Note: DirecTV is airing episodes of Friday Night Lights ahead of NBC. Recaps of each week's episode will be posted after the jump.

What's Buddy Garrity saying?

SPOILERS: Don't keep reading unless you want to read about season four.

Season four of "Friday Night Lights" begins tonight, but unfortunately for most of us, only for DirecTV subscribers.

As with the cost-sharing agreement for season three, season four of "Friday Night Lights" will air first in its entirety on DirecTV and then on NBC in late spring or early summer of 2010. The critically-acclaimed drama about a football-obsessed small town in Texas stars Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton (left).

NBC hasn't done right by the show, but this DirecTV deal is better than cancelling it altogether. Kyle Chandler summed it up nicely in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times: “The first year we were up against ‘American Idol.’ The second year was the writers strike. The third year we get cut down to 13 episodes. I just assumed that while we had a solid base, the numbers wouldn’t go out the roof."

Several N&O readers have complained that their DirecTV feed of Sunday’s game blacked out during the overtime period, only to reconnect after New Jersey had scored the winning goal.

A phone call to DirecTV’s public relations department was not returned. UPDATE: DirecTV spokesman Robert Mercer said he would check into the lost feed with the satellite company's technical operations department.

UPDATE 2: Mercer confirmed the outage, but said he was still investigating the cause. He apologized on behalf of DirecTV to those who missed the end.

Fox Sports Carolinas now says that Game 3 of the NHL playoff series between the New Jersey Devils and Carolina Hurricanes — and Game 6, if necessary — will be shown in high definition. The original television schedule had listed all of the games as being broadcast in standard definition, prompting numerous complaints from fans.

Game 3 will be 7:30 p.m. Saturday at the RBC Center and Game 6, if necessary, on Sunday April 26.

That means Time Warner Cable will show the game on channel 50 and in HD on channel 272. Dish and DirecTV subscribers will have to check on the alternate channels the two satellite providers will use. 

Fox Sports Carolinas is trying to do something about the no-HD first-round playoff series between Carolina and New Jersey, and Dish changes the channel. Read more here.

Fox Sports Carolinas is trying to get at least one of the Hurricanes' first-round playoff games televised in high definition, and the word is in on which Dish Network channel will show Game 2.

A new baseball season is here. Your team is still in it. But Time Warner Cable's long and so far losing fight against MASN threatens to keep much of North Carolina in the dark again this season.

When top-ranked tennis player Rafael Nadal was in danger of being upset, Fox Sports Carolinas stuck with his match in the Sony Ericsson Open, causing hockey fans to miss the first few minutes of the Carolina Hurricanes' 4-2 victory over the New York Rangers on Thursday, including Eric Staal's goal that made it 1-0.

Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina upset Nadal 6-4, 3-6, 7-6 in a match that took longer than expected. Hurricanes spokesman Kyle Hanlin said FS Carolinas made the decision to stay with the match as it went into a tiebreak at about 6:55 p.m. By the time the tennis match ended, the hockey game was 4 minutes, 17 seconds old (about 7:15 p.m.). Staal scored at 4:28, and cable subscribers got the telecast at 4:52, Hanlin said, adding that satellite TV subscribers could see the game from the start.

The HD telecast was delayed, too, on cable.

The network has informed the Canes that viewers in North Carolina will be switched to the Penguins-Canes game at 7 p.m. Saturday, regardless of how long the Florida-Vanderbilt baseball game goes.

That said, FS Carolinas simply has to do better by hockey fans in a hockey market. Even when things go right, there aren't nearly enough Canes games in HD.  

The impossibly caring coach and his impossibly hot principal wife live.

TV Week reports that Universal Media Studios, Imagine Television and DirecTV have closed a deal to produce 26 more episodes of "Friday Night Lights."

The newly ordered episodes will almost certainly be the final batch produced, with writers crafting plotlines with an eye on a final episode. However, it’s unclear if UMS and DirecTV will officially announce an end date for the show, as ABC did with "Lost."

The 26 episodes will be produced consecutively without a break. However, DirecTV will air the episodes as two 13-episode seasons.

As with the previous deal for the show, NBC will get a second window of the “FNL” episodes following their airing on DirecTV.

Apparently, heaven for cancelled (or thisclose to cancelled) shows is DirecTV.

According to Variety, along with helping out "Friday Night Lights" and bringing back critically acclaimed "Wonderland", DirecTV will now revive "Smith," "The Nine" and "Eyes."

Don't remember "Eyes", but the other two were good shows with promise. It's unclear whether TV.com has all the same episodes, but check it out before you buy that dish.