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Fumble! No matter what the critics say, Friday Night Lights drops the ball.

Article Excerpt
To judge by the early reviews, you would think this was something much grander than just a simple television series. This was brave and transcendent art. This was a once-in-a-generation event.

"Lord, is Friday Night Lights good," gushed Virginia Heffernan in her New York Times review on the day of the show's October premiere. "In fact, if the season is anything like the pilot, this new drama about high school football could be great-and not just television great, but great in the way of a poem or painting." In the weeks that followed, the critical enthusiasm turned even more perversely effusive. The Washington Post's Tom Shales wrote, "Friday Night Lights is the Platoon of high school football--the story of the embattled infantry as well as of the officers in the field, reverberant with metaphorical and microcosmic echoes." Troy Patterson, in the online magazine Slate, went so far as to invoke Melville: "Friday Night Lights and Moby Dick share a few major themes--masculinity, passion, anticipation--and each of them is bouncing with...

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