The Lions went on a road trip this week on Friday Night Lights, amped on their own team spirit and the blunt advice from Coach Taylor on how to avoid trouble on the field with their away-game opponents, the racist Rangers: Stop “playing with vengeance”; stop making “mental mistakes”; and “stay away from dumb, gentlemen.” As always, Coach offers words we all might live by. That, plus some classic Kyle Chandler moments, when you think he’s going to be sincere and then, poker-faced, he lets Coach go over-the-top with the same even yet vehement tone: “My way is the right way, the good way… The way to salvation!”

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As always this is a collection of all of our posts when episode 5.04 Keep Looking originally aired on NBC in November 2010.

Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker Reviews Episode 5.04

Televisionary’s Jace Lacob Reviews Episode 5.04

Hitfix’s Alan Sepinwall Reviews Episode 5.04

Friday Night Lights is good — no, excellent — at a number of things. Among them: lens flares, honest emotional development, and reducing us to quivering, sobbing puddles on the couch. So it feels churlish to point out any flaws in this final season, no matter how slight — especially when the flaws themselves are often in service to the show’s strengths. Our potentially vexing question for the faithful: Might it be possible that Coach and Mrs. Coach are too good at their jobs? And is their inherent goodness, delightful wisdom, and incipient sainthood robbing season five of, well, drama?

To read the rest of this review go to: NYMag.com

I now realize that I overrated last week’s episode. Not that it was a bad episode. It wasn’t. It was probably even a necessary episode, bringing everyone up to speed on where everyone is and what they’ve been up to since last we saw them. But, man, this week’s episode made me realize I’d forgotten just how great this show could be. And it’s not like it’s a particularly momentous episode. Apart from kicking the season into gear after last week’s warm-up, this didn’t feel like a big, important episode. Nobody died. Nobody left the show. Everything just worked, however, and tied together brilliantly. I don’t want to spend all season lamenting that this will be Friday Night Lights’ last stand, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a show that ended while still performing so vitally five seasons in.

Though it most obviously applies to the East Dillon Lions’ outside status, the episode follows through on its title—“On The Outside Looking In”—with a Mad Men-like sense of making connections between characters who never see the way their lives parallel other lives around them.

To read the rest of this review go to: AVClub.com

Football, as a multitude of thick-necked, cliché-spoting television commentators love to opine, is a game of inches. Translated into more practical, yet still football-cliché-riddled verbiage for the die-hard Friday Night Lights viewer, this means: It can’t always be a game-winning Hail Mary TD pass, Lions fans. Sometimes it’s about putting your head down and pushing the plot forward. Thus week two of this young season was a low-scoring, low-key contest. (Almost done!) The offense spread the ball around to a lot of different characters without too much forward progress. (Not quite there!) But there’s plenty of time left on the clock

To read the rest of this review go to: NYMag.com

In my preview column for the finale of Friday Night Lights, I made a comparison—obvious in retrospect, so maybe someone has made it before—between FNL and It’s a Wonderful Life. Both are stories about American towns and the pull (and sometimes the burden) of community. George Bailey dreams of leaving Bedford Falls but never does; he ends up happy because of the life he’s made and because he realizes how important he is to the town’s welfare.

Over the course of FNL, but especially its last few seasons, various characters have been faced with the choice of staying or going: moving on because there’s opportunity in the outside world, staying because they’re needed at home, or keeping a foot in both worlds somehow. Several stories in the last season of FNL narrowed down to that choice—get out of Dodge vs. Texas forever—and as the series said goodbye in “Always,” they made some definitive choices.

To read the rest of this review go to: TunedIn.Blogs.Time.com

Well, damn it. “Friday Night Lights” is over. Earlier today I posted my breakdown of my favorite moments of the series, and you can also read my interview with showrunner Jason Katims about the ups and downs of the series. And my review of the series finale coming up just as soon as I make it clear that it’s not incest…

“Will you take me to Philadelphia with you, please?” -Coach

“Friday Night Lights” has always been the story of a football team and its coach, but it’s also been the story of a marriage – one of the most well-rounded, admirable, memorable marriages ever portrayed on television. Time after time, this show’s depiction of Eric and Tami Taylor’s relationship has revealed the “happily married couples are boring” theory of dramatic writing for the ridiculous, lazy lie that it is. This happily married couple has never been boring, and they’ve been as much a part of the show’s core as the Panthers or Lions.

To read the rest of this review go to: HitFix.com