I read the book by H.G. Bissinger a few weeks ago, and I devoured it because I grew up in West Texas. The Odessa Permian Panthers (Mojo) were our rivals when I was in high school. I thought the book was authentic and probably fair and factual.

So I started watching the TV series inspired by BIssinger’s book. In the TV show, the Odessa Panthers become the Dillon Panthers, and the football is joined to the romantic lives of high school students as the main focus of the story. I’ll admit that I got addicted to the show.

The first season was really good. The star quarterback, Jason Street, gets hurt in the first pre-season game, and sophomore Matt Saracen must grow into the role of #1 quarterback for the Dillon Panthers while Coach Taylor struggles to take his mostly young team all the way to the state championship in Taylor’s first year as coach. As the season progressed, and especially in the second season, I noticed that it had become a soap opera, complete with rotating (sexual) relationships, a patriarch and matriarch (Coach Taylor and his wife Tammy), and lots of angst and politics and sexual tension—not to mention murder, drunkenness, and family arguments galore. By this time the show has become something of a guilty pleasure for me, although I’m trying to find some redeeming social value other than the cute guys and my desire to find out what will happen to these characters.

Now I’ve started watching season three of the show. And I’m not a happy camper. Let me count the ways in which the writers have attempted to ruin this show:

1. One of the characters, Lyla, spent the entire second season living out her new-found commitment to Jesus. There were bumps and there was immaturity, but she seemed sincere and committed. I liked the idea that the show was exploring this aspect of West Texas life and culture, and I thought they were doing it without either idealizing evangelical Christianity or ridiculing it. As the third season began, Lyla had outgrown her Jesus phase, and she had returned to her bad-boy love, Chris Riggins. Apparently, it’s not possible for TV writers to portray an interesting, well-rounded, flawed but growing Christian character for more than one season.

2. The show has simply dropped major story lines from the first and second seasons. I understand writing characters out of the show as it continues. I understand that eventually high school students graduate and move on. But tell us what happened to them. Jason Street ended the second season with a pregnant girlfriend that he was trying to talk into having his baby. What happened? An Hispanic character was introduced in the second season, and he’s simply disappeared. If you want him out of the show, then tell us that he got arrested for drug possession or moved to Mexico or graduated early and left for Harvard or something. Lyla’s boyfriend from season two also evaporated into thin air. Did he dump her or vice-versa? Don’t just leave characters and stories hanging.

3. Coach Taylor’s wife has been promoted from high school counselor to high school principal. And she has a year old baby? Unbelievable, but I’ll go with it. However, they’re also messing with my favorite character, Matt Saracen, and trying to bring in another quarterback, a ninth grader, who according to everybody except Coach Taylor, can out-throw and outrun and out-play Saracen who is a senior with two years of experience under his belt. I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe anyone else would believe it, no matter how rich Baby Quarterback’s dad is.

4. This last is a problem that has been evident from the beginning of the series: too much sex. Every single major teen character on the show, except for one (the coach’s teenage daughter, and she’s been close at least a couple of times), has been shown in bed with somebody else. I’m not naive; I know that teens have sex, but I don’t believe they have it as often or as casually as the characters in this show do. And I think TV shows that imply that “everyone’s doing it” do a disservice to those teens who are trying to stay morally pure before marriage or who are looking for some reason to wait for marriage.

I’ll keep watching because they hooked me in the first two seasons. But I’m warning the Friday NIght Lights powers-that-be that if this third season continues to bug me and strain my credulity, I’m going to complain to a higher authority. Maybe the UIL? Or the Texas Education Agency? Or am I confusing fiction with reality?