Adrianne Palicki: A Real American Hero? — A Nerdage/StaticBlog Sweeps Month Crossover Special on the “GI Joe” sequel
Nerdage: So, the first GI Joe movie was, to put it kindly, a bit of a mess. Casting announcements for the sequel, thus far, have been a mix of “huh” and “hmmm”…. RZA may play the Blind Master. DJ Cotrona likely to play Flint. Channing Tatum and Ray Park set to return as Duke and Snake Eyes. Elodie Yung signed as Jinx. John Chu set to direct. The Rock expected to play Roadblock. Bruce Willis keeps being rumored. And this weekend, the news that may cause Staticblog’s George Lang to see a GI Joe movie: Adrianne Palicki, Deadline reports, will play Lady Jaye.
What do you think, Lang? Are you buying tickets for a Dwayne Johnson/Bruce Willis film based on 3 3/4 inch action figures?
StaticBlog: Actually, if it were based on the 12-inch Vietnam-era guy with the awesome bristle-cut hair and beard combo, I’d be in, because Kung-Fu Grip is freaking insurmountable in plastic hand-to-hand combat.
But because this is the “Real American Hero”-era Joe, I’m basically in for the reason you surmised — Palicki, Palicki, Palicki. They can have the guy who directed the last two “Step Up” time-wasters and “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never” at the helm, and yet they have Palicki, so everything’s going to be just fine.
Adrianne Palicki was, without a doubt, one of the best things about the first three seasons of “Friday Night Lights,” and as NBC viewers will certainly enjoy this Friday, her character, Tyra Collette, returns for the final two episodes of the series. She got a ton of bad press this spring when early costume photos from David E. Kelley’s “Wonder Woman” were given a trial balloon treatment by NBC and failed miserably in Internet comments sections everywhere. My personal view is that Palicki, standing nearly 6 feet tall with a distinctive beauty, was perfect for the role, but Kelley wasn’t the right guy. Joss Whedon was always the best choice.
Palicki also got seriously screwed over when “Lone Star,” the best reviewed pilot of the 2010 television season, got dropped by hair-trigger cancellation champion Fox after two episodes. Considering that “Friday Night Lights” is one of the best dramas of the past 10 years but never was a ratings success, Palicki could stand a break — even from a clankety-clank monstrosity. Having her involved suddenly makes the thing interesting.
Nerdage: Tangentally, the rumor mill has it that Bruce Willis may be intended to play the original “GI Joe,” though I don’t know if Bruce is likely to rock the bristle-cut and beard… The character made, I believe, only one appearance in the Larry Hama comics and didn’t, as far as I know, appear on the TV show.
I, of course, enjoyed the original Larry Hama comics as a kid, and heard he consulted on the first film. Still, I found that movie mostly a confusing mess, though it was filled with attractive people. Will John Chu have better luck than Stephen Sommers?
StaticBlog: OK, so I understand how Sommers got from the first two “Mummy” movies to “GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra,” but how does Jon Chu parlay the “Step Up” movies, which are essentially “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” with electro-pop and slightly larger budgets, much less the Bieber hagiography, into “GI Joe 2: Cobra Strikes”? He must know how to follow a budget and make money or something.
Nerdage: Chu told The Deadbolt that he’s a big fan of GI Joe from back in the day, played with the toys, had the comic and everything, so maybe he’ll make a movie the fans of the property want to see. Here’s hoping, anyway.
StaticBlog: At least there’s Palicki.
Palicki, Palicki, Palicki.
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 9: DVD Review, “Friday Night Lights: The Fifth and Final Season”
Rating: 98
I have only one question: Are you ready for Friday night?
Much like “The Wire,” a series that also lasted five seasons and became fiercely loved by a small, passionate cult, “Friday Night Lights” asserted a unique character, style and theme with each season. “Friday Night Lights” will likely go down in television history as an example of the deep emotional realism that is possible in the medium. It started as a loose adaptation of a film based on a nonfiction book about Texas high school football, but “FNL” ultimately transcended both of its sources, unfolding as an epic story about the love of parents, the hazards and joys of growing up, the complexities of a strong marriage and unlocking the potential residing within unlikely heroes.
For the final season, the East Dillon Lions are finally a winning team after the long, tortuous building period of the previous year, and the emergence of Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan) as a star quarterback who brings a set of new challenges for Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler). What begins is a march to greatness fraught with personal difficulty, with Eric trying to recalibrate the team’s performance when egos and expectations throw the Lions off balance. Meanwhile, Tami Taylor (the remarkable Connie Britton) takes over East Dillon’s counseling program, where she must confront teenagers with far greater challenges than her old charges at Dillon High.
Because Season 5 was planned as the denouement for “Friday Night Lights,” it is an opportunity to bring back original cast members from the Panthers heyday and either extend or wrap up their storylines. Not everyone returns for the curtain call, but those who do offer moving, memorable codas for their characters. The series returns at 7 tonight on NBC, but “Friday Night Lights” seems to have more emotional resonance when experienced in massive, DVD-enabled doses, like chapters in a great novel.
The extras are solid, including a 30-minute documentary titled “The Lights Go Out,” featuring interviews with several cast members in which they offer a fitting survey of the entire run of the series. In this short feature, show runner Jason Katims offers insights into key questions about past seasons — indeed, the second season drops off a little dramatically (Santiago Herrera is never heard from again, and the playoffs are never reached, leaving Season 3 to do a quick recap in the opening episode) and like one of our informed readers mentioned, it was due to the Writer’s Strike as well as the fact that NBC was not yet willing to greenlight a third season. Thank you, DirecTV, for a good call in a tight game.
These final chapters do right by the series: Episode 5, “Kingdom,” features one of the single best scenes of the entire series. The finale, “Always,” is a heartbreaker on so many levels, but this was a show that never made things easy, for itself or for its fans, and for that reason, it is one of the greats. When the lights go out at the end of “Always,” that scene will make the most steadfast followers of this landmark show want to go back to the beginning and revisit Season 1 and start over, making “Texas Forever,” the phrase made famous by Taylor Kitsch’s Tim Riggins, worth accepting as an article of faith.
