My initial thought was that the story telling just wasn't anything to write home about, and that the great characters are the main thing holding it together. If you substituted average characters into these plots it would be a sub-par show. The Coach Taylors, Tim Riggins and Matt Saracens of the world may be the reason that nothing that interesting has happened as of late.
Chatting with T-time about this fact, he brought to my attention that the first season might have been that much better because it had such a great story to start with. It was your prototypical sports story, based on the book Friday Night Lights and had plenty to work with. I mean the star quarterback goes down, gets paralyzed, and the team rallies behind the backup QB and wins the Texas State Championship. How are you going to surpass that as a story? Well in my opinion they haven't. What else can you do? Have them lose. Well they did that, now they've run out of sports stories.
Until they get to season four where they have a terrible team and can now use this God awful East Dillon team as a new type of sport story. The winless schmucks that take down the might Dillon Panthers and end their season. The Lions may beat the Panthers at the end of this season, or they may lose, but my major point is that they haven't done a good job at making this story line prominent. Their ability to showcase a great story has been lost. They have come back to a football plot once in a blue moon this season. When they end up beating Dillon at the end of the year, it's not going to feel as satisfying because there hasn't been nearly enough build up.
It seems as though they have been putting much more effort into the side characterization stories. These minor stories of the series have never been fantastic, but the high quality of all of the characters have usually improved them. I've always loved Coach, Riggins, Saracen, Julie, etc. And although I detested many characters over the years (Street, Lyla, Tami) they all have evoked certain emotions, albeit mostly hatred, in order to improve their own plotlines.
Maybe it's that they've run out of good stories, or maybe its that the new characters aren't up to snuff, but recently things haven't had the same feeling. I have definitely grown fond of newcomer Becky Sproles, but I could care less about what is going on in Vince, Luke or Jess's lives at this point. All three come across as dull.
Other Thoughts
-Have they always been terrible at sports related stuff, because this week's aberration was so laughable. Luke limps off of the field after enduring yet another blow to his badly bruised hip. When the coaches take a look at it, they see the ginormous bruise and are outraged. Coach T asks, "What the hell is that?!?" And the assistant coach responds, "It's a hip flexor. He's done. He's out for the season."
First of all, the hip flexors are a group of muscles in the body, not an injury. Sure that's semantics, but if you're not a sports announcer you usually don't say it's "a knee" when someone tears their ACL. Secondly, just from looking at a bruise, this guy knows that Luke has severely strained or torn his hip flexor muscles? I don't think so. I know the show likes to skip past the ins and outs of football as of late, but how bout a little screen time for the kid dealing with this injury instead of saying "hip flexor, out for season."
-I loved Tinker finally getting some nice speaking lines.
-I loved longtime head of Secret Service Aaron Pierce coming back as Landry's dad. I also loved the awkwardness between Jess and Lance's family, especially when the mom asked how she was liking O'Bama as President.
Here's hoping the final two episodes end in a bang.
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