I am emotionally spent this morning. I just finished watching the final episode of Friday Night Lights and I cried through 2/3 of it.

We all know this was a fantastic show. I won’t go into that (again), but for a while now I’ve been thinking about the Billy and Mindy characters. They’re kind of the Anti-Taylors. Billy is a disaster. Mindy is a stripper. What counts, in the FNL universe, is how much they love each other.

In most shows, these two would have been the butt of the joke. On FNL, they certainly provide plenty of comic relief — Billy’s “Rigglets” line nearly killed me — but their little family unit gets the same respect as the Taylors’. Mindy’s character really snuck up on me this year. She went from being kind of annoying, to being…well…not quite maternal, but sisterly.

I’ll miss this show. It’s what America is about…or is supposed to be about. It’s egalitarian, community-oriented, and about loving your neighbor. In the age of the Tea Party, it’s no wonder the show never caught on the way it should have. On that note, I’ll leave you the same way FNL did.