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 8: The Book of Tami, with Scenes from a Marriage
Time and again, the chief observation about Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) is that she and Eric have an extraordinarily realistic and loving marriage, and that Britton is in the upper echelon of the Top 5 television actresses working today, but really the character herself is worth examining on her own as a self-made woman who, if she had not married a high school football coach, could have become a world leader. But, she married her high school sweetheart, the guy who stole her away from future high roller Morris ‘Mo’ McArnold (series creator Peter Berg), and she would never change any of it, neither the birth of Julie while they were still a young couple starting out, or Gracie Belle when they thought their parenting days were nearly over.
A key clue to who Tami Taylor is comes toward the end of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (S3, Ep5), when Tami was going to drive Julie to San Antonio to get her fresh new ankle tattoo removed. They were at the Dillon city limits when Tami pulled over to the side of the road. They’re standing on the shoulder under an overcast Texas sky when Tami tells Julie that she almost didn’t graduate from high school. She had a wild side, a time when books meant nothing and the party was everything. The appearance of Mo in “May the Best Man Win” (S2, Ep15) offered some insight into the kind of guy Tami Hayes dated before she met Eric. In the 80s, Mo was a kind of Riggins who actually made good, but Tami ended up cheating on Mo with a guy who was more of a Saracen, but one who could never be pulled away from football.
When I look at Tami, I actually think of her as being a lot like my own wife, Laura, who is (surprise) the real adult in the relationship and became an accomplished career woman with a separate life and identity, and is married to a guy with public profile who is essentially still doing a version of what he was doing as a teenager. They have a great partnership and they reach consensus, but Tami is the one who makes things happen in the Taylor household. But in the context of the great arc of “Friday Night Lights,” you can see that, at one time, she was the girl who talked the sweet and innocent girl into getting a tattoo. Namely, about 25 years ago, she was Tyra Collette.
Eric Taylor gets a lot of credit for being a “molder of men,” but apart from, say, Vince Howard or Jason Street, the greatest transformation in the entire series must be Tyra, and it would not have happened — absolutely emphatically — without Tami Taylor. At first, Tami saw Tyra as a kind of cancer threatening Julie’s purity, but after the incident in which Angela Collette took half a pill bottle and sat down on the thin glass coffee table, Tami made Tyra “her project.” Tyra never became a saint — by the looks of things, Landry was really “The Giving Tree” (S3, E.10) in their relationship, and Tami had to pull her back from the brink several times, but if Tami had not intervened, then Tyra would have run off with that Oxy-popping rodeo clown Cash and ended up exactly like her mom.
One of her greatest assets is Tami’s commitment to what is right: when she was accused by Luke Cafferty’s mom of talking Becky Sproles into an abortion — a complete lie, but something that took on a life of its own and the administration was predictably spineless in its handling of the situation — she was given a prepared statement to read to the press in order to keep her job as principal of Dillon High. Once she got to the podium, she found herself incapable of lying even to save her job. At the same time, there was a sense throughout Season 4, given her treatment by Joe McCoy’s goon squad and Cafferty’s forced transfer to East Dillon, that (1) forces were lined up against her, and (2) that wasn’t really about abortion at all, but about getting back at the person who (1) forced the transfer and (2) put Luke in proximity to a needy beauty queen.
Tami provides more surprises than virtually anyone else in Dillon, simply because Britton and the writers shaped a character with depth and empathy, who talks to her daughter about sex not simply because she wants to keep her chaste, but because she’s worried that the experience will harden her to the world and make her jaded. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a mother on television talk to her daughter about sex the way Tami did — she told her that just because she does it once, it doesn’t mean she has to do it every time with every boy. It all felt like, at some level, Tami was talking about herself, and her life before meeting Coach Eric, and Britton’s performance deserved an Emmy, at least.
A frequently stated anecdote from both Britton and Kyle Chandler was that they insisted that the writers never do any of the usual things that writers do to married characters on a show, such as creating infidelities or other tried and true nonsense. Eric and Tami are not cut from that cloth — the closest they came with that was Glenn Reed’s post-karaoke bad behavior, and that was played for laughs. Even their serious disagreements don’t result in long stretches of bad air between them. She did make him sleep on the couch once, but Eric was being unreasonable and he knew it. Usually, if things get heated, one or the other hits a kind of verbal release valve and they move on.
The greatest test does come in Season 5. No spoilers here, but Tami, after years of compromise, ask for some in return. It is a testament to how well these characters were crafted that the outcome feels as natural as almost everything else in “Friday Night Lights” that preceded it.
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 7: Eastbound and Up Pt. 2
When Coach Eric Taylor was offered the job as head coach of the East Dillon Lions, it was meant to be an insult, and for “Friday Night Lights” viewers, two common questions came up: “Why haven’t we heard of East Dillon before?” and “What about the Larabie Lions? How many Lions teams are there in Texas anyway?” The answer to the second question is: a lot. A helluva lot. There’s Greenville, Brownwood, St. Mark’s, Albany, Henderson, Tyler, Vernon, Spring, Houston Yates, Dublin, Granger, McKinney — you get the picture. There are almost more Lions teams in Texas than there are actual lions in the wild.
As for East Dillon, this only makes sense that it was never really mentioned before, but every city gets divided into halves or quadrants, one of which grows bigger and more economically powerful and effectively marginalizes its neighbors. West Dillon got the Sears, the Applebee’s, Garrity Motors, even the Landing Strip. East Dillon has Ray’s Bar-B-Q, which is an actual place in the Montopolis section of Austin, but other than that, it’s mostly a convenience store economy. One new local business opens there in Season 5, but that’s for another time.
When Eric arrives at East Dillon, there is almost zero interest in supporting the Lions and a fair amount of distrust for the new Lions coach. Suspicions of white paternalism abound, but what they don’t know about Eric Taylor is that he is truly, at the core of his Texas heart, a father. So much of “Friday Night Lights” is devoted to the relationship between teenagers and their fathers, or the lack thereof, and there simply aren’t that many good examples, whether you’re talking about the good-time criminality of Walt Riggins; the stern, cold authoritarian approach of Henry Saracen; the long-gone Mr. Collette; the philandering Buddy Garrity, and that violent, overbearing rat-bastard Joe McCoy.
