MM Recommends: 'Friday Night Lights'

Okay, so I'm not exactly ahead of the curve in telling you to watch Friday Night Lights. From day one, critics have loved the NBC football drama almost as much as viewers have loved to ignore it.

So why am I speaking up now? Because this may be your last chance to get on board. Judging from the hints NBC entertainment chief Ben Silverman has been dropping recently, he has all but made up his mind to kill FNL at the end of the season.

Unless, that is, the show encounters a sudden surge of viewership in the remainder of its second season.

If you haven't been watching, now's the perfect time to start. NBC still has a couple episodes of FNL in the can; after that (and assuming the strike ends in the next week, as expected) there will be a hiatus while new ones are shot. That lull is the perfect opportunity for you to catch up on all the episodes you've missed on NBC.com or Netflix. If you're like me, it'll take about five days to watch the first season.

Now, I'm not saying it's a perfect show. It's always been prone to melodrama -- ESPN loves to make fun of the way virtually every game ends on a last-second touchdown -- and that tendency has worsened this season, presumably as a result of ratings pressure. But if FNL occasionally gets the big things wrong, it consistently gets the little ones -- like the way Coach Taylor's wife asks him to remove his baseball cap before sitting down to dinner at Applebee's -- exactly right. You could watch it for the music alone, or for the remarkably good casting.

Just don't watch it for the football. Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan elaborated a whole complicated theory about why FNL hasn't been a bigger hit, involving its failure to give fans ways to interact with the characters outside the context of the show, through brand extensions. (Apparently she hasn't checked out all the FNL tribute videos on YouTube.)

I think it's much simpler than that: Women haven't bothered to watch it because they think it's a show about football, which it isn't. Often, three or four episodes in a row will go by without a down being played. And any men who are tuning in specifically to see some smashmouth action are bound to be disappointed.

I'm not sure there's a way around this problem, other than getting the word out: Friday Night Lights isn't about football, but it is really, really good.

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