‘FRIDAY Night Lights” used to rely on shoulder pads as useful equipment. Now it needs a satellite dish, too.
The critically acclaimed but minimally watched high school football drama returns for its third season Wednesday night, but only on DirecTV.
For those whose dish is empty, y’all have to wait until late February to catch up on NBC.
“I was really happy when I heard it was coming back,” fan Kathleen Medina said at a New Jersey high school game this weekend. “But then I heard it was only on DirecTV and I got ticked off.”
It’s a Catch-22 not even Jerry Rice could grab.
The show would have been killed without DirecTV signing on to pick up a portion of the production costs (which Variety estimated at 40 percent). However, in an effort to increase subscribers, the season airs exclusively on Direct TV until the 13 episodes are complete.
Then, it starts all over again on NBC, which will need better ratings to justify another season after this one. (Last season, “FNL” ranked 107th out of 161 prime-time shows, with 6.2 million viewers weekly).
Clearly, “FNL” fans among DirecTV’s 17 million subscribers have no problems, and actually may find themselves with some new friends.
But those who don’t . . .
Zach Gilford, who plays quarterback Matt Saracen, had the perfect game plan, thrown off the cuff at a summertime press conference, “Well, if you’re a loyal fan I say you download it, and then out of good conscience just switch on NBC when it comes on the air.”
Flag on the play.
“The customer has a choice,” Darris Gringeri of DirecTV said. “They can get DirecTV and see the episodes now, or they can wait until February and watch it on NBC. They won’t be able to see it online.”
NBC, which spent the summer yanking down Olympics highlights from Web sites in world-record time, has “dedicated legal resources in place” to go after anyone who tries to post the episodes on-line illegally.
“It’s a travesty that DirecTV isn’t going to put them online for fans of the show,” said Jason McIntyre, of the sports media blog TheBigLead.com. “That leaves everyone with two options: Badger your friend with DirecTV to let you watch at their house on Wednesdays at 9 p.m. . . . or hope that some kind Internet soul will record the episodes and put them on a blog.”
It won’t be McIntyre’s.
He’s already posted that “those of you with DirecTV cannot talk about the show on this blog. Not in the comments, and definitely not in the e-mails. The only screengrabs we’ll accept are ones of the females, assuming [the] image is not giving away the plot.”
That’s Catch-22, Part Two.
The most loyal fans can’t – and don’t want to – remain in the dark until February. They are the ones most likely to look on online or (gulp) on a bootleg DVD made by a friend, passed secretly from hand to hand.
But if they don’t either buy DirecTV, or watch on NBC – or both – their favorite show (which, shhh, looks as good as ever) may go away anyway.