Lights on: 'Friday Night Lights' returns

Although most viewers won't get to see the new season of "Friday Night Lights" until NBC airs it sometime next year -- possibly not until next summer -- DirecTV subscribers get the new season beginning tonight at 9 on The 101 Networks. Yeah, it's a bummer that non-DirecTV subscribers have to wait but if this business deal involving two media outlets sharing the show is what it takes to keep the fantastic "FNL" alive, so be it.

As the new season begins, Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) has been forced to take the head coach job at the reopened, scrub-like East Dillon after he was forced out of the job at Dillon High School, where wife Tami (Connie Britton) remains as principal.

Eric, who can often be irritated easily, is super-irritated with his new situation: The field is a mess and there's no budget for anything, leading him to take on a volunteer assistant coach, found working at Sears, who turns out to be an annoying jabberjaw.

"I wish you'd learn to filter your thoughts better," Eric tells him. "That would really help."

The cops bring him a new player, Vince (Michael B. Jordan), as part of an at-risk youth intervention program. But plenty of other players are in lousy shape and the team makes "The Bad News Bears" look proficient.

At Dillon High, parents revolt over the re-districting that forces their kids to East Dillon and quarterback J.D. McCoy (Jeremy Sumpter), so vulnerable last year when pummeled by his perfectionist father, has turned into his old man, becoming a jerk who attempts to score with Julie Taylor (Aimee Teegarden) much to the chagrin of her boyfriend, Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), who delivers pizza when not attending a local tech school.

High school graduate Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch, right), in a pique of realization while studying the hero's journey in a college literature class, quits school and returns home where he promptly sleeps with a cougar whose teen daughter asks, "What's it like to be the guy who used to be Tim Riggins?" Ouch.

These are fantastic characters with socio-economic backgrounds we rarely see in TV dramas, and that's one of the many things that makes "FNL" unique. Whether you can watch the show now or won't have access to it until 2010, "FNL" continues to be TV worth watching.