Number 1700: Football Goes on the Back Burner in Friday Night Lights' Second Season

My family has only basic cable, but even with just the networks, I've found a startling number of shows to latch onto lately. While I was anxiously waiting for LOST to return, I satisfied myself with other programs with nearly as much appeal. Ugly Betty. Pushing Daisies. Friday Night Lights. The latter outlasted the other two, continuing well past the beginning of the writers' strike. The downside to that is now that all the major players are returning, FNL is over and done with - for the season, anyway. Fans can rest assured that the critically lauded but somewhat unpopular small-town football drama will be back, albeit not until January, unless you happen to have DirectTV. I don't, so I'll be waiting. But that gives me plenty of time to digest the second season, the subject of my 1700th review.

Season two has a different flavor to it than the first. While those who have watched from the beginning are likely to get the most enjoyment out of it, if you start from the beginning of season two, you probably won't feel too out of the loop. It's a new year in Dillon, Texas, several months after the events of the season one finale. Many of the characters are in situations they hardly could have imagined a year before.

Chief among them: Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler), who has gone on to his dream job teaching college football at a state university, and his wife Tami (Connie Britton), who has decided to remain in Dillon to continue her work as a high school counselor and raise their children, snotty 16-year-old Julie (Aimee Teegarden) and newborn Gracie. It isn't long before Tami feels overwhelmed and Eric out of touch; neither copes well with the frustrations of a long-distance marriage. The Dillon Panthers aren't too happy either, as they feel betrayed by the coach they trusted and abused by his replacement. It's pretty plain this situation isn't going to work out, but getting Eric back home is only the first of many hurdles for this close-knit family that seems to be coming apart at the seams.

Julie's hard enough to take in the first season, but her teenage rebellion is in full swing here, leading her to forsake sweetheart Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) in favor of a glamorous older man. Later, she develops a potentially inappropriate relationship with a teacher, which only heightens her sense of intellectual superiority. Matt, meanwhile, shakes off his heartbreak with a couple of romantic ventures of his own, both of which are clearly headed for trouble for different reasons. Though the first season focuses more on him than any of the other students, he takes a bit of a backseat here, as does the wheelchair-bound Jason Street (Scott Porter), who remains obsessed with the possibility of a cure for his paralysis.

The more prominent players this season are geeky Landry Clarke (Jesse Plemons), whose unlikely relationship with Tyra Collette (Adrianne Palicki), the longtime object of his affections, progresses as the two harbor a dark secret; Smash Williams (Gaius Charles), the most promising athlete on the team whose inflated ego causes problems when college recruiters come calling; and Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), the Sawyer of FNL, who often acts like a scumbag but also has a great capacity for decency that manifests itself throughout the season. He continues to pine for goodie two-shoes Lyla Garrity (Minka Kelly), who, in the wake of a renewed commitment to her faith, convinces her father Buddy (Brad Leland) to employ and eventually take in reformed con Santiago Herrera (Benny Ciaramello). Meanwhile, she falls for a squeaky-clean church-goer and tries to shake off her attraction to Tim.

There's less emphasis on football in this season and more on the lives of these people away from the field in a town defined by the love of the game. The firm foundation of the Taylors seems slightly shakier this time around, with all the added pressures, and their separation from one another early in the season gives the show a sense of fracture like the one LOST fans experienced in the third season, when three of the main characters spent the first several episodes in makeshift prisons. Still, Eric and Tami provide one of the most positive models of marriage on television since the Huxtables on The Cosby Show.

Watch the show for them, and for the many other characters navigating life's complexities in ways that are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking but always authentic. It'll be a lot time before we see these guys on the air again; if enough people check it out on DVD in the months ahead, maybe in its third season, Friday Night Lights will finally find the audience it deserves.