Friday Night Lights: The stories you aren’t watching

Posted by sara October 20th, 2008 at 12:00pm In General

So far, this season on Friday Night Lights has pleased me greatly. It’s a huge improvement over Season 2’s abortive murder storyline, Julie’s hideous teenage rebellion, Matt’s affair with his nurse, and Santiago-who-escaped-from-A-Few-Good-Men (he was on Brothers and Sisters this week!).

For those of you who don’t have DirecTV (um, everyone?) here’s what’s happened three episodes into Season Three.

When we rejoin the noble folks of Dillon, it’s the beginning of a new season. The Panthers washed out in the previous season’s playoffs, which included a catastrophic knee injury for Smash. Tami is now the principal of Dillon High; there’s a spoiled new freshman quarterback in town from Dallas; Lyla’s mom has taken the Little Garritys and moved to somewhere crunchy (Portland?) with her new husband from the hippie store; and Tim, Lyla, Tyra, Matt, and Julie are all seniors. Yes. There was also a rip in the space-time continuum in the off-season but we shall not speak of that out of respect for the departed creator of Passions. Also, Baby Grace still has an adorably enormous cranium.

Hey, Tim, as I was saying about the Large Hadron Collider…

So Lyla and Riggins are back together. And it is hott. Lyla has apparently forsworn Jesus (Billy: “She went to bed with Jesus and woke up with you…. You’re a rebound from Jesus.”) for sexytimes with Tim, much to her father’s chagrin. Billy asked Mindy (Tyra’s stripper sister) to marry him, with predictably insane results. And the Sooners are apparently interested in Tim, who has switched from fullback to Smash’s old position, tailback.

Smash blew out his knee in last year’s finals and lost his scholarship to that HBCU he’d committed to. Now he’s rehabbing with Coach and losing faith in himself every other minute. And the management of the Alamo Freeze has offered him a regional manager job supervising four new stores. It comes with a company car and would utterly destroy Smash’s soul, because he is The Smash and belongs in a spread offense.

Coach is, well, coaching. And arguing with Tami about how the football budget is like four times that of the rest of the school, so his office is nice and air-conditioned and they have new computers while the remaining teachers at Dillon High are scratching lessons into the dirt floors of their classrooms with sticks. Julie got a job at Applebee’s so she can buy a car and drive somewhere to find a storyline that doesn’t involve Swedish lifeguards. She and Matt appear to be getting back together, which warms my cold, cold heart, but it’s bittersweet. They’re obviously going to bone this season, but now that Matt has been deflowered by CarLOWta, their relationship is never going to have that blushing awkwardness it did in Season One. I guess this is what they mean by True Love Waits (For Sweeps).

Tyra realized that she’d have to get a GPA of about 120 during her senior year in order to send good grades to colleges, but with Mindy marrying Billy Riggins and condemning herself to a life of yelling at him to get his damn feet off the coffee table, Tyra is redoubling her efforts to get out of Dillon, which includes running a campaign for class president that’s heavy on the strippers and light on the policy details. Billy, on the other hand, has some of his traditional cash-flow problems, so he’s (probably) dealing drugs—here’s hoping this doesn’t mean the return of Meth-Making Ferret Guy from last season—and (certainly) stealing giant bales of copper wire. This will end in tragedy, I’m sure.

We have seen neither hide nor hair of Jason Street. Perhaps he is with his babymama at the Wal-Mart.