officer, Gentleman).

And just so you know, a subversive act of television viewing is a wish your heart makes when you can’t be bothered to vote in general elections, let alone participate in legitimate acts of subversion.

This is the end
Speaking of legitimate subversive acts, did you tune in for the finale of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” like I specifically instructed you to do? And if so, what did you think? (If you didn’t watch, naturally you shouldn’t read this.)

Personally, I enjoyed the episode, but a few aspects of it bothered me. First of all, I thought the state championship game was rushed. Now, normally, I like the fact that this show rushes through the football games. Most of us don’t really want to see how these games go down, play by play, because they interrupt the dramatic action too much. We just want the general idea: Smash is kicking ass, Saracen is feeling jittery, etc.

But in this case, the rough outline of the game that we were offered was pretty stupid. Oh no, the Panthers are down by 26 points! Coach is sure going to give them quite a talking-to at halftime! Coach rolls out just the right mix of tough love and inspiration and … Oh my God, the Panther offense is coming back! Can they do it? Can they really make up such a huge deficit? It all comes down to one final play! “Hey, Coach? Let’s run this nifty trick play me and the boys dreamt up when we were fast asleep!” “Kid, that plan sounds so crazy, it just might work!” The crowd goes hush (“What kind of a crazy-ass play is that?” they seem to be thinking) but then … Touchdown! The Panthers win the state championship!

And didn’t the post-game celebration feel a little hollow to you? Was it just that Coach was leaving to work at TMU? I don’t think so. Something in the mix there didn’t work. It felt cursory — there was nothing original in the celebration, beyond the part where the team gave Coach a standing ovation even though he was ditching them. This show takes really basic stories (teen girl considering sex with boyfriend, hot girl tutored by geek) and makes them feel fresh and unique, so the fact that there was nothing all that unique about the game or the victory was a little bit jarring. Yes, yes, the trick play was tricky, of course — but for anyone who’s watched pretty much any other drama about sports, the trick play is beyond cliché. I just expected the whole game and aftermath to feel new and different.

Naturally, you have to love Daniel Johnston’s “Devil Town” playing over the victory parade, and the scenes with Tami telling Coach she’s pregnant made me teary-eyed, but from the victory on, I was feeling too worried to enjoy it. I mean, I can’t say that I would’ve been happier if they had lost, but doesn’t the fact that they won sort of make you think that the show’s not going to come back for another season? I know that the producers probably have no idea, at this point, and they wanted to wrap up the show without a major cliffhanger so that no one would feel ripped off if it didn’t come back.

But look, if this show isn’t renewed, we’re going to feel ripped off regardless. I just wanted the last few minutes of this incredible season to feel a little bit more satisfying.

Which brings me to my final gripe. In the final seconds of what might be the last episode of “Friday Night Lights” ever, the players are clapping and Coach Taylor looks like he’s going to cry, the screen goes dark for a millisecond, and then … Thursday! “ER” returns!

As Snoop Dogg once said, can we get a motherfucking moment of silence? NBC has a terrible habit of stepping on the last minute of a show with its promos. Do they honestly think we care about the return of “ER”? I mean, the injustice of that! “ER” returns for the 50 millionth melodramatic crisis in which a dirty bomb goes off in the O.R. or a Greyhound bus full of gorillas crashes into the hospital or somebody’s head explodes all over the lunchroom, and yet we might not even find out how Tami and Coach handle the new baby, or how college football treats him, or whether he ever comes back to Dillon!

Choose your conclusion
My heart is making a wish, chickens. In my heart-wish, “Friday Night Lights” returns next fall along with “30 Rock,” while “ER” finally goes gently into that good night. Yau-Man wins “Survivor: Fiji,” feisty drunk Jael wins “Top Model,” the Pussycat Dolls change their name to the Whoring Sea Donkeys, and Wednesday night’s TV lineup features the double threat of “The Bachelorette: Sea Donkerella and a Sorority Recruiter” right after Bravo’s “Top Reality Show Producer.” Remember, chickens, no matter how your heart is grieving the loss of “FNL,” if you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true!

