MovieChat Forums > Friday Night Lights (2006) Discussion > defending season 2

defending season 2

posted 4 years ago by daveyh (634)
4 replies | jump to latest

Having watched it again during the summer lockdown, I couldn’t help thinking that it’s not as bad as I remember or as bad as everyone says. In fact, I’d say that season 5 is arguably worse, but rather than go in to that, I’ll speak positively about season 2 and address some of the criticism that it often gets:
(1) Julie:
When the initial series of any show ends quite conclusively, it causes difficulties when writing the 2nd series – some of the best shows suffer from it, including The Sopranos and The Wire, but that’s for another discussion. In the 2nd season of Friday Night Lights, they have to contrive a way to bring Coach back. The only way to do this, unfortunately, is by having both his family and the team in such disarray that he’s needed back in Dillon – seeing Julie become so insufferable and seeing relations between the Panther players break down is unpleasant to watch but it is needed for the above reason – otherwise there’s no show at all.
(2) The story that everyone hates, the one with Landry and Tyra:
While I can’t defend this story, I will say that the seeds for it were sown near the end of Season 1, and I’ve read somewhere that they’d initially planned for the incident to happen during the mud-bowl episode (Landry would be with Tyra when she was initially attacked), the only reason they didn’t go ahead with it then was because there was already enough going on with all the other stories they’d been building all season about to climax and the team reaching State.
Doesn’t excuse the story, it’s more that it shows the writers didn’t suddenly lose their minds when it came to season 2, because this plot idea was already out there and being developed.
(3) Messing with the characters ages:
This ties in with point 1 about following up the successful first series. It was an awkward situation to write as they had to keep the characters everyone loved from the first series, but the show is based around a high school and two of the most popular characters (Tim and Tyra) were implied to be seniors. While they could have shown them struggling after graduation (like they eventually did with Tim in season 4), there’s only so much mileage to get from that, and with football being so central to the show, Tim had to still be on the team.
Strictly speaking, there was only Jason who was confirmed to be a senior during season one, so the way round it was to make them younger, and maybe if they’d just been one year younger, it would have been easier to accept. And maybe the initial plan was to have them graduate at the end of the year, but because the season was cut short by the writers’ strike, they had to do the same thing again in Season 3 in order to get closure and give them a proper send off.
Now viewers could just about buy that these 2 might have been Juniors in Season 1, but Sophmores?! I have difficulty believing that one too, but please note this was caused by an unfortunate combination of the demand to keep the characters for the second year and the writers’ strike. It’s tempting to think of it as season 2 madness. The reality is that the age inconsistancies actually get worse as the show goes on. Season 3, Lyla’s still in school despite quite explicitly stating in Season 1 that she’s a year behind Jason, which means she would have graduated by then. Worse still, in 4&5, Landry’s suddenly a year younger than Matt and Tyra and Tim, which means he’d have only been 14 at the beginning of the show when he’s driving!
(4) Characters disappearing without explanation
Again, Season 2 seems to get all the flak for this. To the point where Waverlee’s disappearance is levelled at Season 2, but then Santiago, Lyla’s preacher boyfriend etc not being in season 3 is also blamed on Season 2.
And again, this isn’t exclusive to Season 2. The most criminal one of all for me was the McCoys going without anybody bothering to explain what happened.
(5) Bad storylines (Mexico, Tim staying with the guy with the ferrets etc)
Every season has subplots that don’t quite work. While season 2 probably has more than the others, that’s largely down to future series being cut to 13 episodes.
Tying this in with points 1 & 2, I’d also say that at least they got a lot of the lesser stories out of the way while they were contriving to get Coach back in Dillon.
Once that happens and these stories are resolved, for me, the show really hits its stride again......

[–] daveyh (634) 4 years ago

....Who Do You Think You Are is in my Top 5 episodes of the entire show. The drama with Smash being aggressively recruited, then losing the scholarship, then finding a place to play was also a great story (which season 3 kinda ruined!). In fact, I’d say the last 4 episodes in a row (before the writers’ strike derailed it) were really strong and there’d have still been another 7 to go. Maybe I’m giving too much benefit of the doubt – maybe they wouldn’t have kept that standard up for another 7 episodes – but we’d have found out how Tami became Principal, we’d have seen Lyla and Tim get together (something that they were clearly building all through season 2), we’d have seen Buddy’s reaction to his wife taking the kids out of state, only to be consoled by Lyla deciding to stay in Dillon, and on the pitch we’d have seen Smash return from suspension in time for the playoffs.
Even if all of the above stories weren’t executed well, season 2 ending properly would have changed the trajectory of the show.
In addition to the Smash story concluding, we’d have seen Jason’s girlfriend deciding to keep the baby, and maybe he’d have left Dillon at this point. And the romance between Landry and Tyra may well have been settled by the series’ end too. (This kind of ties in with point 3 about the writers’ strike meaning they had to make Tim, Tyra and Lyla younger in order to see their stories out.)
Then, in season 3, they could have started with new stories right off the bat as we’d have already had closure with the original characters.
Instead, the writers’ strike has allowed season 2 to be dismissed, not only by fans but also by the show itself, to the point where it seems to be considered some kind of fan-fiction-parallel-universe.

[–] daveyh (634) 4 years ago

TLDR - while it's far from perfect, a lot of it's problems were down to having to basically undo the end of series one with Coach and also keep characters from series one even though they should have graduated, then, just when it had really got going again, it was stopped in its tracks by the writers' strike (which gave the show itself a perfect excuse to pretend this series never happened).

[–] Lily Magnum (267) 4 years ago

The problem with the entire show is too much focus on the kids and not enough on the adults at the school and in the town. The show got popular with teens so they shifted the focus to the "hot" teenage characters. Most of the time I felt like the writers treated Coach Taylor sort of like an after thought.

[–] CountJohn (602) a year ago

In addition to whatever the planned ending was getting cancelled due to the writer's strike, the issue with season 2 was all the lame subplots you had to sit through. The core stuff with the Taylors, Matt, and Smash was still good, but then you had Lyla trying to be a youth pastor or whatever, the Landry murder story, Riggins couch surfing and living with the ferret guy, and Jason in Mexico. In the first year all the subplots were good dangling around the main football plotline.