Friday Night Lights

Not since HBO's "The Wire" has a show juggled so many conflicting and diverse issues like race, money, and class with such staggering insight.

This show was always best when handling the little things that aim to capture life, and often do.

It's not often that television with a scope so novelistic--so ambitious--comes along, and not often, either, that it yields drama so sterling.

If you think catching up on Smash's injury, Lyla and Riggins' new relationship, and Lyla's now-AWOL mom is overwhelming, just think how Tami (Connie Britton) must feel.

The premiere doesn't necessarily have the sort of mythical, spine-tingling moments that the first season provided from time to time, but the acting remains strong (particularly by Chandler and Britton, the First Couple of primetime) and it feels like an episode of Friday Night Lights in a way that very little of season two did.

One of television's best shows has been the exclusive province of DirecTV's 101 Network for months now, but finally "Friday Night Lights" is returning to NBC, with a third season that feels more like the first. In other words, no homicides, accidental or otherwise, just the very real human drama of life in a Texas town where football touches nearly everyone's lives.

Despite soapy moments, it offers a more honest portrayal of contemporary high school life than a "90210."

Friday Night Lights (which begins Wednesday on DirecTV, the satellite subscription service that is helping finance it, and moves to NBC in February) is delivered with the precision and manner of ethnography--it never condescends.

If you watched FNL on DirecTV when it debuted Oct. 1 and appreciated the sheer genius of the season, you might be ready to see the episodes again.

Shot intimately with handheld camera, it's a moving but unsentimental celebration of community, of pulling together not just because it's right but also because it's necessary.

Lights proves not only that it's possible to produce a smart drama with teenage characters, but that a series can be better than the movie (itself inspired by a bestselling book) that spawned it.

There's no denying that the show looks a little worn, a victim perhaps of budget pressures that may have moved the series from cost-efficient to cheap. But even a reduced Lights is better than most TV series.

Friday Night Lights, like "Battlestar Galactica," also proved initial assumptions wildly wrong and deserves credit for being vastly better than either a show about high school football or an irksome teen drama.