Nothing has ever come close to capturing that feeling for me until the premiere of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights” last fall (8 p.m. Wednesdays), a drama that tackles the sweetness and the awkwardness of high school like no other show I’ve ever seen. In fact, compared to the originality and realism of “Friday Night Lights,” other TV shows about high school look as idealized and as silly as an Archie comic book. Instead of trading witty banter and landing neat punches to the jaw, the kids on “Friday Night Lights” have stilted, clumsy conversations in which they stare at their shoes and giggle and try to act like they’re not completely confused and overwhelmed. Like real teenagers, they hold down crappy jobs, worry about how to act around other kids, second-guess their decisions, and fumble into dysfunctional friendships. They don’t know how to talk to their parents, and their parents don’t know how to talk to them.

Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger and the movie directed by Peter Berg (who’s also an executive producer on the show), “Friday Night Lights” focuses on football mostly as a means of accessing a rich web of relationships in a small town in Texas. That said, the absurd importance of high school football to the townspeople and the arbitrary nature of the wins and losses of the team coincide nicely with the premise that the writers are only beginning to explore, something about the pull of big, unrealistic hopes and dreams on a bunch of kids who are surrounded by evidence that dreams don’t come true all that often. At the center of the story is fallen quarterback Jason Street (Scott Porter), who became a paraplegic after a bad tackle during the opening game of the season. The team’s attempts to get second-string quarterback Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) up to speed are presented in parallel with Street’s struggle to transcend his apparent fate as a tragic story that ended on the football field that day. Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) is wracked by guilt over Street’s injury, but he’s forced to push his guys to a state championship at all costs, for the sake of the school and the town, and simply to keep food on the table for his family. The continued presence of Street in the story tells you something about the courageous ambiguity of the show: What other TV show about sports would dare to allow a severely injured former quarterback to linger at the edge of the frame at all times, thereby shedding a nagging light of doubt on the unrelenting thirst for victory on such a small stage?

And what other show would not only take on a conversation between a mother and a daughter about sex, but make it feel honest and nerve-wracking and incredibly charged? After Tami Taylor (Connie Britton), the coach’s wife, spots her daughter Julie’s boyfriend buying condoms at the drugstore, she tries to have a calm conversation with Julie (Aimee Teegarden), but you can feel her anxiety and she ends up blurting out her worst fears:

Tami: Are you and Matt Saracen having sex?

Julie: No. (Pause.) We’re thinking about it.

Tami: You’re thinking about it. Are you thinking about pregnancy? Are you thinking about sexually transmitted diseases?

Julie: Well, I mean, obviously that’s why he was buying condoms.

Tami: I see, so you’re just buying condoms … so then when you buy condoms that makes you ready to make love with somebody…

Julie: (smiling) Making love!

Tami: (Close to tears) Don’t do that! Don’t you smirk at me right now, I am very upset! You are not allowed to have sex! You’re 15 years old!

Julie: I just, I don’t see what the big deal is. It’s just one body part going into another…

Tami: No, it’s not. It’s not just one body part going into another part. And the fact that you think it’s just one body part going into another body part makes me real clear on the fact that you really are not ready for this. And I need you to be able to hear that. I need you be able to hear me say that to you.

Julie: I’m listening to you.

Tami goes on to warn her daughter, through tears, that if she starts having sex without taking it seriously, she could end up feeling degraded and hardened and cynical — all of which would surely seem overwrought, if not for the fact that Britton’s performance is mesmerizing and hits so close to the bone, you can feel it. For Tami, this isn’t about control — you can see that in the way she speaks to Julie — it’s about her own past. She knows what a messy road her daughter is about to walk down, and it scares her to death.

As with most scenes on “Friday Night Lights,” this one feels incredibly immediate and electric. It’s one of the only conversations between a parent and a teenager that I’ve ever seen on TV where the audience isn’t clearly supposed to take one side or the other. We’re afforded an affecting, complicated snapshot of the relationship: Julie is a good kid who’s already decided to have sex and feels that she has the right to; her mom is a good parent who can’t stand the thought of it and can’t stop from sounding shrill and overbearing because she can’t control her emotions on the subject.