Arguably, Vince Howard has it worst of all: we learn in Season 4 that his father, Ornette, is serving time in Huntsville for dealing dope. Eric is a father to all who need one, and in Vince’s case, he needs one more than most. The only other father we see in East Dillon is a strong, mostly silent type: Vernon Merriweather (Steve Harris), who runs Ray’s and is father to Jess, he keeps his head down, but when we first meet Vernon, he wants nothing to do with Eric because he hates football. It is an acquired hate: he was a Lion back in the old days and got burned on his opportunities when the football program was dissolved.
But what happens in East Dillon is part and parcel of what Eric tries to tell Panthers fullback Jamarcus Hall’s father in “Keeping Up Appearances” (S3, Ep 7): football builds a sense of community spirit. That actually does not sound like much in the context of that Season 3 episode — Jamarcus was in trouble for setting a girl’s hair on fire, which is how his parents, who only had disdain for football, discovered what he was doing with his Friday nights — but East Dillon needed all the community spirit it could get. It was a long, hard-fought struggle, from that awful forfeited game against Kingdom until the victory against the Panthers in “Thanksgiving” (S4, Ep13), but by the end of that season, the community is spirited. And what looked like a punishment for crossing Joe McCoy emerged as the most important chapter in Eric Taylor’s career.
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 2: The Leadership of Eric Taylor
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 3: The Tao of Riggins
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 5: The Lost Months
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 6: Eastbound and Up Pt. 1
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 6: Eastbound and Up Pt. 1
Tyra Collette, Lyla Garrity, Tim Riggins and Matt Saracen all graduated from Dillon High School in the Spring of 2009. Brian “Smash” Williams was becoming a star at Texas A&M and Jason Street successfully got Wendell Foley to sign with Arrow Sports International, thereby securing a job in New York and a new life with Erin and Noah in the New Jersey suburbs. Of the few teenage regulars from the first three seasons, only Julie Taylor and Landry Clarke were still in high school, and since executive producers Peter Berg and Jason Katims had vowed from the beginning that “Friday Night Lights” was not going to be a show in which people attended public school forever, viewers expected an infusion of new blood. But Katims did more than that — he shook the Dillon, Texas souvenir snow globe so violently that, when all the particles settled, the show only slightly resembled what came before.
At the end of Season 3, Joe McCoy (D.W. Moffett) and his cadre of lackeys in the Panther Boosters responded to a state mandated split of the Dillon Independent School District by gerrymandering the hell out of it, making sure that they got all the players they wanted. The scraps, which apparently included Landry, all went to the East Dillon Lions. Furthermore, since Tami Taylor had called Child Protective Services after witnessing Joe slapping around J.D. (Jeremy Sumpter), Joe took his revenge, arraying the school board against Eric despite his winning season and persuading them to not renew his contract. As a lovely parting gift, Eric was offered the job of coaching the Lions.
As discussed in Chapter 1, East Dillon was the old town, the place that existed before the oil boom and the Applebee’s. The mostly low-income residents of the east side cannot generate a sufficient tax base to maintain a tip-top public school, and what they get with the gerrymandering is a relic that had not been open in 20 years. When Eric first opened the locker room at the stadium, he was greeted with graffiti and wildlife. The field was a disaster and his first game after assembling a team from volunteers went so badly that he forfeited to Kingdom at halftime. Season 4 became an intense rebuilding year both for “Friday Night Lights” and for Coach Eric Taylor as he looked at the mass of white flags that the emboldened J.D. McCoy and his teammates placed on his lawn and began to summon greatness from the rawest of materials.
In the beginning, Landry was the most experienced player on the Lions, but then Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) discovered that Luke Cafferty (Matt Lauria), a promising new player for the Panthers, had been set up with a bogus address to allow him to wear the blue — a bogus address that had been used for the better part of a decade. Tami enforced the law and forced Luke to change schools. Meanwhile, Dillon Police point Eric toward Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan), a kid with an extensive rap sheet, a drug-addicted mother and a father serving time in Huntsville. He has raw athletic talent but no experience, which means Eric will either mold him into the real next Jason Street (J.D. McCoy, the presumptive “next Jason Street” according to Slammin’ Sammy Meade, lacks the character of the genuine article and becomes a real toolbag during this season).
While the original characters are greatly missed, there is one constant: Tim Riggins. The dimensions of Riggins’ tragedy only become fully apparent toward the end of the season, but as things are starting up, Riggins is already set adrift. He gives up on San Antonio State once he is within earshot of his first boring lecture and drives home to a world of wearing mechanic’s work shirts and being a former Panther for life. With Billy and a pregnant Mindy living in the freshly painted Chez Riggins and waiting for the arrival of baby Steven, Tim has no sense of place or belonging, he has no real home and he doesn’t have Lila. After a one-night stand with bartender Cheryl (Alicia Witt), Riggins asks if she knows any place to rent. Cheryl lets him live in her old Airstream for $100 a month.
If “Friday Night Lights” always had a bittersweet undercurrent, that sub-tone is now prevalent as Eric becomes a kind of beacon in a tattered community and Riggins becomes a kind of ghost, haunting the new “Friday Night Lights” as a spirit from the first three seasons. His loss is brought into focus with “Stay” (S4, Ep6). After the funeral of Henry Saracen, who was killed in Iraq, Lyla is in town and it offers Tim a tangible look at what used to be and what might never be again. There is considerable trysting in that Airstream, but Lyla is expected back at Vanderbilt. Tim gives her a half-hearted pitch to “Stay,” telling her how great it would be if she could be the office manager at Riggins’ Rigs. He knows she won’t do it, and it only magnifies his feelings of stasis. Cheryl’s daughter, Becky Sproles (Madison Burge) certainly shows considerable taboo interest in Riggins, but at this point he wants nothing of her romantically but does show an interest in being a big brother figure — a key plot point going forward.
But while this is a point of loss and mourning (Matt Saracen is readying his departure, as well) there are new characters with compelling story lines, including Becky and Jess Merriweather (Jurnee Smollett), the daughter of a former East Dillon superstar (Steve Harris of “The Practice”) who has her head in the game — possibly more so than ex-boyfriend Vince or future boyfriend Landry. But the move eastward especially signaled a change in tone. No longer was “Friday Night Lights” centered on a football team defending its legacy. Instead, it was about building a team up.
