My thoughts about movies and TV shows I've been watching

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Friday, October 8, 2010

Every word and action is revealing and true to character: Friday Night Lights

What makes "Friday Night Lights (Season 4)" so powerful is that it's a wonderful balance between the expected and the unknown or unpredictable. As with all really good dramas, you find yourself thinking: what will he say? what will she say to him? In this case: how will Coach Taylor speak to his team? What will he say when Matt shows up at his house distraught? How will he speak to the two players arrested for fighting? Even more so for his wife, Tammy: what will she say to daughter Julie? And, in episode 5, what will Matt say at his father's funeral? There's always a bit of surprise, you can never quite predict what they will say - but once the characters speak and act, it seems so inevitably right that you can't imagine they could have said or done anything differently. Matt's eulogy, about his father pulling toilet paper off the shelf in the supermarket - tells us a great deal about Matt (his clumsy inability to come up with a real memory), the grandma (fussy, picky, cross, wrong brand of toilet paper), the dad (angry, impulsive, we see why he left home), most of all Matt's awkwardness in this situation tells us everything he says his dad was "funny" but this shows us a 6-year-old boy scared of his father's impulses - anyway, you could analyze this one scene for pages. All of the scenes are like this. It's not that there is never an extra word, which was the case with The Wire, but it's that every action is revealing of character and true to the essence of the character - kids, adults, all.

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