We had our final cathartic cry with Friday Night Lights. The high school football coach we all wish we had, the guidance counselor, the team, the innocuous puppy-love crush we all wish we had — they move on, life moves on, but without us. Friday Night Lights has thrown this bon voyage party twice before, for the first and third season finales, and we had to become just a little bit hardened to deal with the thought that Dillon, Texas would just disappear into cancellation, even while pap like One Tree Hill and Seventh Heaven kept plugging along in their un-reality. Friday Night Lights, which was inspired by one of Texas’s real-life football-obsessed farm-towns, filmed without rehearsals and often improvised, was always an honest portrait. Dillon wasn’t always the escapist fantasy of other teen dramas, but it always was a place that you could, realistically, escape to. And like anything genuine, we knew it wouldn’t last forever — the principal cast was being rotated out the door as early as season three — but that doesn’t make letting go any easier.
The landing approach found the Taylors at a nadir in their marriage, Tami all but given up on Coach resisting his stubbornness and moving the family to Philadelphia. Tami’s ties to the Dillon community are certainly more ancillary than Eric’s, and even way back in the pilot, she was joking about moving to Alaska. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the men in football-town have a collective “Texas forever” mentality while the women — or at least the women sophisticated enough to realize that there’s a world outside of throwing team barbeques and beauty pageants and the Landing Strip — dream of leaving the place behind for Austin or Boston or Philly. The argument between Tami and Eric was always on the verge of tipping into Texas traditional sexism, but Friday Night Lights has too much nuance for that sort of cartoonish villainy. I’d been watching the last three episodes from the northeast neo-feminist tradition that I was brought up in: “But, this time, Tami’s right. Eric’s just shoving his weight around, not treating her like an equal partner.” And then I think of Vince, who still needs his surrogate father, and Tim, and all the kids who need Coach and Mrs. Coach because the rest of Dillon is a hive-mind of character-sucking blind boosterism. Eric’s stubbornness and unflappability add something humanizing to this town, and what a tragedy to leave it in the self-interested hands of the Buddy Garritys and Joe McCoys of the world.
Like I said last week, Dillon doesn’t deserve Eric Taylor, and Eric starts to get the message too after one too many early-morning strategy calls from Buddy, who all but admitted to engineering the super-team after Coach took the Lions instead of his beloved Panthers to state. To Buddy, the salesman still hanging onto his championship ring of decades ago, the football team is about selling Dillon, selling the community, selling the life here. It’s about keeping kids — then grown-ups, then parents and their kids — tied to the town. Meanwhile, Coach watches the seniors graduate and new freshman come in, and he knows that the team is a fleeting opportunity, but one that might prepare a kid to go off to college and maybe be more than just an ex-high school football player.