As hard as it is for a sports-hating, small-town refugee to admit, Friday Night Lights is one of the best shows on television in recent years. Anchored by a rock-solid performance by Kyle Chandler, who plays a high-school football coach with a steadfast sense of right and wrong that resonates with viewers in a powerful, old-fashioned way. It’s one of those shows that over time makes you care about characters you hate passionately at first (like Taylor Kitsch’s drunken, sometimes mean Tim Riggins) and worry sincerely about the fate of others, like the tender-hearted quarterback whose sudden success threatens to change him completely. In the second season, just released on DVD (and a bargain, offering 15 episodes for the price of one feature-length movie), the screenwriters take some drastic measures in an apparent attempt to draw viewers: Within the first couple of episodes we get a killing and a cover-up on one hand, a life-threatening scam on another, and intimations of sex scandals down the road. All of which are too extreme to fit the mood Lights has established, but the season stays aloft thanks to actors who’ve earned our trust and our faith that the show will recover from the writer’s strike. In other TV series discoveries, the justly praised Mad Men is now out on both standard DVD and Blu-ray — a glossy and increasingly mysterious look at Manhattan’s corporate world circa 1960. Less famous but worth comedy fans’ time are two British TV series, Black Books and the cult item Spaced, whose casts and sensibilities will be familiar to fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.