What to Binge This Weekend: Train for Game Day With Season 4 of 'Friday Night Lights'
Between cooking up large batches of wings and overseeing the final days of your fantasy football league’s current season, you probably won’t have much time for binge-watching television between now and the Super Bowl. Still, it would be a sacrilege to the holy sport of football to go into Game Day not having re-visited at least part of the greatest small-screen sports drama of all time — Friday Night Lights. The Texas-set series ran for five glorious seasons, the first three exclusively on NBC before shifting over to DirecTV for its final two-year sprint. During that time, viewers got to know and love the football-crazed town of Dillon, Texas, home to two high-school pigskin teams, a multitude of great players, and one remarkable coach, Eric Taylor, played by Emmy Award winner Kyle Chandler.
All 76 episodes of Friday Night Lights are streaming on Netflix, and while we’d never dissuade you from a pillar-to-post binge-watch, if you can only see one season for the first or second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) time before the Super Bowl, make it Season 4. That was FNL’s maiden year on DirecTV — NBC aired the episodes again at a later date — and the writers treated the season premiere as a mini-reboot of sorts, sending Coach Taylor back to square one. Having been exiled from his previous post as head of the Dillon Panthers, Eric found a job on the wrong side of the tracks with the East Dillon High Lions.
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A new school meant new faces (like Michael B. Jordon’s green QB, Vince Howard) and new challenges (like East Dillon’s underfunded sports program), and while characters and plotlines from the first three seasons definitely carried over, the fourth year tells a complete, satisfying story in its own right. (Bonus: It’s only 13 episodes, as opposed to Season 1’s 22.) Let’s just say the Patriots and the Seahawks are going to have to play extra hard to top the Panthers vs. Lions showdown that closes out the season.
The entire run of Friday Night Lights is streaming on Netflix.
