I TRIED TO KISS MY NEIGHBOR LAST NIGHT, AND SHE'S AT LEAST 35 YEARS OLD: Alan has a love letter to the last few episodes of Friday Night Lights up over at NJ.com (which, incidentally, to me sounds like it's the web site for the commercial wing of the state of New Jersey), but I had mixed feelings about last night's episode. I hold this show to an extremely high standard, and whenever I don't think it is absolutely perfect, I am disappointed. Not fair, I know. So on the one hand, there was great stuff last night: Kyle Chandler's eyes doing all the work as Coach Taylor, confronted with the notion that his daughter is in love with his quarterback, goes from lack of understanding to realization to tentative acceptance to sadness that he is going to lose his little girl eventually (and coupled with Tyra's glance at Lyla a few weeks back, I can't think of another show that more efficiently and effectively conveys such ranges of conflicting emotion, much less wordlessly); and on a different note, the drunken bonding on the football field (even if the football part was a bit remedial). On the other hand, the episode as a whole felt like a nervous plea from the producers to the powers that be, as if they had to demonstrate to the network that they are capable of delivering too-tidy, too-easy 42-minute resolutions to problems-of-the-week.
In other words, while I don't want this to be the next Freaks and Geeks, a transcendent show that gets a single season and then disappears in a haze of fanboy melancholy, I also don't want it to be the smart girl who plays dumb just to get the boy.
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