You are now leaving Dillon, Texas

For those with a DirecTV subscription, we hope you were smart enough to watch the last season of "Friday Night Lights" this past winter. If not, then you're hopefully catching up as the show reruns its final episodes on NBC. If Emmy were just, this show would get a slew of nominations for its final go-round. It really is that good. (And the closing moments of the series are supremely satisfying in a way we were not expecting - fans of the show are indeed rewarded.)

Those who've seen it, love it. But it was always tough to get audiences to sample the show. Too adult for teens, too teen for adults; too much football for non-football fans, not enough football for sports nuts. It was never an easy sell in a world where pre-sold titles drive ratings. Slap a "NCIS" on the title or revive some old fossilized brand like "Hawaii Five-O" and, bingo, you have yourself a top 20 show. Quality too often seems beside the point. If the networks don't have to take a chance to get a hit, why should they? (Rumor has it NBC brass insisted on a rather contrived and melodramatic "Desperate Housewives"-"One Tree Hill"-style murder-subplot in Season 2 in a desperate effort to up the ratings, one of the show's rare missteps.)

We've praised this show before, but it's worth repeating: there have perhaps been better dramas on television, but those typically involve high-stake, high-conflict jobs like cops, detectives, criminals, and doctors. It's very rare to find a show that wrings genuine emotion and tension out of "mundane" everyday situations: paying the rent, maintaining a marriage, coping with divorce, grappling with family problems, separating work pressures from home pressures. There's no wry one-liners or polished movie-star charm here, no handguns or out-of-breath footchases. This is a show that always strived for suburban realism, which may be another reason audiences had trouble with the show. It's easy to escape into an overblown world of rampaging serial killers and lovelorn wealthy doctors, less so when the middle-class TV characters deal with the same impossible problems from which you're trying to escape. This is a show, after all, where major characters by turns went to prison, took steroids, lost everything in a bad real estate deal, had an estranged father killed in action in Iraq, and suffered quadriplegic injuries. And that doesn't even include the fact that our hero was transferred to a horrible high school with no tradition of winning football - the horror.

NBC and DirecTV deserve our thanks for cutting a deal to share the costs and keep the show on the air. Critically-beloved, but low-rated shows like this simply don't run five seasons any more. Indeed, we may not again see this sort of quiet drama on network television, although "Friday Night Lights" showrunner Jason Katims' new NBC show "Parenthood" does seem to be cut from the same cloth.
Also worth celebrating...

* The show's distinctive visual style. "Friday Night Lights" employed a loose, raw feel in which actors were encouraged to improvise and cameramen filmed the action handheld as if shooting a documentary. This is a show that never felt staged. It felt captured.

* Real locations. "Friday Night Lights" was produced two time zones east of Hollywood and it showed in every frame. The Texas locations (mostly in and around Austin) added another element of grit and realism, whether a rundown hamburger shack, a crowded high school football stadium, a modest suburban house, or a proud (but struggling) car dealership.

* The moody country-rock soundtrack. The dreamy, wistful instrumentals were provided by Explosions in the Sky, but the show also added liberal doses of bands you don't always find on top-40 radio. End result: "Friday Night Lights" didn't really sound like any other show.

* A healthy marriage. Eric and Tami Taylor were surely two of the healthiest spouses ever depicted on television. They got into fights and disagreements, the worst of which of course comes in the final episodes of the series, but there was never any doubt of their commitment and admiration for one another. Marriages on TV are too often a narrative tool, a way to create a ratings event (let's have the main characters get married!), add vague backstory sorrow (let's have the main character be brooding because his wife left him!), or provide conflict (he can't be a doctor because his wife won't let him!). Real marriages just aren't that exciting - they involve constant compromise and negotiation, just like the sort we saw the Taylors engaged in.

* Football. For those who do like football, this was a show steeped deep in the obsessive culture of Texas high school football, exploring what it means to play on the field, coach from the sidelines, watch from the cold rickety stands, or long for your own teenage glory days years after you should have moved on. Yes, the show's climactic games almost always came to some ridiculous, gadget-play, last-second series of downs engineered by Coach Taylor... but it didn't always work. In keeping with the show's interest in realism, Taylor's teams often won, but sometimes they lost.
And so we bid goodbye to the sights and sounds of Dillon, Texas. Gone but not forgotten (thanks to DVD box sets).

For the record, our favorite character was always Buddy Garrity, but we sure did like looking at Tyra Collette.
Alan Sepinwall at Hitflix does a great job recapping the best moments of the series.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.

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