Carousel

(Warning: this post contains spoilers. –PB)

Friday Night Lights returned to NBC this weekend with its Season 4 premiere (Hulu), and I’ve decided to write a review on every episode this season. As part of the unique financing arrangement that can be credited almost exclusively for keeping the show alive this long, all thirteen episodes have already aired on DirecTV, so I’ll be watching this season for the second time; I’m hoping that I’ll notice new things this time around. (I don’t want to spoil later episodes, though, so I’ll often write as though I haven’t seen the rest of the season.)

Season 4 begins a summer vacation after the Season 3 finale, in which Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) lost his job as head coach of Dillon High School’s football team and was instead named the head coach at East Dillon High, a long-closed campus that’s reopening after a controversial redistricting. The final shot of Season 3 saw Taylor and his wife, Tami (Connie Britton), visiting the run-down East Dillon field that would become his new home.

We viewers have been trained to dread these kinds of plot developments because they tend to signal “reboots,” often perpetrated either by networks who want to “take the show in a new direction” (see: Alias) or by writers who have run out of ideas (see: Weeds, which has done this literally every season, with absurd and appalling results). They almost always turn out to be disasters. If there’s one thing I have to say about FNL‘s Season 4 premiere, “East of Dillon,” it’s that we can rest at ease. It’s clear after just the first few minutes that nothing has really changed, that we are right back where we want to be, with Eric and Tami and Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) and Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) and all the other characters we know and love (or love to hate). Credit is due to the show’s writing team for turning in a new direction without jumping the shark.

But while nothing may have changed for us, plenty has changed for these characters and for the town of Dillon. Coach Taylor has a new job, of course. Saracen, having decided to stay and take care of his grandmother rather than accept his scholarship at the Art Institute of Chicago, is stuck delivering pizzas — to the Panthers’ newly obnoxious starting quarterback, J.D. McCoy (Jeremy Sumpter), no less. Riggins spends less screen time at college than you will reading this review, before he drives his truck from San Antonio State straight back to Dillon. And of course, all of Dillon is on edge as a result of the school redistricting, which has left Tami, Dillon High’s principal, caught on both sides of an argument with deep racial and socioeconomic subtext. The pace of the first half of the episode is brisk, quickly bringing us up to speed on what’s happened to everyone and introducing us to a new character, Vince Howard (played by The Wire’s Michael B. Jordan). I continue to be impressed by how FNL can say more in a 45-second scene — indeed, in a single shot of Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) looking uncomfortable at a Panther boosters meeting — than some shows manage to say in a 45-minute episode.

I didn’t, of course, like everything the show did to kick off Season 4. We meet two as-yet-unnamed characters in this episode, when Riggins, back in Dillon, has a one-night stand with a red-haired bartender and meets her plucky daughter when he tries to sneak out of her house the next morning. The daughter is just plain annoying and talks too much in that way, the way that often happens on TV but almost never in real life. She’s too young to be a credible love interest for Riggins and, at least for now, doesn’t feel like she has that whatever-it-is that makes us believe so strongly in every character on this show, no matter how minor. The redemption of her role in this episode is that she delivers its best line: “So what’s it like being the guy who used to be Tim Riggins?”

After all, that’s what this episode is really about, and what it seems that this season will be about: when life veers off course, when you lose the things that made you who you are, what do you do? How do you cope? Nearly every character has to find an answer to this question, Coach Taylor most of all. What we see in “East of Dillon” is that he honestly doesn’t know. What we’re reminded of is what we’ve always known: that Eric Taylor isn’t perfect. For one thing, he doesn’t handle the stress very well. He yells, because he can’t think of anything else to do; he even yells at the well-meaning (if buffoonish) Stan Traub (Russell DeGrazier), who joins the East Dillon Lions as an assistant coach after a chance encounter at Sears. Taylor’s frustration, along with that of many other characters, is palpable, and he’s generally as clueless as the rest of us when trying to channel that frustration.

But imperfect though he may be, Coach Taylor is also amazing. His pregame speech in this episode literally gave me chills, and I don’t even have the excuse of being an impressionable 17-year-old. I loved the earnest affection in his eyes as he checked on his bruised and battered team at halftime, gently probing to discover the seriousness of their injuries as they attempted to conceal them, wanting to prove to their coach that they could keep fighting. Coach Taylor might yell, and yell, and yell, but he loves his team, and they love him, and we all know it.

Indeed, FNL‘s commitment to verisimilitude, to showcasing not only a flawed hero but a full cast of flawed characters, human and real, has become its legacy. It’s the reason we watch it and the reason we’ll still be talking about it a decade from now as one of the great television shows of our time. Because if these people, imperfect as they are, can still do amazing things, then maybe I, with all my myriad flaws, can do amazing things too. By watching and learning what these people are capable of, I’m also learning something about what I’m capable of.

And that’s why I can’t wait for next Friday night.