But then, every week “Friday Night Lights” features a truly memorable scene, the kind of scene that you can’t imagine working on any other drama. The odd, seemingly improvised dialogue and shooting style of the show, which co-executive producer Jeffrey Reiner described to Entertainment Weekly as “no rehearsals, no blocking, just three cameras and we shoot,” brings out the intimacy of each scene. The shaky cameras and extreme close-ups that plague so many other shows actually work here, giving us the sense that we’re eavesdropping on a heated conversation between strangers. The dialogue has a natural, halting pace, and the camera movement focuses our attention on the weight and meaning of each word. We don’t just watch these interactions, we experience them, getting caught up in the misunderstandings and tensions and longings that are uncovered in the process.

The young actors on the show have really grown into its odd style. While Gilford, who plays the earnest, shy quarterback Saracen, seemed to have a natural talent for the aw-shucks qualities of his role from the start, some of the other actors had a shaky beginning — Minka Kelly, who plays fallen quarterback Street’s girlfriend, Lyla, seemed a little false at first, but now she’s utterly convincing as the optimistic but sometimes naive romantic. Similarly, Porter has done a great job evoking the anger and confusion of going from star quarterback to outcast overnight. And Gaius Charles has really shined as hot-shot receiver Smash Williams; he’s evolved along with his character into a conflicted, sometimes immature kid with good intentions that are sometimes clouded by his huge ego.

Best of all, though, are the interactions between coach Taylor and his wife, Tami. Every scene between the two is lively and flirtatious but also edgy and snippish, perfectly capturing the imperfect, bickering energy of a good marriage, where two people are good friends and depend on each other completely, but aren’t afraid to say it when they disagree. When coach Taylor is faced with a tough decision about whether to fire one of his assistant coaches for making ignorant remarks that many interpreted as racist, he goes to his wife, who’s the counselor at the high school, for advice. But as he speaks to her, he realizes that he really wants her to back his choice not to fire the guy.

Tami: As a guidance counselor, I gotta say, that, to me, is a fireable offense. What he said.

Eric: All right, let me talk to my wife. Let me talk to the person who cares about me and cares about the team and also has to understand the relevance and the importance to our future of us winning the regional.

Tami: There is nothing more clear to me. Your team is way more important to you than Mac McGill.

Eric: Is there anyone else I can talk to?

The humor and energy in scenes like this one make other dramas seem limp and silly in comparison. Yet, “Friday Night Lights” continues to struggle for good ratings, regularly getting crushed by “American Idol” on Wednesday nights.

But then, marketing-wise, “Friday Night Lights” is in an impossible position. The show appears to be about football, potentially turning off plenty of possible viewers who aren’t into sports. And even with those fans, TV shows about sports have a long history of failing miserably. On top of that, the show actually focuses on far heavier and more complicated subject matter — parenting, adultery, alcoholism, racism — potentially turning off viewers who are into football. This is the Catch-22 of any narrative that needs to find a wide audience to survive: The more complicated and difficult to describe it is, the more challenging it is to lure in a big enough audience. If the show had a really bad, obvious name like “Tumbletown, TX” and it appeared on the CW, maybe it would be another “Smallville” or “Everwood” — a modest hit with a clear group of loyal fans. Forget that “Friday Night Lights” is much better than either of those shows. It’s a confusing, complex drama that’s sort of about football, but sort of not, and that makes it a hard sell. Americans may love football, but they aren’t exactly big fans of ambiguity.

If only more people knew what a rare and beautiful thing they’re missing: a drama that sets the bar much higher than it has to, daring to take on the romance and heartbreak of being a teenager with honesty, compassion and wit. The writers don’t take shortcuts with pointless fisticuffs and cliques and ironic asides; they stick to the emotional center of the story at all times. As a result, over the course of its short season (which ends on Wednesday, April 11 — well before May sweeps, which isn’t a good sign for its survival), “Friday Night Lights” has evolved from a strikingly original, lively little story about a football team to an evocative portrayal of life in a small American town, a narrative with so much sweetness and authenticity to it that, once you abandon yourself to its undeniable charms, you’ll find it has the power to make you cringe and grit your teeth and laugh and cry each week, without fail.

