Why Friday Night Lights Season 2 Was So Much Worse

Following the first season’s moderate success, Friday Night Lights spent season 2 attempting to raise the stakes of the critically acclaimed sports drama to new levels but ultimately presented a vision regarded as worse than what came before. The response to the creative decisions of the show during the second season is mixed to this day. The series embraced the motto of “clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose,” but FNL‘s second season proved that they could.

Friday Night Lights grounded itself in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, where almost everyone had one goal: getting their beloved Panthers that championship ring. For many, this high school football team seemed to mean more than love, god, or life itself. The show followed the coaches, players, and local community who found themselves wrapped up in small-town dreams of stadium lights leading to eternal glory. One such character was Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons), the geeky but wise-cracking best friend to quarterback Matt Saracen. Season 1 of the show was happy to let Landry mostly play sidekick until season 2 changed his story arc shockingly and suddenly. Trying to protect tough-girl Tyra Collete (Adrianne Palicki), Landry accidentally killed the man assaulting her, and both characters spent the season trying to live with what took place.

This odd storyline involving Landry and Tyra was completely unexpected for Friday Night Lights, a series that, just the season before, established its interest in showing characters whose lives were grounded in a kind of graceful realism. The subplot was a choice that felt out of place for a show more concerned with representing small-town truths than dramatically raising the stakes. The choice to have these characters commit murder, even accidentally, negatively altered the show for the entire second season, paled in comparison to what came before. That said, the dip in quality went deeper.

Landry and Tyra’s characterization in season 1 spoke to the difference of what was asked of them in season 2. Season 1’s Landry got running back Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) to read the end of Of Mice and Men. He played bad punk gigs with a band he practiced with in his garage and spent his days hoping too hard that Tyra would look back at him the way he always looked at her. This sense of realism for the show was consistent with what it showed of Tyra’s life, too, although hers was much more situated in a struggle. Her life in season 1 was dealing with men who treated her worse than she deserved, wasting her nights waitressing at the only Applebee’s around. Mostly, though, she dreamt of a life that looked like more than getting stuck in that familiar football town of hers. These were the kinds of stakes the show was concerned with during Friday Night Lights season 1. Moving from this sense of realism to outright murder was a mistake for Friday Night Lights because there was no frame of reference for such an action ever happening before. Instead, it evoked a sense of emotional whiplash, even confusion, that almost undermined all the delicate character work previously established.

These choices aside, Friday Night Lights remains one of the great depictions of small-town America, of growing up and getting out, of football games and going nowhere. Season 2 didn’t tarnish this legacy, but it didn’t contribute to it either. It didn’t help that the show’s ability to tie up the threads of Tyra and Landry’s murder storyline was cut short by seven episodes when the 2007-2008 strike of the Writers Guild of America began. As a result, it remains a kind of curiosity or an experiment gone awry; it can only feel out of place for a show usually dedicated to so much grace. Thankfully the writers seemed to agree, dropping Tyra and Landry’s murder storyline when season 3 began, taking it as an opportunity to reset and pick up where season 1 left off instead. When they did, it felt like a switch turned back on again, like the lights coming to life on a football field.