We’ve said it before and it bears repeating: Friday Night Lights is the best show about adults on television. Admittedly, this may seem like an outlandish claim for a series focused on the trials, tribulations, and touchdowns of high schoolers. But the complicated lives of Jess and Becky et al only resonate because of their interactions with the equally complicated lives of Coach, Tami, and the rest of the legal drinkers in Dillon (a caveat we have to make because, jeez! Doesn’t anybody card in that part of Texas?!?). “Swerve,†this final season’s second outstanding episode in a row, was ostensibly about the suddenly complicated predicaments of Vince (evil Kenard is back and wants his money — or else), Luke (without a scholarship from TMU he’s facing a life of baling hay and chugging beers), and Julie (who takes out her shame and frustration about being called a slut on her poor, innocent hatchback). But it was elevated by the unpolished reactions and fumbling attempts to help made by the grown-ups on the show. Rare is the program that allows fathers (and father figures — and mother figures, too) to be as sloppy, confused, and occasionally flat out wrong as they are in real life.
Read the rest of the recap, originally published when DirecTV aired the episode in December, here.