"BECAUSE I'M A CRIPPLE AND I WANT TO LISTEN TO NIRVANA NOW!" the Friday Night Lights TV series thread

xp these days and esp in big football programs, there are a lot of kids that are pretty physically advanced (is there any non-creepy way to say this). like the most physically imposing kids / kids with the best shot at the college game are groomed early and its not uncommon to find groups of them on the same squad.

in any case i thought they did a pretty decent job at the casting, knowing that acting ability had to be considered

I laughed (very) out loud when Amy Schumer did that walking-to-the-house-with-hands-up walk.

right!? best part

Just starting this--three episodes in. I know it's very early, but two things are really getting in the way so far. 1) The way it's shot: cinéma vérité , endless close-ups. 2) How grim everyone is. I'm generally simpatico with the friend who bought it for me, so I expect I'll start to warm to it at some point.

1 never goes away, but 2 does. It's very funny at times.

1 actually does ease up a lot 6 or 7 episodes in.

I'm just past the thread-title episode, and I am liking it better. Still new to these prestige shows (or whatever) of the past few years, but in the four that I've watched, it takes them a few episodes to get their footing, then they get better.

Like the coach's wife a lot; her gentle mocking of the coach is always great ("Our daughter is now interested in football--good job, honey.") Smash gets better and better; when he's really hammy, he's funny, but lately he's added some shading. I thought Smash's mom telling him about his father was the first really great dramatic scene thus far. Landry and Tyra are really good, and even Riggins has loosened up. Haven't connected with much of the music so far, though.

I always thought the thread title was a joke until I got to that episode. Getting the feeling that this was initially planned with Street and Lyla as much bigger players before they realized that everyone else in town was more interesting, including the Mayor and her partner (how the fuck does the mayor of a 10k person town hide their live-in gf?).

Kinda weird how the Internet fervor was about how wonderful Coach is and generally he seems to be a bit of a compromised dick - not firing the racist coach, etc.

Street and Lyla are still front and center where I am right now. (The lawsuit has just been launched.) Minka Kelly is gorgeous, but she's...not a great actress. If her part gets smaller henceforth, maybe that was a factor. The episode or two where she became a total pariah was moving anyway, and she had that one great line to the cheerleading judge: "Yeah, it's me, the slut with the website."

Like the coach's wife a lot; her gentle mocking of the coach is always great

imo they're the best portrayal of a married couple ever on television.

otm

i also really love the way they handle the parenting-a-teenage-girl issues

we loved this show, just finished it a month or so ago.

this show is so clear eyed and compassionate w/ all its characters. every single character has value

― ⊚ ⓪ ㉧ ☉ ๏ ʘ ◉ ◎ ⓞ Ⓞ (Lamp), Friday, January 7, 2011

so true

i still adore most of these actors based almost entirely on this show

tyra is kicking ass on Agents of Shield btw

https://scontent-dfw.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xtf1/t31.0-8/11187177_10153328246187146_8074973265860351374_o.jpg
ex-roomie's response to this unfortunate pause: "it's comforting to know even she can look unattractive in a photo"

tyra4life

I'm no Tyra stan but she's not even a little bit unattractive in that pic.

everything clemenza said leads me to believe that friday night lights will have a new superfan in ~60 hours

tyra is kicking ass on Agents of Shield btw
wait whaaaaaaaaaaat that's her????????

They were working on her own Shield spinoff actually, but it got nixed. Just like her Wonder Woman movie.

she was wonder woman in a david kelley tv pilot. you can find it online. it is... not good, although she did the best she could with what she had.

imo they're the best portrayal of a married couple ever on television.

100% cosign

xp oh that's right. it was tv. there have been so many failed wonder woman projects in the last decade i confuse them.

and we have more failed wonder woman to look forward to! thanks dc!

friday night lights will have a new superfan in ~60 hours

Probably--but much faster. Same with House of Cards; really skeptical at first, got better and better. Six Feet Under and Mad Men were better from the start, but even they didn't hit their peak till three or four seasons in.

Halfway through the second season. A friend warned me that it was the weakest, but so far I've liked most of it. The daughter bugs me sometimes--she mopes around and cries a lot. Riggins, who was such a drag the first few episodes, gets better all the time; him calling the radio station about Jesus and the Turin Shroud killed me. The music, almost none of which I know, usually works; "Now That I Know" is the first Devendra Banhart song I've ever heard, and I love it.

Riggins is my favorite

If nothing else, S2 has one of Saracen's best scenes and a pretty amusing guest star in the finale

Smash is another character who was very one-dimensional for the first few episodes--the vainglorious, refers-to-himself-in-the-third-person show-off (and being black, they caricatured him even further)--but has settled down and gets better all the time. That side of him is still there, but ever since that one girl called him out on it (Waverly; hope she comes back), he almost treats it like a joke, and it's kind of charming; there was also the great episode where he led the boycott of the coach, and that took him somewhere else. The scenes with him and his mom are among the show's best.

I hope they figure out what to do with Landry and Tyra now that the murder's been resolved. They're such an interesting pair.

Finished season two.

If nothing else, S2 has one of Saracen's best scenes

His drunken scrimmage?

Landry having to choose between Tyra and Jean is pretty hilarious--they're like the two versions of everybody's dream girl. The cutting during the volleyball games could be a lot better; every close-up of Tyra underscores how awkward she is out there. The drug dealer guy was scary.

