- first off, general things - I like it a lot, it's a good show - essentially a soft relatively realistic for TV primetime soap with football, with really good characters, and attempting to make everyone human - and by the time I got about halfway through every season, I wanted to power through the rest which is always a good sign - it's not the best show ever but it's good and I hope it comes back for the two seasons at least NBC is talking about
- no one is completely in the wrong on the show as a general rule - for example, one coach who is forced to share quarters with Dillon, due to who his school being destroyed in a tornado seems like a total jackass, until just before you see him for the last time he tells Coach Taylor that his wife has cancer - this show would never let you get away having unequivocal hate towards any character
- most ridiculous subplot is about Landry murdering Tyra's rapist. FNL, unlike, say, the Wire, is TV left and right, no doubt about it but usually they stay within the bounds of fairly normal human drama - boy-girl troubles, school problems, parenting issues - throwing in a murder was way beyond anything they had thrown in before, and after - totally out of place - like the reverse of if Jack Bauer tried to start cracking jokes during 24 - the whole plotline just felt like the writers had stretched the bounds of the universe in which the show takes place
- the other most obvious TV thing is of course, that during every game, the player who seems to have been the subject of the episode seems to be the one making the plays - this may be the wrong place to do this as I don't want to insult FNL as much as credit a show like The Wire, but if FNL was The Wire, we would know far more players' names no matter how important characters they were, and what happened in the games would have nothing to do with the rest of the episodes - it's fine, it's not a big deal, I just wanted to make a point out of it
- the most ridiculous occasional character is the meth dealer who Tim Riggins lives with for a couple episodes - the hunting and driving conversations between the two of them, including the Patrick Swayze lovefest are some of the most utterly surreal scenes in the entire series and just made me feel weird and confused while watching
- myself having an insane obsession with opening credits related comments: third seasons, no more smash and street - makes sense, they're only in a couple of episodes - why not replace them with Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) and JD McCoy (Jeremy Sumpter) Both are just about main characters in the third season, getting as much screen time as anyone else. Buddy has really moved above the other recurring characters, like Matt's grandma and Billy Riggins in terms of prominence and JD McCoy is a way to shepherd the show into a new era after the majority of the cast graduates high school (though somehow finds their way back in Dillon, maybe?)
- one thing probably both liberating to the writers and highly unsatisfying to the viewers is that this high school show, unlike most high school shows (ie. Buffy) covers just the fall rather than the whole school year, and thus huge events can happen in the second half of the year that are unexplained, as seems to happen between the 2nd and 3rd seasons. ps. I wrote this before I realized there was an episode 13 of the 3rd season, which I then watched, and is sort of a "everything stays the same for five months" until things start happening again.
- it's kind of ridiculous to anyone watching the show that Lyla, Tyra and Tim Riggins were sophomores in the first season - they had the run of the school, everyone knew who they were, and the general impression I got is that, while watching the first season, they were all seasons and maybe at absolute reach, juniors - my guess and this is based on absolutely nothing is that they were not designed to be sophomores but were changed to them later on to keep them longer when the show got extended
- one nice thing FNL does is show a whole range of functional families - it sounds silly, but while there is plenty of hackneyed TV encounters and dialogue on the show, the relationships within the different family units, from the Taylors, to the Riggins, and Saracens, Collettes, and the rest really do seem authentic, and that is a credit to the show - one of the shows strongest traits I think
- the series also should have been adding characters each year so that when characters graduated they'd be easily replaceable if necessary rather than having to worry about finding a way to keep them in Dillon
Well that's all for now - I probably have a lot more thoughts, but if I wait for all of them, I'll never put this up
1 comment:
I agree with you on the Riggins et al being Sophomores thing, I assumed that at the very least Riggs was a senior in the first season. Where you're completely off base (as usual) though, is in not understanding how they could be that well known and have the run of the school as sophomores. Did you just not go to a school with a football program or something? Lyla was a cheerleader and the girlfriend of the superstar quarterback, Riggins arguably the third best player on the football team and best friend of superstar quarterback, and Tyra is super hot and the girlfriend of Riggins at that time. They absolutely would have been well known and running the school, especially in a state like Texas where football is the be all and end all of the year. Growing up in East Meadow has clearly warped your worldview.
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