-
-
Ad Space
(728 x 90)
Published on 2/22/08
Friday Night Lights offered up a handful of remarkable episodes during its strike-abbreviated second season (which ends with an unintended cliff-hanger), but the missteps were more numerous: Overwrought melodrama often eclipsed heartfelt realism as the order of the day. Thankfully, the generous selection of deleted scenes included on the DVD collection does much to restore faith in the series’s writing staff. Almost without exception, the cutting-room-floor material is about character rather than plot—basically, we’re seeing what Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), Jason Street (Scott Porter) and others are doing between scenes of episodes that revolve around other players or townspeople.
The series’s high believability quotient always made it easy to imagine, say, blowhard car dealer Buddy Garrity (Brad Leland) hitting on Shelley (Jessalyn Gilsig), the aggressively ditzy sister-in-law of coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler). Seeing it play out as you’d expect makes one realize that while it didn’t always seem as if the writers knew what they were doing, they nonetheless love their characters as much as the fans do. The deleted scenes also allow new arrivals who barely registered during the season—including Benny Ciaramello as the series’s (long-overdue) first major Latino character—to show some real personality. The commentary tracks by cast members are disappointingly slight, but the discussion of the season premiere by executive producer Scott Winant and director-producer Jeffrey Reiner is everything the most obsessive fan could ask for.
Rate & Comment