Riggins doesn't seem to have active parents. He and his even bigger loser of a brother are kind of raising each other. Badly. He always has a beer in his hand and lately his roommate has been trying to stick a meth pipe in his hands. See, he had to move out of his brother's house because his brother started sleeping with Tim's girlfriend the single mom from across the street and ... I'm starting to sound the way those ladies on the train sound about their "stories."

At first, I thought "Friday Night Lights" was really unique television. The first season mad me laugh and made me cry. It brought me into the lives of a whole new group of people. And it is a unique and compelling way of telling a story. The camera work and editing are more like a film, fast and jerky. There is real adrenaline in the story telling. You get bits and pieces of the story, and you get it fast, in looks and quick cut-aways, but you get the whole story. And you get a lot of varied characters. The performances are spectacularly naturalistic.

These high school kids have pimples like real high school kids not like those simpering idiots on "Dawson's Creek." They behave like real stupid teenagers sometimes, but they are also capable of very genuine acts of nobility and courage. They talk to each other because the adults are too busy or not even there. It gives me hope for my soon-to-be-high-school-age son.

One of the difficulties with prime time television is that the bar is set pretty high because, these days, you are competing with films and DVDs. Therefore, you have to come up with something original every seven days, and if you are successful (and who wouldn't want to be successful?), you have to do it year after year for at least three and hopefully five years. I think the contract you sign on a series, hour or half-hour, is five years. It used to be seven.

It can be difficult making these "stories" new and interesting week after week; and finding ways for the characters to evolve, to grow and change. And what do you do when these high school kids graduate and go on to college?

I am two-thirds of the way through the second season of "Friday Night Lights" and I can see them struggling to not repeat themselves. Some characters are standing still while others are growing and changing. It's hard to tell if it's the writers that aren't giving them anything new or the actors themselves who just aren't bringing the depth.

I know from experience that when you work a series like this, you have to work the writers and producers, too. You have to encourage them to give you more and guide them in directions you want the character to go. You can just let yourself be at their mercy and whim, or you can grow your character yourself by seeking out the writers during lunch on the set and giving them ideas.

It is an interesting process, doing a series, because you discover a character over a long period and he/she evolves in ways that you never would have imagined at the beginning. You can get kind of philosophical about it and realize that we are never finished as people until we take that last gasp on the stairway and fall over backwards with a look of bewilderment and relief and the character you play in a television series is never finished, either, and is therefore a greater challenge than a character in a play because they have to continue to grow through time. But I digress, as I so often do.

"Friday Night Lights" is simply the best TV I am watching now. Other than "Entourage," which is like watching home movies because in the '80's in Hollywood we all lived like that except that for some of us the bread was a day old.