How could a show with so much depth and soul possibly get canceled? Sure, it’s happened before, but something about the spirit of “Friday Night Lights” makes me hope against hope that this time, the good guys will bring home the trophy. As the Dillon Panthers say at the start of every game, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!” Let’s hope that this time, they’re right.

We know, of course, that this can’t be true. Only a fraction of the boys who risk their bodies in high school will ever make it to college on a football scholarship, and just a tiny percentage of those will make it to the pros. Anyone who tells us otherwise is lying. While I watched Berg’s film, I kept thinking of the line from Springsteen’s “The River,” “Is a dream a lie that don’t come true, or is it something worse?”

Considering the difficulty of selling anything that isn’t titillating or inspiring to a network audience, “Friday Night Lights” the TV series, judging from the first three episodes, isn’t bad. For one thing, it doesn’t put a gloss on the conditions of life in Bush country; in every car ride across town the camera lingers on rows of shut-down storefronts, and viewers quickly grasp the point that everyone in the community is desperate. The parents are desperate for their kids to succeed; the kids are desperate not to wind up as desperate as their parents. The community is desperate for a distraction, and the coach, Eric Taylor (played winningly by Kyle Chandler, reprising Billy Bob Thornton’s role in the film), in a peripatetic profession, is desperate to finally establish a home for his family.

Chandler’s coach Taylor is the show’s most interesting character. He knows he’s in the community but can never be of it, and like all smart coaches he knows that the only real discipline is self-discipline. He’s the only father figure many of the players, particularly the black players, have, and he knows it. He also knows that he’s the buffer between his boys and the community when things don’t go right. The coach’s family can’t pull into a parking lot at Wal-Mart without someone stopping them to offer football advice; at a women’s book club meeting, his wife is bombarded with arguments on the relative merits of an offense based on running or passing.

Someone who knows the territory has had a hand in these scripts; at the gala opening of a car dealership attended by the coach and his team, a middle-aged woman tells the quarterback he should listen to early Black Sabbath because, she says, “It will make you mean.” The football is pretty good, too, and the show does a good job of explaining it to the average viewer, reducing insufferable football jargon to layman’s terms. For instance, a coach tells his quarterback how to “read the coverage” — “That means throw the ball to our guys.”

On the downside, we could all do without the shaky, hand-held camera, which aims for a reality-show look but instead makes us overly conscious of the presence of the camera. The show’s sense of realism is further undermined by the actresses, nearly all of whom look more like fashion models than they do the girlfriends and wives of football players and coaches. Credibility is strained by the idea that such women would have no other option than to hang around a dreary little town rooting their men to victory. And talk about depressing: Outside the football games there seems to be nothing more to look forward to in this town than dinner at the local Applebee’s, which seems to function as the center of the community. (In case you haven’t heard, in the age when viewers can TiVo around commercials, advertisers are now spending their money on product placement.)

It’s obvious that “Friday Night Lights” can’t go on being about the big game every week, and clearly the primary appeal of the show will be to teenagers identifying with the off-field problems of the players and their girlfriends. Refreshingly, the background music is low-key even during the most dramatic moments, as it is in “Degrassi,” the long-running series about life in a Canadian high school whose audience the producers of this show would no doubt like to co-opt.

Though it is twice removed from its nonfiction source, “Friday Night Lights” sometimes seems like a documentary compared to MTV’s hugely successful reality show “Two-A-Days,” which was just picked up for a second season. “Two-A-Days” (the title refers to the practice schedule) is about the Hoover Buccaneers, a team in an affluent suburb of Birmingham, Ala. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have firsthand knowledge of the high school football mania of the area, having graduated from nearby Mountain Brook High, where I was kicked off the football team before the end of the second practice.) Very little of “Two-A-Days” suggests reality as most people would define the term. First of all, as with all so-called reality shows, the air of unreality is accentuated by the participants’ eyes constantly shifting to the camera and their self-conscious half-smiles.

