When the news broke in December that the long-rumored Friday Night Lights movie (based on the much-beloved television series, rather than directly on Buzz Bissinger’s book) would not be happening, we celebrated the fact that the show’s protagonists would continue to live their lives only in our imaginations, where they could never disappoint us.
Alas, we have bad news for those who enjoyed imagining a wonderful future for Lance Landry, Jesse Plemons’s affably awkward kicker/frontman for “extreme grindcore with heavy thrash influences” band Crucifictorious. Landry’s charm and smarts suggested he would achieve great things in his future, once he escaped Dillon and found a place more suited to awkward, affable young men without a smidge of talent on either the football field or stage—but, unfortunately, it appears that is not the path that he’s taken, as Landry and Crucifictorious have returned in a new series of webisodes for NBC’s Parenthood, which shares a producer with Friday Night Lights.
In the first of the videos—watch it below—Landry and friends arrive, instruments in tow, at some coffeeshop or something that is apparently a location used in Parenthood, a show that we have heard is good but do not watch, much like most of America did with our beloved Friday Night Lights. Anyway, Landry, Devin (played by Austinite Stephanie Hunt), and the rest of the band show up at the venue, much to the chagrin of a young woman wearing an East Dillon Lions t-shirt who we will assume is a series regular on Parenthood.
At the moment, only the first episode is up, so we are given no explanation for why Landry, a young man whose future held such promise, is on tour with his doomed grindcore band through empty coffeeshops in wherever-it-is-Parenthood-takes-place Berkeley, California. Perhaps after leaving school early to launch a wildly successful tech startup, Landry received a call from Devin suggesting that he needed to rediscover his creative edge, and they took to the highways as a way to reconnect? We’re going to assume it’s something like that, rather than Landry and friends chasing a futile dream with their crappy band for far longer than they should—at least until the future webisodes spell out something depressing.