Tomorrow, StaticBlog looks at the way forward for the East Dillon Lions.
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 2: The Leadership of Eric Taylor
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 3: The Tao of Riggins
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 5: The Lost Months
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 5: The Lost Months
Look at the history of television dramas, especially those with ongoing serialized stories, and most viewers will notice one thing in common with over 90 percent of these series: there are no wide swaths of history missing from their stories.Most series simply move from day to day, partly because their showrunners see no quarter in messing with timelines, but possibly because most production companies and networks are deathly fearful of anything that might alienate viewers, so most series in traditional September-to-May schedules wrap up most of their ongoing storylines in May, allowing only the grand arcs or sagas to continue from season to season, lest anyone forget what is going on.
But there are notable exceptions. “Mad Men” skipped 15 months into the future between Season 1 and Season 2, and nearly a year between Seasons 3 and 4, and in 2008, Marc Cherry took the unusual step of flashing forward five years for Season 5 of “Desperate Housewives.” These are purely elective decisions: much of “Mad Men” is tied to actual events in its 1960s historical period, and because creator Matthew Weiner has more history that he wants to cover, “Mad Men” skips gleefully through time — don’t be surprised if the seventh and final season of that show takes place in the mid-1970s, if not the 1980s. And of course, there is the extreme example in “Lost”: the first four seasons were all set in 2004, before the show underwent a kind of timeline mitosis, with the action split between 1977 and 2007.
In the case of “Friday Night Lights,” viewers soon discovered that a genuine and realistic show about a high school football team could only really cover about four months of any given school year, so each season is an account of the period beginning with August practice and following through to either the end of the regular football season, playoffs or state championships. To go onward into the second semester of any given school year would mean losing the narrative thrust — no games would signal the loss of a significant part of the forward momentum. And so, when each season of “Friday Night Lights” commences, about eight or nine months have passed since we last visited Dillon, Texas.
Most series are under extreme pressure to maintain as much status quo as possible — keep the most popular actors under contract, keep their characters around as long as humanly possible — but “Friday Night Lights” was never going to have people stay in high school forever. As Kyle Chandler noted in the TV Guide remembrance of “Friday Night Lights,” this was the plan from the beginning.
“Of course, you’re sad because some of the actors are leaving, but to be fair, Pete (Berg) had always said, ‘You guys aren’t going to be in high school for eight years,” Chandler said. “Watching Smash go, that was a hard one.”
Viewers can be forgiven for feeling like they missed a lot in the lives of Eric, Tami, Julie, Matt, Jess, Vince and Tim Riggins during those lost months, but this storytelling framework became one of the show’s key strengths. Nine months in the life of a high school student is an enormous amount of time: people drift in and out of each other’s lives and some simply go away. When Season 2 began, Tami was almost full-term with Gracie Belle, and after nearly a year together, Julie was getting bored with nice, stable Matt and, going through a fairly typical phase, decided she needed to date a handsome bastard, so she came on to “The Swede” (the not terribly Swedish Alejandro Rose-Garcia). Also, Lyla became a born-again Christian in the wake of her dissolved engagement with Jason and the breakup of her parents.
And then there were people who simply went away, like Smash’s ex-girlfriend Waverly (Aasha Davis). This happened again when former juvenile delinquent Santiago Herrera (Benjamin Ciaramell0) essentially evaporated after Season 2. Some viewers see this as a glaring error, and it should be said that the complete disappearance of Tim Riggins’ little neighbor Bo is a little glaring, given that his mom Jackie continued to appear well into Season 2. But life can be that way: neither Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) nor anyone else mentions Santiago after Season 2, despite his notable contributions to the 2007 Panthers lineup. Viewers are expected to just fill in the blanks for themselves, whether he backslid into juvenile detention, returned to Mexico to live with his deported parents or became another team’s superstar once Riggins was back in the game. Want to write some fan fiction? “Friday Night Lights” offers plenty of opportunity.
Occasionally, “FNL” would show briefer-than-brief flashbacks to bridge the gaps like it did in the first episode of Season 3 when a press conference with Coach Eric was used to reveal that Smash had injured his knee during the 2007 playoffs and had consequently lost his scholarship to Whitmore College, that freshman J.D. McCoy (Jeremy Sumpter) threatened Saracen’s QB1 status, and despite Eric’s claims that Riggins’ head was completely in football, he had spent most of the summer getting raving drunk with Billy. But usually, we’re just parachuted back into Dillon and told to acclimate to the new environment.
The takeaway from this unusual approach to series television is that “Friday Night Lights” is the rare network show that trusts its audience to follow without spoonfeeding, here is a fair question: would “FNL” have the leeway to take these narrative risks if it had become a cash-cow hit for NBC? Taylor Kitsch thinks that the low-profile, low-financial yield status of the show help it to maintain an uncommon integrity.
“If we were going to get picked up or not, I just love that we never truly waivered,” Kitsch told TV Guide. “We never tried to become some soapy, mainstream thing to get ratings.”
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 2: The Leadership of Eric Taylor
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 3: The Tao of Riggins
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 4: The Second Season Murder, or The Attempted Murder of the Second Season, or When the “Lights” Got Dim
Even the greatest shows have seasons or storylines that don’t quite work, or even production conceits that seem wrongheaded by both the people involved and the viewers on the other side of the fourth wall. For instance, “Seinfeld” has that unfortunate “Fonzie Kramer” stretch, when the studio audience was encouraged to scream and clap whenever Kramer entered Jerry’s apartment — even diehard fans consider going outside to play when they hear that overenthusiastic Pavlovian response. As for storylines, “Lost” has Nikki and Paulo, “The Wire” has the stevedores, and “Big Love” has its entire fourth season. These aren’t “jump the shark” moments, but it was clear to steadfast acolytes that someone was asleep at the switch.
