A great TV drama, like a great football team, is often defined by depth. You need stars to succeed, but you also need players further down the roster who can perform when their number gets called.
Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger has heaped praise on Friday Night Lights from the get-go, with most reserved for the fantastic performances by Kyle Chandler as Eric Taylor and Connie Britton as his wife, Tami.
But one of the best pleasures of Friday Night Lights is its great top-to-bottom cast. In particular, two actors who began the season chained to the end of the bench - Adrianne Palicki as the outcast sexpot, Tyra, and Jesse Plemons as an outcast geek, Landry - were playing like MVPs by the finale.
When the series began, Tyra and Landry existed, at best, as appendages to more important characters - Tyra as the girlfriend of alcoholic fullback Tim Riggins, Landry as the sidekick of shy quarterback Matt Saracen.
"Early on, (producers) Jason Katims and Peter Berg both told me they had no idea what they were going to do with my character," Adrianne Palicki said.
"With Tyra, we didn't really know a lot about her," Katims admits.
So he and the other writers started filling in the blanks.
In the 12th episode, "What to Do While You're Waiting," they introduced Tyra's mom, an arrested development case with an addiction to abusive boyfriends, one of whom Tyra chased out of the house.
It was probably too much back story to dump into a single episode, but it marked a turning point for the character. Soon Tyra Collette befriended Julie Taylor, became a pet project of Mrs. Taylor, and became a key part of the series.
"When you introduce her mother, her sister, her mom's problem with men, suddenly you understand her," says Katims."When you see her have this connection with Tami and this friendship with Julie, you have this fully dimensional character, and Adrianne Palicki just took it and ran with it and blew us all away. She's become one of my favorite characters."
Landry, meanwhile, would hover on the fringes of the series, cracking jokes in Matt Saracen scenes but remaining so inconsequential that even Coach Taylor began referring to him as "that Lance kid."
Outside of an ironic contrast between his first name (probably a homage to legendary Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry) and his lack of interest in athletics, there were few hints about who he was.
"It was interesting having a role who was always there but no one knew that much about him," says Jesse Plemons. "It was a process."
Part of that process was in the realization that Jesse Plemons is funny, an invaluable commodity on a show filled with so much angst elsewhere.
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