Counting down to Lights out

SOMETIMES I WATCH TV: In which viewers have been egging on Two and a Half Men for nine seasons, but Coach Taylor can't even get to 77 total episodes

Before his head was exploded by a violent torpedo of truth, Charlie Sheen was the highest-paid actor on television because of the apparently hypnotic attraction of something called Two and a Half Men. I confess that I have never watched a moment of it. Perhaps I would find it incisive and witty. Perhaps I will also discover the cure for cancer while staring at my breakfast cereal tomorrow morning. My point is that why is Two and a Half Men so important that CBS didn't even blink at paying Ashton Kutcher to replace Sheen and keep it around, but three years ago NBC couldn't be bothered to hang on to Friday Night Lights until DirecTV stepped in to assume a fat chunk of its production costs? Yes, I get the dollars and cents of it: Millions of people misguidedly love Men, ergo CBS will do anything to save its ratings dominance. And Lights doesn't rack up the numbers, ergo the East Dillon High School football program is about to vanish (again).

Say it ain't so, Coach Taylor! Nobody needed (or needs) more than one — or maybe two-and-a-half — seasons of Two and a Half Men. The world of television, however, will always need flawed, complex, resolute, passionate and fascinating characters like Eric and Tammy Taylor. There are five episodes left in the now-unfolding fifth season of Friday Night Lights, which NBC has long since announced it will not renew. The first season of the show got a full order of 22 episodes, but the writer's strike cut the second season down to 15, and the show-salvaging deal with DirecTV capped production at 13 episodes each of the past three seasons. So Friday Night fans have already been cheated, and now they're getting the ultimate stiff arm. I'm sure there's a future for the show's cast members elsewhere on the tube or in movies: Kyle Chandler is probably the biggest "name" in the cast of the J.J. Abrams monster movie Super 8, which opens Friday.

I don't want to see Connie Britton play a caring pediatrician, though, or catch Jurnee Smollet as a dog-walker with crazy roommates, or occasionally see Brad Leland in a random guest-starring role on Sitcom A or Legal Drama B. I want more Buddy Garrity. I want more Luke Cafferty. I want more of everyone from Dallas Tinker and Mac Macgill to Becky Sproles and Billy Riggins. Mostly I want more of Coach and Tammy. Some shows have run their course by the time they get canceled. And Friday Night Lights got much more time to empty out its playbook than many other bright ideas. (My least favorite thing about TV is how frequently it's the moron-level stuff that sticks when networks throw things against the ratings wall in pilot season.) We've had a good long time to settle in in Dillon, and yet I still feel like I just got to town. I haven't even unpacked all of my boxes! Five more episodes?! I could watch the Taylors teach truth to troubled teenagers for five more seasons and not get bored.

Nathan Fillion recently (and briefly) made a few entertainment headlines by suggesting that, if money were no object, he'd acquire the rights to Firefly, the late, lamented sci-fi TV series that launched him to television cult stardom, and produce new episodes himself. Much as I loved Fillion and his rowdy crew in Firefly, however, if I had the power to save or bring back just one show on television, it would be LOST. OK, not really. For better or worse, polar bears, donkey wheels, animate John Locke cadavers and all, it told the story it had to tell. I might fret a little about never having gotten a Matt Santos presidency out of The West Wing. And I'd definitely agonize about using my one-time-only magic wand on Firefly, which got yanked when it had barely begun to spread its wings. When the TV fairy started to tap her watch and shoot me dirty looks, however, I'd check the scoreboard, nervously fold my playbook in half and then look her in the eye and say, "Get me Coach Taylor."