“Friday Night Lights” fanatics almost universally agree on the rare moment when their favorite show went off the rails, albeit temporarily, and it takes place from “The Last Days of Summer” through “There Goes the Neighborhood” (S2, Ep1-10). In its feature “When Good Shows Go Bad: TV’s 10 Worst Storylines,” Buddy TV listed “Tyra and Landry Kill a Guy” as the No. 1 worst storyline from a great series, and Television Without Pity was similarly pitiless when it declared “The Last Days of Summer” part of “Worst of the Best: The Worst Episodes of Great Shows.” Now, the phrase “Tyra and Landry Kill a Guy” is a comedic oversimplification of what was at stake, but in the great arc of “Friday Night Lights” plot progressions, it stands out as an obvious situation in which a network pinhead who never wrote a TV show looked at the Season 1 ratings and decided that a show steeped in emotional realism needed to gin things up with some super-violent death action.
At the end of Season 1, Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) is studying late at the Alamo Freeze and waiting for Landry (Jesse Plemons) to come by with his enormous brain and give her an assist when a seemingly random guy named Mike starts chatting her up. This study date was supposed to be Landry’s big moment with Tyra, but car problems keep him from applying his geometry, so he’s late and Tyra is getting antsy because this Mike guy, who is about 30 and clearly a leering freak, won’t stop talking. Now, if you’re 16 and you look like someone might cast you as “Wonder Woman” someday, you decide that it’s time to give up on Landry and get away from this guy. Well, Mike follows Tyra out and yells, “Hey, you dropped your notebook!” Tyra had done no such thing, but she turns around, Mike gets the upper hand and he tries to sexually assault her. He throws her into his vehicle and pins her down, but Tyra breaks free after burning him with the car’s cigarette lighter. She slams the door on him repeatedly, and he gets away just as Landry’s pulling up to the Alamo Freeze. Landry holds her and it’s clear to Tyra that this is a guy who will always be there for her — he stands in sharp contrast to the cowboy bozos and Rigginses she usually dates.
That should have been the end of that, but then came “The Last Days of Summer.” An old LTD starts following Tyra’s pickup around Dillon, and Tyra, who filed a police report over the incident, is convinced that it’s the same guy from the Alamo Freeze and asks Landry to stay close, which takes little persuasion. Later in the episode, Landry and Tyra are watching a movie together. Landry tries one of his smooth moves on Wonder Woman, inching one of his tentacles onto her golden arm (see photo), and she abruptly turns and tell him she’s hungry, quashing the moment. They go to a convenience store, where Tyra tells her “Giving Tree” that her Mom’s credit is canceled there, and asks if he would mind going in for the junk food. While he’s in there, Mike shows up and starts trying to drag her into his car. She’s screaming when Landry runs out and pulls the attacker off Tyra. It looks like it’s over, but as Mike is walking away he says something threatening, which prompts Landry to pick up a blunt object and slam it into the base of the man’s skull.
They roll the bleeding bastard into Landry’s old GMC station wagon, but there’s no pulse, no breathing. Mike is dead, and it’s around this time that “Friday Night Lights” enters its Southern Gothic period, with Tyra and Landry dropping the body off a railroad bridge and into a creek. Tyra’s freaking out, Landry’s freaking out even more, and they have much sex to calm each other down.
From that point on, roughly one-third of the action on the next nine episodes of “Friday Night Lights” centers on Tyra and Landry trying to cover up the act and ultimately facing the ensuing police investigation, which is complicated by the fact that Landry’s father is Officer Chad Clarke (Glenn Morshower), a veteran of the Dillon Police Force. Officer Clarke does everything he can to protect his son, including trying to keep Tyra out of Landry’s life and, when evidence starts to roll in, taking Landry’s station wagon out to a landfill (site of some future Riggins’ Rigs misadventures) and torching it.
That all sounds awfully dramatic, doesn’t it? Like someone had been reading a little too much Jim Thompson? To the actors’ credit, both Plemons and Palicki do everything they can to elevate the proceedings — Plemons does some of his best acting of the entire series during this story arc. But there is a general consensus that “Tyra and Landry Kill a Guy” sticks out as being tonally inconsistent with the rest of the series. Furthermore, it never really has any impact on anyone outside of Landry, Landry’s dad, Tyra and Tyra’s mom (Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, who enters StaticBlog Valhalla just for playing Gail Stanwyk in “Fletch”). Come on: Landry’s playing for the Panthers at this point, and Coach Eric doesn’t know? Coach knows everything. Saracen notices that Landry’s a little weepy and jittery, but otherwise he knows nothing. It all seems to happen in a vacuum, and when the story is over, it is hardly ever mentioned by either Tyra or Landry for the rest of the series.
In February 2011, the cast and crew of “Friday Night Lights” talked to TV Guide about the end of the series, and one of the subjects was “Tyra and Landry Kill a Guy.” Needless to say, there was no shortage of antipathy toward that arc.
“I kind of throw that whole thing under the rug,” said Aimee Teegarden (Julie).
“It didn’t feel off to me as we were shooting the way it did for people who watched afterward,” Connie Britton told TV Guide. “Here’s my feeling: I feel like because of the reality and honesty of our show, it can pretty much handle everything. Adrianne and Jesse gave fantastic performances in those scenes. My only complaint would be not that the storyline was inherently bad, but that because of the nature of our show, because it’s an ensemble and there’s so many different stories being told, that we weren’t able to really tell that one with the depth it needed. If we could have really focused in and showed what happens to this teenage kid who is trying to save his friend and inadvertently kills this guy, if we could have showed what it would do to the town… Because the idea that it would happen and nobody in Dillon would know is, like, absurd… It was maybe a little too ambitious for us.”
Ambitious? No, it was more like a skunk wandering onto Hermann Field in the middle of an important game against Arnett Meade.
Not everything was going wrong during the first half of the second season — in fact, “The Last Days of Summer” features some extraordinary acting from Britton when Tami learns that Eric is being called back to TMU early. Also, the storylines surrounding Eric’s sojourn at TMU, Gracie Belle Taylor’s first days in the world, Jason Street’s Mexican medical mission and Lyla Garrity’s Christian conversion are done well, and by the time recruitment season hits and Smash Williams is in the spotlight, “Friday Night Lights” was back to its normal greatness.
