'Friday Night Lights' season four review - andreikirilenkotattoo on TV

In today's column, I review "Friday Night Lights'" fourth season, which is as terrific as I expected it to be, based on the clever ending of season three. After the jump, I'm going to briefly explain how I intend to cover the show this season.

Because the show is going to air on DirecTV's 101 Network now, and not on NBC until sometime midway through 2010 (at the moment, the plan isn't to air it until summer, and it therefore won't be legally available online anywhere until then), I'm going to take the same approach that I did last season, which is as follows:

1)Because the episodes are, in fact, airing now, in a form where at least some of the audience (myself included) can see them, I'm going to review them as they air, rather than writing reviews months from now, colored by my impressions of the season as a whole.

2)I'm going to post these reviews as they air, usually (but not always) right after the episode finishes airing. Because this version of the blog publishes a full RSS feed, last year I initially published the after-the-jump part of the review as the first comment, which RSS won't publish. That proved to be something of a hassle (among other things, I had to manually publish each post so I'd be there to publish the comment, rather than just doing it in advance, and that meant I sometimes didn't get to post until sometime the following day), so unless anyone strenuously objects, I'm not going to do that this time. (The way I figure it, if you follow me via RSS or XML, there are going to be times where I have posts for shows you haven't gotten to yet, and if you want to stay spoiler-free, you've figured out ways to do so.)

3)Sometime close to the premiere on NBC, I'm going to pull all the reviews off the blog - this time with plenty of advance warning for anybody who wants to save them for some reason - and re-publish them one at a time as NBC shows them. I'll also make sure and check the comments first to be sure nobody put a spoiler for, say, episode 7 in the post for episode 2. (And DirecTV viewers, please try to be courteous of the NBC viewers in that way, okay?)

So my review of the premiere, "East of Dillon," should go live tonight at 10, and then it'll go live again months from now when NBC airs it. That way, all the comments stay in one place, even if some will be separated by a long stretch of time.