Friday Night Lights remains one of the best things on TV, for viewers who happen to have found it

A "two-minute recap" of Friday night's episode, 'The Son'"

[at 00:56 (scene beginning at 00:45)] "I gotta get up there in front of everybody and say good stuff about this man. And all I really want to say is, 'Here lies Henry Saracen. His mother annoyed him, his wife couldn't stand him, and he didn't want to be a dad, so he took off, to be in the Army, because that was the only way you could come up with to get out of here and ditch all your responsibilities and no one could call you out on it and that worked out great, so you just decided to enlist four more times, and that ended up getting you killed, and now here you are, and all you got left, all you left behind, is a mother with dementia, a divorced wife, and a son -- who delivers pizza.' "

-- a drunk Matt Saracen, drinking beer on the football field
at night with his friend Landry and Tim and Billy Riggins

by Ken

Now that NBC has finally slipped the fourth season of Friday Night Lights onto the schedule (following its first run on -- what was it? -- satellite TV?), Friday nights at 8pm ET/PT, apparently to guarantee minimum exposure (is NBC actually still in the TV business?), I hope there's somebody actually watching. It's always been a show that was relatively unafraid of being realistically depressing as it looked, not just at high school football in West Texas, but the hard realities of supporting a family, adolescence and high school life in the early 21st century, the strains of two-earner families, balancing work and family (especially when work is as macho a calling as coaching football), real life with a new baby, community values with regard to sports and education, dead-end lives and hopeless poverty, race, and on and on. But in the first three seasons there were successes most of the way to balance the rigors and failures. The new season has gone really grim.

I've written about the show a number of times -- the last time at length here. I think Tami and Eric Taylor (Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler) are one of the great couples created for the screen, large or small. Actually, they would be wasted in film, which couldn't begin to take advantage of the fullness and depth of the relationship. And if things got complicated last season with Tami being promoted to principal of Dillon High, that's nothing compared with this season, with Eric having been forced out of his job at Dillon and taken on the labor of building a football program at the newly reopened, dilapidated old East Dillon, the school for the wrong part of town, the part that never sees any development money or hope.

The producers have managed to hold onto some of the great now-graduated characters, like athletic genius but life screw-up Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) and the accidental championship quarterback Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford). Poor Matt is the sweet, earnest grinder who does everything he's asked and is mostly never rewarded. With his Army father in Iraq and no one to share the care burden for his grandmother (Louanne Stephens), who teeters between the near and far shores of dementia, Matt has been shouldering a load beyond what should be asked of someone twice his age. Presumably the thought in his own mind has been that he has to hold things together, somehow, until his father returns.

And then came Friday's episode. (SPOILER ALERT IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE EPISODE YET.) Matt's father isn't coming home. It was an incredibly powerful episode, with large numbers of townspeople showing support, and poor Matt too muddled even to begin to imagine what kind of support he needs. Especially while he's still sorting out his feelings about his father. There was a wonderful line about how he poured all his hate on his father so he didn't have to hate anybody else.

The episode was a gorgeous piece of writing, as always amazingly respectful of its characters' realities, and the cast remains uniformly remarkable. My goodness, this season even super-booster Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) has become a sympathetic character, now that we've discovered how much rottener the boosters of a high school football program can be. And who accompanied Buddy to the Saracens' wake but his daughter Lyla (Minka Kelly), presumably back from college? Lyla had no lines that I noticed, but you got the idea we're going to be seeing more of her. Fine by me.

AFTERTHOUGHT (Monday): The pressure to simplify in the interest of brevity can go too far, and it was wrong of me to say that Matt Saracen has "no one to share the care burden for his grandmother." It was true when the state of her dementia became too advanced to ignore, but as Friday's episode reminded us, the return of Matt's mother into his life, accepted even more grudgingly by her former mother-in-law, actually has given him someone to share the load.

Matt (Zach Gilford) and his grandmother (Louanne

Stephens) at his father's funeral in Friday night's episode

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