There were problems swirling around Season 2 that had nothing to do with plotlines or actors, notably ratings and a looming Writer’s Strike, and it only compounded the situation when clearly some non-creative types were forcing the production staff for “Friday Night Lights” to soap things up.
“The strike put not only the actors out of work, but also the crew and so many businesses,” Teegarden said to TV Guide. “We went from being able to make this amazing show to, ‘Uh oh, should I keep my apartment? Do I move back?’ Plus, we had been trying to get through the whole murder thing, and it just didn’t quite work out. It was a hard time to go through.”
Fortunately, the show recovered and prospered — creatively, at least. “Friday Night Lights” grew in viewers’ estimations because the characters seemed to exist in a real world, and after “Tyra and Landry Kill a Guy,” the show never again tried to play like Texas high school noir.
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 2: The Leadership of Eric Taylor
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 3: The Tao of Riggins
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 3: The Tao of Riggins
Every day, Monday through Friday until the April 15 NBC premiere of the final season of “Friday Night Lights,” StaticBlog’s George Lang will be publishing essays on this landmark series.
When Tim Riggins made his first appearance in the Peter Berg-directed “Friday Night Lights” pilot, he was being interviewed by the local NBC affiliate, wearing his Panthers jersey and probably drunk — the reporter even asked Riggins if he smelled liquor on his breath. Of course, he denied it, but of course, he was drunk when he was telling the interviewer why he didn’t like Brian “Smash” Williams.
“That’s not racism man, I just don’t like him,” Riggins said. “He can be from Saudi Arabia, or Sweden or Czech. That dude could be Santa Claus and I still won’t like him. My name is Tim Riggins and I play fullback.”
Nice. Later in the episode, Riggins, played by Taylor Kitsch, is hanging with Jason Street (Scott Porter) and Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly) around a bonfire, talking about the master plan: Jason will buy a ranch with his first NFL check, and then Riggins will manage the property for the next 10 years while Jason completes his football career. Jason retires, they spend the rest of their lives riding the range, scoring girls, drinking beer — “Texas Forever.” It’s not an unusual dream, except that Riggins, a talented fullback despite his sunrise/sunset beer consumption and his relative disengagement from the game, only factors as a hired hand. That’s all he sees for himself — no college career, no NFL. Just “Texas Forever.” It’s hard to develop any real sympathy, let alone empathy, for Tim Riggins when you first meet him, and then it only gets worse: he and Lyla start screwing around after Jason’s paralyzing injury. Granted, there is a sense that Riggins was set adrift when his best friend could no longer be his partner on the field and, at least to some extent, his ticket to that “Texas Forever” ideal.
There’s probably more written about Tim Riggins on the Internet than on any other character or element of “Friday Night Lights,” mainly because women fantasize about being with him and men secretly want to be him. But Riggins is not a simple, hard-drinkin’ badass who possesses the golden touch with the rally girls. In the end, Riggins will come to symbolize Dillon, Texas itself, with its promise, its dashed dreams, and the romanticism of living with a big sky over your head and a football under your arm as long as the world will let you do it.
Riggins started to show signs of humanity when light was shed on his past, and what continually shows up in the story of Tim Riggins thereafter is a bifurcated personality: the hard-drinking “Captain of the S.S. Tatas” who lives up to the local legend, and the kid who was permanently scarred by a dad who is a thieving, carousing scumbag who abandoned his family when hard times hit Dillon and now chases women around a Corpus Christi golf course and steals their Conway Twitty CDs.
Clearly, Tim could have become Walt Riggins, and the fungible morality that exists near the cores of both Tim and his older brother Billy (Derek Phillips) was inherited: “We shouldn’t steal this money from the biggest meth dealer in Dillon. On the other hand, we can pay our mortgage and then some…” “We shouldn’t steal this copper wiring from the old power plant. On the other hand, if we take a back road…” “We shouldn’t start a chop shop. On the other hand, we could make a lot of money and, presto! Texas Forever!” That is what you get when your father is the kind of guy who would steal a high-end video camera from your football coach, then let you defend his honor when the coach comes calling.
Tim revealed that he would not become Walt when he started to mentor his young neighbor in a way that his own father never would, showing Bo how to throw a spiral and teaching the kid to defend himself on the playground. It’s no surprise that Riggins, when he was in fifth grade, was the kind of kid who would have bullied Bo — that’s learned behavior. Of course, Riggins managed to mitigate whatever good he did for Bo by sleeping with his mother, Jackie (Brooke Langton), but at least he was trying. Riggins was also wise enough to go along for the ride with Jason when No. 6 decided to take an experimental road trip to Mexico to get shark stem cells injected into his spine, and had the presence of mind to try to talk him out of it. Sure, he had Lyla come down and they conducted their intervention on a booze cruise, but everyone has their style.
Season 2 was pivotal, mainly because after Mexico, Tim hit what, at the time, looked like rock bottom: he came back to find that he’d been kicked off the football team for all those practices he missed, Billy was sleeping with Jackie, and when ex-girlfriend Tyra (Adrienne Palicki) wouldn’t let him crash at stately Collette Manor for more than 48 hours, Tim wound up taking care of ferrets for a gun-crazy, smoothie-loving meth dealer in exchange for a place to crash on a dirty floor.
Around this time, “Friday Night Lights” was expressing a certain amount of self-awareness: Billy and Tim went into Tami Taylor’s office to plead their case and get Tami to sweet talk Coach Eric into letting Tim back on the team. Tami was having nothing of it at first, but two episodes later, Tim was back, begging Tami speak on his behalf. Tami relented and talked to Eric, saying that he had this sad, desperate look on his face. Eric (characteristically in the mid-part of the series) got his back up about Tami trying to tell him how to run his team, but he also said that Tim’s been using that look to get over on people (mostly women) since he was a kid.
Ultimately, Tim only found a way back on the team by owning up, not trying to coerce anyone: he apologized to the entire team on the practice field, individually. Riggins got to move out of Methy’s apartment when Eric gave him a place to sleep in the garage, but then the drunk Julie incident happened. He never defended himself when Eric threw him out of the house, and it’s an open question whether Riggins was being altruistic or simply resigning himself to the notion that no one believes him anyway.
