Spoilers for Friday Night Lights Season 2 ensue

So I’ve been in Pennsylvania for the past week or so, watching the second season of Friday Night Lights on DVD. I didn’t mean to buy it, really, there was just sort of a perfect storm that descended on me that led me to that end. It involved a senior communication banquet that I half-remembered to go to, a $20 Barnes & Noble giftcard from that meeting, and a trip to the local Barnes and Noble on the same day - which happened to be on the exact day that the show came out on DVD. All in all, I only paid 8 bucks and change.

I hadn’t watched it since the first episode of the second season, when I quasi-gave up on the show. The murder annoyed me to no end, and I couldn’t imagine how the show could recover from it. It didn’t seem at all to be like the show I loved so much for the first season. But I had heard from several sources that the show got better after that, and it recovered from that misstep rather well to become one of the finest shows on television once again.

Now I’m about halfway through the second season, and I have to say: the show doesn’t really need to get better, it’s still great from the moment the season starts. It’s strange: absolutely everything else seems completely unaffected in quality, it’s JUST the murder subplot that’s annoying. I’ll be watching the same sort of real-life drama that was so engrossing for 22 episodes in the first season, and then all of a sudden it’ll go over to the murder subplot, and I’ll just have to roll my eyes and press on. It’s not that it’s bad per se, just terribly out of place.

In some ways, it almost works, too. The action itself seems larger-than-life, and very much like something that would happen on just any TV show. But the way the characters react to it, and the actors performances are all so realistic, it almost succeeds in selling me on the whole idea. Almost. It’s just that the original act still seems so out of place for the show that it’s hard to swallow a lot of what comes after.

But I’ll deal with it. Landry and Tyra are great, and if you’ve got to bend the rules of the universe a bit to get them together, then so be it.