"Friday Night Lights" Gets Its Third Second Chance

Give this to the moneymen - they recognize how important closure can be to viewers of even the lowest-rated television show (if only to better package that show on the eventual DVD.) Used to be that shows would just kind of disappear, or end in midsentence - nothing was worse, for a TV fan in the primordial age of serial television, for a show to end with a cliffhanger.

There is something particularly thrilling about a last episode that knows it's a last episode but that was conceived in the trenches, quickly - particularly if it happens early in the season, with the studio cutting their losses due to low ratings. (This is a feeling particular to network television, since the series finales of "Sopranos" and "The Wire" and "Six Feet Under" could conceive of their endings from ten, even twenty episodes out.) Look at the series finales for "Arrested Development" and "The O.C." - there is something rushed about both of them, yet in a way that makes them all the more enjoyable. There's no "Seinfeld"-style excess, and the sensation of hastily forming an ending sends both shows off with a fleet-footed exclamation point.

So thank god that "Friday Night Lights" is getting a third season. The show was all over the map this year, but every episode had at least three extraordinary moments, and you could feel the show finding its footing in the last couple of episodes (in strike-emptied gray January, before "Lost" and "The Wire" returned, "Friday Night Lights" was practically the only thing keeping television worth watching.)

There's some crazy new deal involved in the third season which will see the show broadcast on DirectTV first, which could mean that it's safer than ever or that it's halfway through the door. I don't think the show will get any more viewers than it has right now, and I'm almost positive this will be the last season, but you get the feeling that, having renewed it for a third go-round, and lacking a writer's strike as an exit strategy, NBC will at least have the common decency to let the show die gracefully.