The stories go on: Riggins’ good deeds almost always get punished, all the way up to the Riggins’ Rigs incident in Season 4. In the space of 63 episodes, Tim Riggins went from being a pain in the ass to the closest thing Dillon has to a martyr, sacrificing his future so that Billy, a new father, could be spared. For those who watch “Friday Night Lights” in massive, Netflix or DVD-enabled doses, Tim Riggins looks like the soul of the show. People will leave Dillon, and people will leave Riggins, but when the Landing Strip no longer has girls on the poles and the Alamo Freeze has thawed, Tim Riggins will still be there, staring at the sunset on his ill-gotten land with a beer in his hand and one at the ready. Texas Forever, indeed.
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 2: The Leadership of Eric Taylor
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 2: The Leadership of Eric Taylor
Every day, Monday through Friday until the April 15 NBC premiere of the final season of “Friday Night Lights,” StaticBlog’s George Lang will be publishing essays on this landmark series.
Most audiences are so inured to expository dialogue that it doesn’t even register anymore, but it’s the dumb guy’s approach to storytelling when all the smart people are telling you to “show, don’t tell.” For those who’ve forgotten their composition classes, those garbage-strewn passages in which characters recount everything that’s happened thus far for the sake of absent-minded viewers is expository writing. It’s particularly endemic to soap operas, but even watching shows that are considered relatively quality-oriented like “24″ can make viewers feel like they’re being carpet-bombed with exposition.
One of the most laudable qualities of “Friday Night Lights” is that it’s about 98 percent exposition free, and as a bonus it sometimes avoids showing altogether. One of the obvious high points for storytelling in this series was “It Ain’t Easy Being J.D. McCoy” (S3, Ep6). This episode illustrated the level of leadership and strength of character in Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) with just a few flecks of paint in the coach’s hair.
In the first stretch of “FNL,” a good portion of the storylines centered on the recovery and rebuilding of Jason Street (Scott Porter), the Panthers quarterback who was paralyzed on the field during the pilot episode. Eric never really expressed guilt over the incident — Jason’s parents certainly tried to ascertain guilt through their legal initiative against the coach — but Eric always showed that he felt responsible: not for the injury, but for the man he hoped Jason would become despite his catastrophic setback. Eric never took pity on Jason, choosing instead to help when Jason was ready for it, offering him the assistant coaching job with Panthers, understanding when Jason felt he needed to leave it behind, and offering constructive support when Jason finds out he’s going to be a father.
Two years after he was paralyzed, Jason Street (Scott Porter) is flipping Buddy Garrity’s old house with Herc and the Rigginses (Riggi?) to show Erin, the mother of his son Noah, that he can be responsible and support his family — things aren’t going great guns at Garrity Motors, where all the other salespeople on the floor resent having to compete with an earnest, good-looking local football hero in a wheelchair, and Erin doubts that there is a real future for them. As one might expect, the Riggi are complete clowns when it comes to doing the real work of house-flipping, Herc is in a wheelchair, too, and there’s more evidence of beer consumption and demolition than anything else. Jason and Eric run into each other at the lumber yard, and Eric is a little incredulous about this undertaking, but the dynamic between the former quarterback and his ex-coach is the most interesting thing about this scene: Eric treats Jason like a man, a peer. This is recurrent in other key areas such as Eric’s after-hours coaching of Smash Williams (Gaius Charles) when the graduated and injured running back is trying to earn a walk-on at Texas A&M, his counsel of Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) when Matt loses his star standing with the Panthers, and later, his fatherly approach with Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan) when the quarterback is trying to escape his gangs and street justice past. When he respects his players, Eric shows it by treating them as equals.
Eric goes to the former Garrity home to check things out and sees the disaster at hand. Jason has just bawled out his business partners for deviating from plans by knocking out a load-bearing wall and buying a $1700 toilet, and he’s putting away the Budweiser. Jason sees his plan falling apart. He tells Eric he doesn’t want to be a deadbeat dad (the role of fathers is an overarching theme in this episode). Eric recognizes above all else that Jason is a man of his word, but he also understands that Jason is attempting to flip a house with a fellow quadriplegic and two beered-up knuckleheads. Eric tells Jason to stay calm: he’s not going to be a deadbeat, especially considering that he’s only 20 years old and is executing a plan. He just needs to give himself time.
Later in the episode, Tami (Connie Britton) is waiting for Eric at the Dillon Dance, an event that absolutely no one seems to actually want to attend, but it’s one of those time-honored traditions that no one in Dillon has the fortitude to kibosh. They’re supposed to be chaperoning. When he finally does show up, he’s in his suit and tie, and Tami comments that he has paint in his hair (the camera doesn’t exactly pick it up), but nothing is really said about it.
It’s hard to convey the power of this moment to people who haven’t seen the episode, but for “Friday Night Lights” fanatics, it is one of the scenes where a level of greatness is achieved. Just in terms of storytelling, “It Ain’t Easy Being J.D. McCoy” derives its power from what it doesn’t say and what it doesn’t show. We never see Eric show up at Chez Garrity in workclothes or with a paintbrush in his hand. And he doesn’t really talk about it because telling people that he helped a friend isn’t what Eric is about. He is principled man of action, and he doesn’t help because he feels professionally compelled or driven by the expectations of others. He’s not looking for a medal or a cookie. Outside of the house flippers, no one will know what Eric did, except maybe Tami, and they’ll talk about it off camera.
Coach Eric Taylor is not always saintly. There were moments when he was horribly wrong, such as when, in Season 2, he jumped to the worst but most obvious parental conclusion when he saw Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) helping the extremely drunk Julie (Aimee Teegarden) into her bed. When he realized that he made a mistake in that instance, Eric stepped up and said not only what he is morally obligated to say, but told Tim the kind of things that the boy had been needing to hear for about 17 years. It’s not a stretch to say that, while Riggins sees a lot more trouble in the next few years, this is the point where he begins trying to model himself as a more selfless individual. Watch “Thanksgiving,” the final episode of Season 4, to see how much Riggins is willing to sacrifice for others.