Second, the private lives of the players and their girlfriends, as revealed on the show at least, don’t seem to be like those of high school students outside the immediate culture of football. The girls have no apparent life aside from the boys, and the boys have no lives outside football. Indeed, how could they, since, in the words of former basketball great Bill Russell, athletes nowadays “have been on scholarship since the eighth grade”? The smug sense of entitlement and privilege is expressed by one of the Bucs’ stars who, when chided by a teammate for some transgression, replies with a snicker, “It’s not like I’m going to get punished.”

What “Two-A-Days” utterly lacks any sense of — and “Friday Night Lights” is about — is what high school football means to the community. We see the aerial shots of the bumper-to-bumper Friday night football traffic heading for the stadium, but we never see or hear any of the fans who fill the seats and find out what dreams of theirs are being played out on the field. For that matter, we never really learn anything about what role the football team plays in the daily life of the school itself. I watched “Two-A-Days” with my daughter, a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. Her comment was, I think, interesting: “In real life, not everybody is involved with the football team. On this show, you never see anyone who isn’t a player, a cheerleader or someone in their family.” She’s right, and the scary possibility that the teams in big-time high school football factories exist as entities entirely apart from the rest of the community isn’t even touched on.

Scary, too, is the near-fanatical behavior of the Buccaneers’ coaches, particularly head coach Rush Propst, a bargain basement Bear Bryant, who, after the team’s only loss of the season, browbeat his boys mercilessly, threatening to hurt their chances of a college scholarship if they didn’t turn things around the following week. (They did win the next week, by the way.) Unlike Bryant, the legendary University of Alabama head coach whose specter dominates all high school and college football in the South, Propst never gives the slightest acknowledgment that his coaching rather than his players’ effort might be at fault.

A phony controversy has arisen regarding Propst’s use of profanity: Dan Washburn, director of the Alabama High School Athletic Association, says he did not see the episode of “Two-A-Days” in which Propst was bleeped for cursing his players during a halftime tirade. But, Washburn recently told the press, “Profanity has absolutely no place in high school athletics.” Washburn is either a hypocrite, or he spent his formative years in a seminary. Propst’s language, and, alas, most of his bullying tactics, are standard practice by the overwhelming majority of high school coaches in the country.

What Washburn and other educators ought to be concerned with is a school system that puts young men through the tortures of the damned for no discernible good to most of them. Most of the boys who played ball for Bear Bryant were the first in their family ever to graduate from high school let alone attend college, and they all swear, to a man, that Bryant’s discipline helped them succeed in life. The problem with big-time high school football now is that for most of these boys the lure is not personal fulfillment but rather a distant, and probably outright unattainable, carrot on a stick, an NFL contract.

Propst is correct when he says his boys are “starved for discipline”; all boys could use more discipline. “Friday Night Lights,” though it is fiction, is about the kind of discipline that prepares them for life. “Two-A-Days” is about the kind of discipline that just leads to more football.

There’s an ugly undercurrent of violence to all these exhortations, a promise that failure will not be tolerated. When one of the players fumbles during practice, his dad (country singer Tim McGraw, looking like Michael Madsen’s baby brother), who was on the team in one of the years that it won a state championship, strides onto the field to knock his son down in disgust. When the team loses a game, the coach returns home to find local realtors have placed “For Sale” signs on his lawn.

Berg doesn’t even allow us the pleasure of the game itself. Football here is just the sort of red-meat spectacle the rednecks and blowhards he’s put on-screen would thrill to — the sight of young men ground into fertilizer. When the players collide on the field, the soundtrack emits a Dolby-amplified whammy of crashing bodies and crunching bones.

The camera is shoved in the middle of the skirmishes. We see teenage boys running into outstretched arms as if they slammed into tree branches, or plucked from a midair leap by an opposing player and slammed to the ground. One kid, lying on the ground after being tackled, has his helmet kicked into his teeth.

Some of the football sequences look exciting, but they’re so chopped up you see them only in flashes. And in the big championship game, with the clock running and the players trying to keep getting first downs until they score, the camera is so close in that you can’t even tell what yard line they’re on.

The players here are presented less as athletes than as soldiers whose sacrifices are understood to be no more than is expected of them. After one lost game, a caller to the local radio station says that maybe the kids are learning too much in school to concentrate on the game. Football may hold a future for some of these kids, like Boobie (Derek Luke), the star player being scouted by the big colleges who can barely read the USC catalog he’s been sent. But for most of them, their senior season will be their one moment of glory before a life spent working at the lousy jobs their lousy education has prepared them for.