As I tend to do, I obsess over the music. I wrote about Devendra Banhart's "Now That I Know" (season 2) for a movie-music blog a friend and I intermittently keep:

https://heardjustwhatiseen.wordpress.com/2015/06/29/make-them-disappear-now/

That gap from the end of S2 to the beginning of S3 is jarring--I took the DVD out and made sure I hadn't rented the wrong season.

yeah it's weird huh

from wiki:
This season ends on a cliffhanger due to the Writers' Strike. The show's head writer and executive producer, Jason Katims, stated that this last episode was “not in any way viewed as the season finale... If we were leading to the end of the season [under normal circumstances], we would have most likely brought the story around to the coach and his family again,” and there would have been a strong football element as well, Katims said. Seven of the 22 episodes NBC ordered for Season 2 weren’t made.[41]

When 2 ends, the team is trying to get into the playoffs so that Smash can return from his suspension. Within 5 minutes of the start of 3, you find out that Smash has graduated (?) and is recovering from a knee injury (??), and then the Coach gets into his car and refers to his wife as the principal (???).

Once you get into the first episode, it's no big deal (although something I read points out that Diego never shows up again, with no explanation). I'm five or six episodes into 3, and most of it has been very good, with the exception of Tyra's Linda-Lovelace-for- President run at student council--that seemed like a stretch. It took about four false starts for Smash to go through with his walk-on tryout, but the wait was worth it--him getting accepted, and the way he fakes out his mom, was very moving.

Was season 3 the first Direct TV season?

that was 4 i think

Yeah, first 3 were on NBC, last 2 were on DirecTV.

Hoping another VegemiteGrrl shows up on ILX, just so I can designate one of them VG-1 and the other VG-2.

she would not last long, i would fight her in the thunderdome & win

No Mud Bowl showdown?

>:(

Season 3 was the first DirecTV season, not 4.

The early Direct stuff ended up on NBC as filler programming a few months later.

Ssn 2 had the incredible disappearing Santiago storyline iirc

No that later seasons were much better with stray plots--Hastings Ruckle wtf?

I didn't think S2 was as much of a comedown as everyone else seems to think. The problem with the Tyra/Landry detour, for me, wasn't so much the murder itself, but that a smart guy like Landry wouldn't realize he had an obvious self-defense alibi. It took him most of the season to do what I would have thought he'd do right away.

Anyway, S3 was definitely better. Found lots of scenes surprisingly moving--I think I got verklempt every time someone got accepted into college (first Smash, then Riggins and Tyra), or when people selflessly urged them on (Billy to Tim, Tim to Lyla, Tyra's mom and Landry and Mrs. Taylor to Tyra). I did think there was an obvious flaw or oversight at the end of the last episode. The surprise coup worked well; I'm really looking forward to this fictional team and fictional coach getting their fictional revenge in S4. But there seemed to be no interaction between the coach and Buddy Garrity over what was engineered, unless I missed it. You'd think that Taylor would have been furious with Garrity, yet at Billy's wedding, there didn't seem to be any acknowledgement of that.

Sorry to say that I bet that's it for Devin.

Oh, Devin............

reminiscing abt Tim Riggins
I may have to rewatch this whole series again

http://youtu.be/Cuxz0pvWu14

Borrowed S4 from the friend who got me going on this in the first place. When he and his wife went to Texas a few years ago--a trip that he said was partly inspired by wanting to visit some locales from the series, which they both love--the guy who plays Saracen was on the plane back with them.

First four episodes of S4 were pretty good, although Taylor's "Let's finish this"-type motivational speeches are starting to blur together at this point. Liked Vince from his first scene, and Joe McCoy has turned out to be a great villain. (When I was double-checking his name on Wikipedia, I stupidly glanced at the results of all the games for this season. So I know now what happens when East and West Dillon play...not that I didn't expect something like that anyway.)

That song at the end of "Stay," the episode where Julie and Matt sneak off to the Austin Music Festival--I thought it was Springsteen as it played, Matt driving off (presumably to Chicago), and it felt good to respond emotionally to Springsteen, as I rarely do. In some ways, he feels like this invisible presences throughout the whole series. Anyway, wasn't him; "This House of Cards" by Jamie Mefford & Blue Light, whom I've never heard of. When I checked the credits online, they said "Don't Think Twice" was used in the Direct TV version (I'm watching DVDs right now), which I don't actually understand--my friend's wife said yesterday that "Don't Look Twice" would turn up, and I was looking forward to that, but evidently that won't happen.

I think this is the bingiest day I've ever had. Trying to decide if I should watch the last two episodes and finish up tonight.

The actress who plays Vince's mom is beyond great. The scene where she went to thank Taylor was incredible. Something else I loved: Buddy, after he proposes the idea for the late-night game between the park guys and East Dillon--initially ridiculed by Taylor, quickly accepted by the old-guard community guys--saying "Everybody loves football." It was such a perfect, simple, and heartfelt line for that character.

Getting tired of Julie at this point. And when Becky's mom comes home and completely misunderstands what's going on, I just thought "Is this really necessary? We already had this scene with Riggins and Julie." (Becky going to Riggins right after was nice, though.)

Getting tired of Julie at this point.

That ain't gonna change much.