FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS Returns Tonight

1 The best show (and soap) on television, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS, returns tonight to kick off its third season on DirecTV's The 101. The show will air 13 episodes on the satellite provider before moving to NBC for "reruns" early next year. In Season 3, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) has a new boss — his wife. Tami Taylor (Connie Britton) is the principal at Dillon High now. Smash has graduated. Tyra and Landry are now split, and Lyle and Tim are together. Here is a news and review roundup about tonight's episode: Bright ‘Lights’: Fans will go wild as Panthers kick off new season (A-) LIGHTS cuts a laserlike focus on the dreams and aspirations of those in Middle America. This is an admirable kickoff to what looks to be a championship season. A Return to West Texas for Another Football Season In its third season FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS still charges along with so much to recommend it. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS scores a touchdown FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS brought in a star out-of-town quarterback once before - Voodoo Tatum - and Matt survived. But maybe there's a second agenda now. Maybe the producers are thinking that if the show comes back for a fourth season, they'll need replacements for the seniors. It's a dream. But hey, dreams are what Friday night lights are all about. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS kicks off season on DirecTV tonight If you have DirecTV, enjoy “Lights” now. If you don’t, be assured the wait for it to hit NBC will be worth it. FRIDAY NIGHT survivor ...the creative challenge remains the same as it has been from the beginning: Convince high school football fans -- a subculture so huge and fervent in some regions that the term superculture would be more accurate -- that the show gets their lives right while at the same time convincing everybody who spent high school hiding from football players that an hour with the Panthers won't spark convulsive flashbacks. LIGHTS stays brilliant despite downsizing 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, and a reduced LIGHTS was all we were going to get. 'Friday Night Lights' deal may herald a new era TV funding Basically, in exchange for getting first dibs on new "FNL" episodes now being shot on location in Texas, DirecTV is subsidizing the series' costs to the extent that it's still a worthwhile proposition for NBC, which plans to run slightly different versions of the same episodes on its broadcast network early next year. The producers have had to trim between 5% and 7% from the show's previous per-episode budget of approximately $2 million. But they promise that hard-core fans -- which "FNL" has in large proportions relative to its puny overall audience, which averaged 6.2 million total viewers last season, according to Nielsen Media Research -- won't notice a difference.