At some point in the making of “Friday Night Lights,” either Berg or the studio, Universal, must have realized nobody was going to pay money to see a movie about that. So in the second half, the movie turns into a rah-rah celebration of exactly the mind-set it’s spent the first half criticizing. All of the bad things that have resulted from the characters’ mindless devotion to gridiron glory — the abusive father who stays drunk to forget that the peak of his life came at 17; the barely educated Boobie’s having nothing left in his life when a knee injury ends his dream of playing pro — are converted into obstacles that test the mettle of the young warriors.

And what is it that gives them the strength to meet those challenges? Why, football, of course, and its life lessons of dedication, hard work, blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t matter, finally, whether most of these kids are going to be able to put those lessons to work at anything other than menial, low-paying jobs, whether they are going to have to spend the rest of their lives in a small town where they’re washed up as soon as they leave high school. It doesn’t matter that there’s no one to say to them, look, teamwork and persistence are great things to learn at a young age, but there are more important uses for them than a frickin’ football game.

Berg tries to peddle an “it’s not whether you win or lose” finale, but he can’t disguise the fact that “Friday Night Lights” wallows in every piece of inspirational horseshit from every hoary sports movie you’ve ever seen. Thornton even has a let’s-win-this-one-for-Boobie speech. (“Friday Night Lights” looks especially egregious next to the wonderful “Mr. 3000,” which really does understand that sporting glory is a paltry thing next to building a decent and satisfying life you can take pride in.)

It’s hypocritical, but it’s not that big a loss. The movie that “Friday Night Lights” starts out being substitutes slick, cynical point-scoring for insight. “Friday Night Lights” isn’t repugnant like “Very Bad Things,” the first movie Berg directed, but it shares some of that movie’s superior everything-is-crap smugness. It’s bad enough watching Boobie get injured — Berg has to include a shot of the opposing player who did it getting congratulated by a teammate. It’s sour little details like that that leave a bad taste.

Berg doesn’t show much empathy for the former high school athletes trying to live vicariously through the new crop — he seems to think that a pop psychological explanation of their envy will suffice. Most of the team’s boosters don’t even get that puny consideration. The Odessa businessmen (and their wives, one of whom tells the coach not to spare a black player because “that big nigger can’t be broke”) are the movie’s examples of boobus americanus, vulgarians in garish sports clothes who exercise the threat of their puny power to keep underlings in line. If he could, Berg would probably give them Bush buttons to wear (and seeing as the movie takes place in the fall of 1988, there’s no reason he couldn’t).

There’s some good acting in this mess. Lucas Black manages to suggest what’s roiling around inside his nearly silent character without violating the placid surface. As Boobie, Derek Luke understands that playing his character’s grandstanding doesn’t mean he has to grandstand as an actor. And Grover Coulson, as the uncle who raises Boobie, has some good moments: When Boobie is injured, Coulson looks helplessly back in the stands to see if the college scouts are watching, as if they could somehow have missed the moment.

Thornton gives a very fine performance here; he’s one of those rare actors who is able to convincingly play decency without making it seem boring. He stays quietly in character and even manages to dry out the most potentially mawkish scenes. But the movie’s determination to shy away from complexity lets him down.

The coach is well aware of the pressures on his players — the same pressure is on him. But the movie never examines what if any complicity he feels in driving his players toward victory. It’s his job, but we never know if he’s tempted to tell them that there’s more to life than football, or if he ever tries to make sure they don’t neglect their schoolwork. When, with the best intentions, Boobie and his uncle lie to him about what the doctors have said about Boobie returning to play, you wonder why as basically decent a man as this doesn’t simply pick up the phone and ask the doctors themselves.

But these are questions the movie doesn’t want us to ponder too closely. The end titles tell us where the various players are now and what they are doing. There are, however, some salient facts missing. We find out that Boobie played football in junior college and now lives in Texas with his twin girls. We aren’t told what he does for a living — or if he feels confident enough to read his little girls a bedtime story.