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Friday Night Lights News
Friday Night Lights Episode 3.2 Recap
*NEW* Friday Night Lights Photos
*NEW* Friday Night Lights Trivia
Friday Night Lights kicked off its third season exclusively on DirecTV last week, and the new episode easily proved that the drama is still at the top of its game. The premiere had all the emotion and touching character moments that fans have come to expect from the series, and also laid the groundwork for the show to explore the important budgetary issues that many schools face. Watching the episode made me even more thankful that NBC renewed the series for a third season, even if the DirecTV deal inconveniences some viewers.
As fantastic as the episode was, the thing that will interest many
Friday Night Lights fans is how the premiere did in the ratings. Read on to find out if DirecTV is happy with the numbers the series pulled in.
According to
The New York Times, the third season premiere of
Friday Night Lights pulled in 400,000 viewers on DirecTV. That number would be laughable on network television, but for a satellite service that's only available to 17.1 million people it's a fairly respectable tally. In comparison, NBC is in over 100 million homes, and
FNL averaged about 6.2 million viewers on that network. During the hour of its premiere,
FNL ranked seventh among all basic cable shows available to DirecTV subscribers. Within the all-important 18-49 demographic, it ranked number two with women and number seven with men.
DirecTV released a statement saying they were “very pleased with the results" of the ratings, but it's still tough to gauge
FNL's success. The number seems rather miniscule, but I'm sure DirecTV wasn't expecting millions to tune in to the premiere. I also wish it were possible to gauge how many fans downloaded the episode after it aired last Wednesday. Are there six million people out there willing to wait for
Friday Night Lights to return to NBC in 2009, or did most of them scour the web to watch the episode illegally?
Friday Night Lights airs another new episode tonight at 9pm on The 101 channel. This week's installment, entitled "Tami Knows Best," finds the mayor of Dillon clashing with Tami (
Connie Britton) after her decision to reallocate the JumboTron funds to academics. You can view a preview of the episode below.
Did you watch the FNL season 3 premiere?
- Don Williams, BuddyTV Staff Writer
Source: The New York Times
(Image courtesy of NBC)