Spoilers for the final "Friday Night Lights" (until the strike ends? of the season? ever?) coming up just as soon as I defend my wife's honor..."Give it a chance." How perfect -- and sad -- is it that this would be the last line of dialogue, maybe ever?
As Jason Katims notes in his interview with Mo Ryan, "May the Best Man" win wasn't intended as any kind of finale, be it season or series. But even if the strike ends this weekend, I don't know that NBC's going to feel compelled to order more episodes for this season, and unless Ben Silverman's "Who cares about 'Friday Night Lights' when we've got '30 Rock'?" comments were wildly inaccurate, I'm not feeling confident that we'll get more new episodes ever. But intentional finale or not, there's something incredibly touching that the final line of this episode would be "Give it a chance," you know?
"May the Best Man Win" wasn't quite as outstanding as last week's effort -- far too much of Lyla and Logan for my taste, and the Smash story took too long to get to the idea that there would still be colleges dying to give Brian a scholarship, plus the ongoing weirdness of The Murder That Must Not Be Discussed Even Though It Explains Everything About Tyra and Landry -- but it was still damn good.
The Mo story was lightweight but a fine comic showcase for Connie Britton and, especially, Kyle Chandler (I loved the way his lip curled at the first mention of Mo), and it even feels appropriate that Peter Berg would finally step in front of the camera for what may or may not be the swan song. Gaius Charles played the hell out of his scenes (even the ones that were BS, like him pondering arena football for even a half-second). It was nice to see the Panthers finally get a completely easy win (as well as an acknowledgement that, whatever his heroics were many episodes back, Landry is still second string), Riggins on the radio was hilarious (even though the story was tied to Lyla), and Scott Porter was superb in his story. (Though I imagine, as with "Knocked Up" and "Juno," there will be some complaints about the script trying to stack the deck against getting the abortion.)
I don't regret any of my complaints about this season. The problems were real and at times very, very bad. But, dammit, I'm not ready to say goodbye to this town, to this team, to these people just yet.
Give it a chance, Ben Silverman. There can be room on NBC for two charity cases that aren't owned by your production company, can't there?
What did everybody else think?
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