TV #11 of 2019:
Friday Night Lights, season 4
On a macro level, my biggest criticism of FNL thus far is that every season seems radically different from the one before it — and never in a way that feels especially organic or planned-out as part of a larger design. This year the program shifts suddenly to the poorer and blacker side of its fictional Texas town, and although the writing explores the new supporting cast with great nuance and interrogates some of the founding assumptions of the show quite nicely by presenting its original team as the new face of entitlement, it’s all a bit too radical a break from the past.
The easy comparison here is The Wire, given a shared seasonal rebooting of focus, interest in what drives children into urban crime, and excellent use of rising star Michael B. Jordan. Yet for all its facets, that earlier drama manages an overall cohesion that just keeps escaping Friday Night Lights. Season 4 of this high school football series is yet another outstanding individual string of episodes — probably the strongest since the first — that requires not looking too closely at the circumstances that have brought the narrative here or the goals that have previously been driving its characters.
★★★★☆
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