Ellen Gray: 'Friday Night Lights' debuts new season on DirecTV

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS. 9 p.m. tomorrow, DirecTV's 101 Network.

THERE'S NOTHING fair about television, where more than ever we get what we pay for.

Broadcast networks that once made so much money on advertising - and faced so little competition - they could afford to sink millions into meaty miniseries and hard-edged dramas are more likely to settle for cheap laughs now, often at the expense of so-called real people.

Even those doing relatively well are playing it safe, cloning success rather than taking chances.

Ad-supported cable's only a little better: For every hour of "Mad Men" or "Saving Grace," there seem to be 10,000 hours of people flipping their houses, cleaning their closets or their colons (don't ask) or shopping for more stuff.

Premium channels like HBO and Showtime charge, well, a premium for programming that might be a cut above most networks' but wouldn't be profitable any other way.

I understand that, I really do.

Because businesses need to make a profit to stay in business and TV, however much we treat it as a necessity, like water or oxygen, really isn't.

But then along comes a copy of the fourth-season premiere of "Friday Night Lights," and I can't help feeling stung by the unfairness.

One of the best shows on TV returns tomorrow night, and unless you subscribe to DirecTV, you can't see it.

At least not until the late spring or early summer of 2010, when it's to premiere on NBC, which is now in its second year of an arrangement that kept "FNL" alive by sharing expenses with the satellite provider.

As a fan of the show, I'm grateful that DirecTV stepped up, though I continue to wish that NBC had found a way that didn't tie fans to one provider.

The real unfairness is that a show like "Friday Night Lights" - a fictional spin-off of the movie based on Buzz Bissinger's book about high school football in Texas - never attracted enough viewers to guarantee it a place on NBC's fall schedule.

For those who love it already but can't, for one reason or another, switch providers right now, it feels mean of me to say that the season premiere delivers on the promises of last season's game-changing finale, which found Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) facing a massive rebuilding task as the coach of a school in a newly divided Dillon.

Shows set in high school tend to stumble at this point, but "FNL," which made its big mistake early, in a second-season subplot I'd just as soon forget, seems to have found a way to reinvent itself. I just hope someone's there to see it.

You might not know it from watching "Gossip Girl," but things are tough all over - even, apparently, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, where PBS' "Frontline" goes tonight (9 p.m., Channel 12) for an unusually personal report on the economy it's calling "Close to Home."

And though there's a slight element of tone-deafness here - longtime "Frontline" producer Ofra Bikel spent a week in the salon where she's had her hair done for 20 years to collect stories of the recession from people who are still able to pay for an Upper East Side haircut - the stories themselves are compelling ones.

That's largely due to Deborah Boles, the Brooklyn-born owner of Deborah Hair Designs, whose willingness to ask probing follow-up questions of her longtime clients should qualify her for a job at "Frontline" if the haircutting thing doesn't work out.

She gets answers, too.

But then it's always amazed me what people will say to someone coming at them with a pair of scissors.

The interviewees range from the undeniably sympathetic - a couple whose coffee shop failed, leaving them $200,000 in debt, a laid-off executive in his 50s networking his heart out - to the maybe slightly less so, such as the woman who sold her Porsche to maintain her health insurance and says, only half-jokingly, that "losing the car was worse than getting divorced."

"It's so embarrassing," says another woman who says she's nearly 40 and admits that her 60something mother still works to help her adult children cover their own children's expenses.

"Why am I even talking about my mother?" she asks. "I feel like a child."

But any time it begins to feel as if "Close to Home" is indulging in a bit of hand-wringing for a very particular subset of New Yorker, Bikel brings us back to earth with Deborah and her family, who are struggling with basic survival issues.

The show even follows her sister, who's been helping out in the shop, to Florida, where she's fighting foreclosure on her vastly devalued house by renting out rooms to a collection of people who've also fallen on hard times.

And back at the shop, the biggest economic indicator might not be in the stories of the people who are still coming in, but in the empty chairs once occupied by those who've already had to stop. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.