Plot twist dims brilliant 'Lights'

So you may remember how, a few weeks back, I wrote about how there was a development in the otherwise-great "Friday Night Lights" season premiere that had me really worried for the show's creative future? I've now seen two more episodes and am just as concerned. Today's column talks about that -- along with Jason Katims attempting to defend The Bad Thing in an interview -- in very non-spoilery terms:

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.

No, that's not my own motto, but there are times when I wish some TV shows would follow it.

Too many series peak in their first seasons, then hang around for years as they slowly devolve into self-caricature. Even worse are the good but low-rated shows that get renewed on the condition that the network gets to make "improvements" that inevitably take away what was special about the show in the first place. NBC, for example, kept renewing "Homicide" and then forcing serial killers and prettier, less talented actors on the producers.

I was thinking about "Homicide" a lot as NBC's brilliant, struggling high school football drama "Friday Night Lights" approached the end of its first season last spring. Here was as perfect a season of a TV drama as I had ever seen, and yet a part of me was rooting against renewal. I feared what NBC would do to make the show more "accessible" or some other silly buzzword, and how that might sully my memory of the genius of season one.

To read the full thing, click here. As the column says, I'll have a post ready to publish as soon as the premiere ends, where I'll have some more quotes from Katims, more detailed thoughts on why I'm so troubled, etc. Since I know a lot of people watched the premiere on Yahoo!, if you want to talk about The Bad Thing now, we can continue the discussion in the comments for the last post I did on this. (I'll be checking them all day.) I want to leave this post a spoiler-free zone, and once the episode airs, we can all come together to argue about it some more.