SPOILER CITY
I'm going to try to make this more than a rant, and draw some useful craft advice out at the end, but right now I'm thinking, "What the hell?"
The season premiere of FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS hung up for me on two bits of story logic that I found unconvincing.
The big one -- unavoidable with last year's finale -- is that Coach Taylor and his family wouldn't have moved to Austin when he got the job. His wife is on maternity leave, so her excuse that she has to stay in Dillon for "the kids" makes no sense. Julie Taylor is bored with Matt Saracen because, well, he's a hick. She dreams of something more. Hey, kid, how about Austin?
The reason they can't move to Austin is they're half the series. Obviously Coach Taylor will have to come back to coach Panther football because he's the star of a show about Panther football.
Now I knew going into Season Two that the writers would have to send Coach Taylor back to Dillon pretty fast. So I'll suffer through some unconvincing plot logic to get him back. Though I'll wonder if the writers were assuming they were going to be canceled, and wrote themselves into a corner.
But now we've got a story line where some creep is stalking Tyra -- tailgating her car, etc. And she doesn't go to the police. Okay, maybe she's had a few run-ins with the cops. Maybe she's not anxious to call them. (Woulda been nice to know why she wasn't calling them, but I can imagine.)
Then Stalker Boy tries to rape her -- again -- and Nerd Boy Landry comes to her rescue. The guy walks off making threats, and Nerd Boy lays him out with a pipe. He's dead.
Do he and Tyra:
a. Call the police, and tell them, "He was trying to rape my girlfriend, so I hit him with a pipe. Looks like I mighta killed him." The police run the creep's record, realize Landry's done society a favor, pin a medal on his chest and tell Tyra she really ought to do something nice for him when they go home together; or
b. Panic, and dump the body in a shallow stream, while crying out of guilt/fear/shame.
If you guessed (b), you need to get out of the writing room and spend some actual time in Texas.
Here's where I start to worry that the show has jumped the shark. Are we going to have to suffer through episodes where Tyra and Landry suffer pangs of guilt, Landry starts drinking, Tyra falls apart, the police start investigating, etc. etc.? 'Cause it's too big a story to just dump like the body.
Okay, so craft. The moral of the story is that not all logic is story logic. You can't expect the audience to follow you down a path just because you think you can get an fresh story out of it; at least not outside of daytime soaps. I may like the characters ever so much, but if your story just doesn't make any damn sense in the world as I am familiar with it, you're gonna lose me.
Now when I say "the world as I am familiar with it," really we're talking about the world
of the show. What's troubling me is that the world of FNL in Season One was beautifully realistic and small. The stories were about the kinds of disasters that regularly do happen in small town Texas. Someone is crippled in a sports accident. Someone cheats. Someone punches someone out. I remember where a bunch of Jason's friends smash up Riggins's car because Riggins slept with Lila. What was lovely about that is the calibration. They
don't beat up Riggins, because he's the team's star fullback. Everyone would hate them if they injured the team's star fullback. So they just beat up his car. With him in it.
In real life, creeps do sometimes stalk pretty girls. But the pretty girl's boyfriend rarely kills them. And I don't believe there's a whole lot of body-hiding going on in small Texas towns. And so on. The idea that you hit someone twice and they're dead is straight out of TV -- it would probably take a lot more blows to kill the guy, and he'd be shouting, and there would be blood.
And in real life, when a small town high school coach gets a promotion to quarterback coach at a Big Ten school, he grabs his family and takes the job, and his guidance counselor wife easily gets a guidance counselor job at the Big Ten School. Case closed.
Now you could fill in these plotholes, or at least address them. For example, if Tyra and Landry had pulled out the guy's wallet to see who he was, and it turned out he's the Sheriff's son... then I can believe that they wouldn't want to call the cops.
And if Coach Taylor got in an argument with the wrong person at TMU and got fired and
had to come back to Dillon; or if he hit a player; or if a rival at work found out about Smash's drug use and blackmailed him... I can believe he's back coaching Panther football.
But give me something. Throw me a bone here, people.
Bridget, you know my eddress...
UPDATE: Polly points out in
Strong Female Lead that Tyra, who was willing to bean her mother's abusive boyfriend with a fireplace poker last season, utterly fails to protect herself from Stalker Boy in any way.
Any particular reason why? 'Cause otherwise Landry wouldn't need to protect poor helpless Tyra...