Friday Night Lights returns with another new episode tonight, "Hello, Goodbye." The biggest story is a farewell to a legend (Smash Williams).

Julie supports Matt during his family struggles, Tami embarrasses herself with the superintendent and Tyra dates new guy Cash (Zach Roerig).

As always, you can discuss all these developments, your favorite couples and anything else you like in our Friday Night Lights forum before, during and after the program. Share your thoughts with other Friday Night Lights fans!

Some Friday Night Lights spoilers / news items from E! Online today ...

Q: Can you share anything on Friday Night Lights?

A: Wednesday's episode, "Hello, Goodbye" marks Smash's (Gaius Charles') final week in Dillon, and his goodbye scenes will break your heart. Also heartbreaking? Landry's (Jesse Plemons) goodbye to Tyra (Adrianne Palicki) after she starts seeing rodeo cowboy Cash (Zach Roerig) somewhat seriously. Of course, Tyra and Landry are officially not together, but it feels like a bad breakup just the same.

We knew it was coming, but that doesn't make it easy to handle.

E! Online's Kristin Dos Santos was there in Texas for the departure of Gaius Charles (a.k.a. Brian "Smash" Williams) from Friday Night Lights... it's a sad day, but a nice tribute to this rising young acting star. Check out the video below:

How much longer will Matt stay at quarterback?

How will Coach respond to the fallout of a brutal loss?

Will Smash swallow his pride and let his mama help him?

Will Matt and Julie get together already?

How great are the Riggins boys and the Collette girls?

All these questions and more remain to be answered. But for a full recap of last week's action, check out our recap of "How the Other Half Live."

If you have DirecTV, you'll be watching tonight's Friday Night Lights, "How the Other Half Live" on the 101 Network. You're reading this, after all!

And after the episode, stick around for the premiere of Live From Dillon, a new live call-in show that E! Online's Kristin Dos Santos will host.

There you will get the chance to ask questions (over the phone, via email or text message) of the Friday Night Lights cast in Austin, Texas.

Each Wednesday for the next six weeks, they will have different cast members as live guests on the show, starting tonight with the Garritys: Minka Kelly (Lyla) and Brad Leland (Buddy). That should be a good interview!

Live From Dillon airs immediately following the 9 p.m. EDT episode of Friday Night Lights on DirecTV's 101 Network. Check it out if you can!

A quick note on Friday Night Lights ratings from TV Guide today ...

Q: How are Friday Night Lights' ratings on DirecTV? I'm concerned that if they aren't high enough, NBC won't air the show this winter as promised.

A: Fret not. First of all, I can't imagine NBC not airing Friday Night Lights at this point. They still have to figure out if this DirecTV experiment worked, and they can't do that without correlative network ratings. As for its DirecTV run, the season premiere ranked No. 7 "I Knew You When ..." in its timeslot among all basic cable channels, but an impressive second among women 18-to-49, which means… what, exactly? Not sure, but DirectTV tells us they are "very pleased" with those results.

Friday Night Lights returns with another new episode tonight, "How the Other Half Live." The third episode of Season 3 looks like another good one.

Tonight, Eric frets over his job security, while Tami befriends newcomer Katie McCoy (Janine Turner); Matt reconnects with Julie (woohoo!) and Lyla worries about Tim, who's being roped into a money-making scheme by Billy.

As always, you can discuss these new developments, your favorite characters and anything else you like in our Friday Night Lights forum before, during and after the program, sharing your thoughts with other Friday Night Lights fans!

Shedding some light on future developments are a couple of Friday Night Lights spoilers / news items from E! Online this week ...

Q: How much do you love the new season of Friday Night Lights? It's perfect and so is Riggins. Any scoop for the season?

A: The season is amazing — it has everything that made the first year so wonderful, but refreshed and up-to-date - but Riggins (Taylor Kitsch) is not as flawless. In fact, he and brother Billy (Derek Phillips) become thieves in a coming episode. That said, Riggins is generally trying to go straight this year. He wants to overcome everyone's low expectations of him - he's especially hoping to change Buddy Garrity's very negative view of 33 dating his daughter.

Q: How about some info on Friday Night Lights. Thanks!

A: The ambitious McCoys continue to push J.D. into the starting quarterback slot, and boosters start to agree that maybe Matt Saracen is no longer the man for the job.

Tyra drew the ire of Tami.

So did Buddy, for different reasons.

Eric tells Smash, whose confidence is low, to suck it up. Matt tries to become legally free of his parents (it's complicated), while Tim and Lyla continue their complicated relationship as his brother is "humping" Tyra's sister. Seriously.

All that and more took place on another terrific episode of Friday Night Lights. This is the best show. Follow the link for a full episode recap.

Now that Friday Night Lights is airing on a satellite television channel, it is time to re-evaluate its definition of commercial success.

After two seasons on NBC, the critically acclaimed drama about a small Texas town and its football team made its debut Wednesday on DirecTV.

It will run on DirecTV exclusively for four months before starting its third season on NBC in February. The arrangement defrays production costs.

In its first two seasons, Friday Night Lights averaged 6.2 million viewers on NBC, a relatively low rating for a major network broadcast.

Wednesday’s DirecTV debut reached a much smaller audience – 400,000 – but then again, the satellite universe is also much smaller.

DirecTV counts 17.1 million subscribers. NBC reaches 100 million homes.

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