Friday Night Lights, Season Four, Episode One Review: “East Of Dillon”

Season four of Friday Night Lights has kicked off, and after being at the brink of cancellation last season, it appears that it won’t hold back any punches. The inaugural episode, titled East of Dillon, was among the better ones the show has ever had.

East of Dillon picks up where season three ended. After Coach Eric Taylor and the Dillon Panthers failed to win the state championship, the school board decided to relegate him to East Dillon High School, reopened to address the growing population issue. East Dillon High also happens to be mostly black and Hispanic. Naturally, all the good black players were miraculously zoned to remain in West Dillon.

Coach Taylor has to field a team with lesser resources and with students who have never played organized sports before. We see him trying to instill discipline in a group of black kids who don’t respond well to Whitey yelling at them, telling them what to do. It’s precisely this that leads to the major conflict of the episode. During one of the practice sessions, a black kid keeps talking in the back of the huddle as the coach is trying to address the team. Landry, probably the whitest honky ever featured in the show (kid is paler than the guy from Powder), calls him out and demands that he give the coach respect. The black kid, not taking any shit from this new white guy, starts brawling with him instead. Later in the locker room, an angry Taylor instructs both players to make right. Landry, doing what his coach tells him to do, apologizes, but the black kid remains defiant. He ain’t having that shit. Taylor is forced to eject him from the team, because no one questions his authority. This sequence is followed by a frustrated man screaming at his players that if they don’t want to be there, they should just leave. About half of them, all black, decide to do so because fuck him, that’s why.

We’re glad the makers of Friday Night Lights decided to focus on the issue of school gerrymandering, where a school board slices and dices the zoning line in order to maintain the status quo for what usually ends up being the white school. It’s a topic that played a seminal role in Buzz Bissinger’s book, the source material for the television show. East Dillon High School is a thorn in the side of the town. No white parent wants to send their kid there, but they don’t want to say its because the scary school is mostly black and brown. Instead, they say it’s because of the lesser quality of education. After all, they’re not racists. It is important to note that there are white kids who end up at East Dillon, but these are kids who don’t contribute to the football team, or whose parents aren’t influential enough to keep them in their old school.

A new season also means new characters. While it’s still too early to be familiar with all of them, we were able to catch a glimpse of Vince, a troubled youth who is forced to play in order to avoid incarceration. This is good news for Coach Taylor and for us. For Taylor, it means he’s found himself a player with enough raw talent to actually get a win this season. For us, we get to see Michael B. Jordan, the actor who played Wallace in The Wire.

Not everything was smooth and easy, however. Like the previous season, we have several characters who graduated but find themselves still in Dillon. While it’s not unusual for ex-high school football stars to stick around their hometown past their glory days, keeping former QB1 Matt Saracen in town delivering pizzas seems a bit far fetched. Yes, he gave up going to college for coach’s daugher Julie Taylor, but a kid who won a championship for a football crazed town within the last three years would fare better in terms of job of opportunities.

Another character we thought had graduated and moved on was Tim Riggins. In last season’s finale, Tim’s older brother Billy gives him a heartfelt talk about how he needed to go to college and do better for himself, and it appeared lil’ Timmy had done just that. Well, that didn’t last long. After hearing a lecture on a hero’s journey, Riggins takes that as his cue to leave San Antonio State and head back to Dillon, meaning he’ll be back for at least a handful of episodes. It’ll be interesting to see how they resolve these characters who’ve already graduated, and hopefully they’ll do it much earlier than how they did it with Jason Street and Brian “Smash” Williams in season three.

Despite this setback, the show has kicked off strongly, and since its production costs are being split between NBC and Directv, it no longer has to worry about how long it’ll stay on the air. The network and the satellite provider have agreed to produce two seasons, so the writers at least know how long they have to create strong compelling storylines. The show looks promising, and we can’t wait for the second episode.