And finally, there are the times when Taylor actually breaks the law to protect his players, especially when he covers up a steroid problem in Season 1 and actually hides a weapon in Season 4. In the steroid case, he used a potentially career-destroying incident as a character-building exercise. With the gun, this was another instance where Jason Katims and his team were appealing to their better instincts: rather than showing Taylor throwing the gun into the lake for dramatic effect, Eric tells Tami that it’s “going away.” We will never know exactly how it happened.
“Friday Night Lights” never stoops to cheap moralizing. The actions of Coach Eric Taylor show that we can be better than the place where we live. We can be better than how people perceive us and how they talk about us. It’s leadership that works best with few words and no exposition.
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
“Friday Night Lights” Chapter 1: A Sense of Place
Every business day, Monday through Friday until the April 15 NBC premiere of the final season of “Friday Night Lights,” StaticBlog’s George Lang will be publishing daily essays on this landmark series.
There was once a town called Dillon, Texas, in the far northeast section of the state, in Hopkins County, just south of a small town named Saltillo, and it only existed for about 20 years. It was incorporated in 1906, but by the 1930s it was no longer represented by Rand McNally or the official Texas DOT maps. There are a few stray buildings left standing, but certainly no football stadiums, no Alamo Freeze, no Applebee’s. There’s no Dillon High School, no East Dillon, no Landing Strip, no Riggins’ Rigs. Eric and Tami Taylor never lived there, Buddy Garrity didn’t help win a state football championship there in 1974, nor did Matt Saracen in 2006, and it was never a place to love as a symbol of “Texas Forever” or a “Devil Town” from which to escape.
The Dillon, Texas of “Friday Night Lights” is a fictional place with no set geographical touchstones other than its home state. From 2006 to 2010, the series was filmed in and around Austin and Pflugerville, and Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 nonfiction book “Friday Night Lights: a Town, a Team and a Dream” covered the Permian High School Panthers of Odessa, Texas in the far west portion of the state, but in the conception of the series, executive producers Peter Berg and Jason Katims never tell us much about where Dillon is on the map. All we know for sure is that Dillon is about four hours from Austin — in Season 2, when Buddy and the relocated-to-Austin Coach Eric Taylor arranged a meeting, Buddy figured they each had to drive two hours to meet in the middle. While Dillon has a distinct personality and is not in danger of being swallowed up by a metroplex, there is a sense that it isn’t isolated — if Tami wants to take Julie shopping they don’t have to drive all day, and it’s hard to imagine Joe and Katie McCoy moving J.D. from Dallas to a remote place for football alone when a beer distribution empire is at stake. Venturing a guess, Dillon is to a major Texas metropolitan area what Waxahachie, population 21,426, is to Dallas, and consider this: when Matt borrowed Landry’s car in Season 3 so he could drive to Oklahoma and get his estranged mother to sign some legal papers, he didn’t have to drive all night. So despite the Austin and Pflugerville shooting locations, west-northwest Texas is the likely setting.
To just call Dillon a football town is reductionist: Dillon is a town sustained by football. Based on the architecture of the downtown area seen in “State” (Season 1, Episode 22), Dillon is about a century old, but the real story of Dillon has a lot to do with large deposits of petroleum sitting below the surface in the Permian Basin. Dillon has all the earmarks of a boom-bust town. The old side of town, East Dillon, got the short end of both the stick and the tax base during the boom, when the west side developed and, as is alluded heavily in Season 4, all the shopping and the suburbs were built. Eric and Tami’s home, as well as the much-shabbier Chez Riggins, is typical early 1970s suburban development: ranch-style, quick to build, on to the next one. Up until Season 3, when we see the exurban McManse that Joe McCoy built, the nicest home seen in Dillon belongs to Buddy Garrity, who parlayed his hometown hero status into a successful car dealership. He and his family lived in a circa-1980 upper-middle-class house, but it’s telling that the newest homes seen in the first seasons are the small tract houses that Brian “Smash” Williams’ mother thought of buying before the bank redlined her.
The root of all this oil talk can be found in an early episode titled “Git ‘Er Done” (S1, Ep. 5). Tyra Collette is working her after-school job at Applebee’s (a key sponsor and underwriter of “Friday Night Lights” — more on that later) when a 20-something oil company rep named Connor starts chatting her up — he’s basically set up a mobile office there, calling back to Los Angeles for updates, and since Tyra is a statuesque 5’11″, it doesn’t seem to occur to Connor that he’s trying to pick up a high school sophomore. At any rate, he invites her out to the oil patch, where he’s trying to revive drilling in the area. Tyra brings some fast food and they have a dream date in the middle of nowhere. Tyra tells him that she hates oil: she hates what it did to her town and to her father. Connor tries to mitigate things by telling her that, back home, he drives a Prius.
This is possibly the only time oil gets mentioned in the series, but the oil bust of the mid-1980s is still a tangible bit of history in Dillon. Most of the non-government (i.e. public school) jobs are in the service industry. Mindy Collette, Tyra’s older sister, works in that ninth circle of recessionary hell, a strip club. As for Tyra’s dad, he’s not there and not talked about — Maybe he drank himself to death, or maybe he just abandoned the place and his family like Tim Riggins’ father did. His only legacy is a house outside town where his former wife Angela sucks down box wine, takes pills and tries to turn her daughters into drinking buddies.
The oil bust was rough on West Dillon, but for East Dillon it was catastrophic. In 1983, the East Dillon Lions won the state championship, but by the end of the decade the school was closed and its student body was folded into Dillon High School. Up until Season 4, the most we see of East Dillon is Landry Clarke and Matt Saracen’s homes — after the boosters gerrymandered the hell out of the Dillon Independent School District at the close of Season 3, Landry wound up in East Dillon, and if Saracen hadn’t graduated, he would have, as well. The crime rate is high, drugs are a persistent problem (i.e. Vince Howard’s mother) as are gangs who, as is evident in Season 4, are in search of a good chop shop for their stolen vehicles.
Football was always big in Dillon, but once the economy turned sour, those Friday night lights became one of the few bright spots — so much so that an entire media industry seems to have sprung up around the Dillon Panthers. Football became the one thing that Dillon did well. The history textbooks in the high school might be 15 years old, but damn it, we’re getting a JumboTron at Hermann Field.
“Friday Night Lights”: Countdown to the Final Season on April 15
