Friday Night Lights second season premiere tonight was a good reminder of just what I like about this show which critics love, but most people aren't watching. And what I find so aggravating.
What's aggravating is that sometimes they resort to melodrama in the worst sense, as with a sudden death tonight. And I don't mean the football term. This is the series at its most predictable and, like most, it's best when it's unpredictable.
And sometimes (though this is, thankfully, more rare) a speech feels overwritten. I was willing to let tonight's example slide by because it was spoken by the coach's daughter, Julie, who has always been presented as a little bit different. More literate, if that's not putting too fine a point on it.
But-
Although I don't think I've really thought much about this series since almost a year ago, when I said this-
The acting is particularly strong, and the directing style, lots of hand-held work accentuating close-ups, helps put it over. Another great score by Snuffy Walden, too. The writing is not flashy-great in the way of an Aaron Sorkin, but the words fall easily upon the ear. You believe the characters have depth and an existence away from that moment.
Also, the perhaps-surprising number of strong female characters is lovely.
-I was surprised at how much I liked seeing the characters again; finding out where they all are eight months (in story time) after the end of last season. I've really come to care for them. And as I've said many times, any show that can make me feel this way while being mostly (but not only) about high school football must be doing something right.
A lot of what it does right is what I look for in a good drama: I may not always like what the characters are doing, but I usually believe it's what they would do in a given situation. Nobody's perfect and everybody's broken in some way. The relationships between the characters are dynamic and there's real, not artificial conflict, for the most part.
That's what I like.
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