Season one of “Friday Night Lights” was one of the best seasons of TV ever, and it had the best pilot I’ve ever seen. The pilot was magical: we were introduced to a dozen intriguing, complex characters, and understood that all of their objectives hinged on the success of the football team. When Street goes down, everybody’s world is shattered. Street, Coach Taylor, Smash, Lyla, Riggins, Buddy Garrity, everybody. The season worked so beautifully because at that point, everybody was thrust into the same situation: how to pick up the pieces of a broken dream. Every single person I’ve talked to about the show watched at least two episodes in a row to start. Everything was set up so perfectly in the pilot, the upcoming problems were so immediately clear, the gravity of the situation was so well-defined, that you had no choice but to immediately watch the next episode.

In season two, though, the catastrophic event does not have that same shatter effect. What it does is force the ensemble in different directions. In season one, we lived and breathed with the town’s collective emotions: the catalyst acted on every character simultaneously. This narrative strategy was further strengthened because of the setting; it’s a small town where everyone knows each other’s business. The characters had no choice but to heal (and come) together.

The season two catalyst, though, works as an opposite force. Its secrecy runs counter to that small town intimacy, and in doing so saps the show of its greatest strength in season one. Backed into a corner, it felt like the writers just accepted that the characters would diverge over the course of season two, until there was no central narrative and it was simply a collection of only mildly relevant storylines (which would seem completely irrelevant to a viewer who hadn’t seen season one).