FirstCuts: Friday Night Lights Scores Season 3?

By Chris Littmann
Sports don’t start and end with a referee’s whistle. FirstCuts, a blog dedicated to sports culture, will cover everything outside the lines, from games to gear.
My most favorite of TV bloggers -- Alan Sepinwall at the Star-Ledger -- graced my RSS reader late Wednesday night with this exhilarating headline: Friday Night Lights lives?
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Could it be? Will the Dillon Panthers live to play another season? The answer is yes, according to Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily.
[quote="Nikki Finke"]I’m told that Jeff Zucker, Marc Graboff and Ben Silverman had been searching for a way to renew the critically acclaimed but low-rated Friday Night Lights for a 3rd season in a way that would still make financial sense. The answer came in a deal with DirecTV, now owned by John Malone’s Liberty Media. Clearly Malone is looking to offer exclusive content to his satellite subscribers to distinguish DirecTV from its rivals on a content as well as price basis. “It’s an innovative deal where NBC found a partner who will share costs and exhibition windows,” an insider explained to me. So both NBC and DirecTV will be airing Friday Night Lights across multipurpose platforms.[/quote]
This scenario has been out there for a week or two -- that DirecTV would get some sort of exclusive content like first run of episodes. Obviously, this will make NBC some money and give the show new life. Finke also notes that there’s no word if the fan campaign from SaveFridayNightLights.TV, which involved sending mini-footballs to NBC execs, had anything to do with the renewal.
As someone without DirecTV, I’m a little bummed, but overall, I’ve got no complaints about a third season of this show ... so long as it’s a lot more like Season 1 and a lot less like Season 2.↵