Certainly the murder story line in Friday Night Lights was definitely the biggest low to me in terms of the audience's response to it. I think that the audience not only rejected the storyline, but they felt like it was taking their show away. That's what I got from it — they felt like we were taking the show that they really liked and changing it in a way that was unacceptable to them. That was really tough to deal with. The problem with that is, if I were wanting to take that feedback and do something about it, it would be impossible. By the time that episode aired we were filming an episode that was five episodes later and we had already written three episodes past that. Basically, the entire arch of that storyline was committed by the time anybody saw the beginning of that story.

But you did ultimately take the feedback because you did truncate the storyline and then never brought it up again.
Well, it wasn't truncating in the sense that the way it was resolved on the show was exactly how it had been planned. [Laughing] The fact that we didn't talk about it in the future much might have been because people … you know, I took the advice that … I will say this, I was very careful with any story lines beyond that, that I felt like might kind of be outside of the vocabulary of the show, so we were careful. On the other hand, if the storyline was really exciting and potentially controversial, we still did it. The abortion storyline was controversial in a different way.