Brittany Wagner binged on the screeners of Last Chance U Season 2, watching her own life tumble toward a chaotic job search that ended with her simply leaving East Mississippi Community College one afternoon, tears in her eyes. She got to that scene, the final one in an 8-episode series, at 4 a.m.

“Pitch-black outside,” she said. “The whole season in one night. What a feeling.”

Much of what Wagner goes through in Season 2, available starting Friday on Netflix, goes unspoken. The charismatic and forceful academic advisor no longer has a relationship with head football coach Buddy Stephens, which makes her efforts at helping his players even more difficult. And though the first season of the show brought her fame — and job offers — the single mother struggles to figure out what to do next with her life.

So she turns to the players. There in the office that became the setting for so much of the show (director Greg Whiteley simply planted a camera man there every single day), she asked them: What should I do?

“I think, first, they could sense that I had these frustrations,” she said. “But we had the sort of relationship — and you see this throughout the show — where it was built on talking about more than the schoolwork. You need to develop something deeper than that.

“And what they told me is what I told them, ‘Follow your dream. If there’s something you want to do, do it.”

And though Wagner originally left the tiny junior college where she had spent eight years to work in marketing for a Birmingham, Ala. food company she lasted only a few months in that job. She has since launched her own company, called 10 Thousand Pencils, which will offer academic counseling services to schools and athletes across the country. (Her most famous line from Season 1 was, “Do you have a pencil?” And she uttered it so frequently that fans of the show sent her more than 3,000 pencils — and a new desk chair.)

Wagner’s company will offer a wide range of services, but mainly she plans to do what she’s always done: Propel talented athletes who are struggling in school into their next chance at proving themselves. Though she oversaw 200 athletes at EMCC, she estimates she spent most of her time on the six to eight who combined Division I athleticism with an inability or unwillingness to keep up the grades needed to transfer to 4-year university. She wants to help those sorts of players — and the smaller schools that might end up dealing with them while lacking the resources deployed at big-money schools.

“A lot of these schools don’t have the money to pay for large staffs, and there’s only a few kids who really need the extra, full-time attention,” she said. “So hire me to do it. That’s what I do.”

She has already signed on to consult with a Division II conference to guide the counselors at those schools on dealing with incoming transfers. And she had a “guinea pig” this summer, a player headed off to college who needed extra assistance staying on the path toward qualifying — meaning Wagner could intervene before junior college became the last option.

And while Wagner will do most of this work remotely, without the face-to-face interactions that endeared her to millions of viewers, she believes the show has given her a unique ability to reach players.

“It might have taken me six months to a year to reach some guys,” she said. “It was that difficult, their walls were that high, they were so not into it. And I think that was the reaction of this kid when he was told he had a new advisor: ‘Someone else to yell at me.’ … When his coach told him it was Miss Wagner, that changed. He loved the show and he’d seen me working with players and he understood that, he was open with me from the beginning and very honest about his own weaknesses and what we could do to fix them. He bought right in and usually that’s half the battle.”

The idea for 10 Thousand Pencils didn’t arise from Last Chance U — she’d been dreaming of finding a way to do her work independent from an athletic department for a while — but the show enabled her to make the leap. She had become personally unhappy in Scooba (population around 700) and wanted more for her 8-year-old daughter, Kennedy. She also felt stifled by Stephens.

“You’re tied to a coach,” she said. “You’re almost tied to his philosophy. Everything about it — it’s how he runs the institution, his message — comes from him.”

The hard-charging coach’s attempts at change — he hated what he saw of himself in Season 1 — become a theme of the second season, and Wagner grows increasingly skeptical as the year goes on.

She is careful — and precise — when discussing her frustrations with Stephens.

“When you value other people, when you value other people’s life and dreams and goals and just the fact that they’re standing in front of you and you are working with them every day, when you really value them as people, I don’t think you have to have this list of what you’re not going to do,” she said. “I don’t think you have to do pushups every time you cuss if you’re really valuing your job and your influence and the people you’re working with. I think that, to me, was my issue with him. It was always surface-level things that he was trying to change and it seemed to me that he was changing them for the perception of everyone else but he wasn’t learning to value himself — you can’t value other people until you value yourself — but he wasn’t learning to value the people that helped him build that program, which would have been myself and his assistant coaches and our administration, our teachers, our staff members, the people of East Mississippi that helped him build the program. And then he wasn’t valuing the players that he was bringing in there.”

Wagner is shown speaking with Stephens’ assistants in Season 2, many times chafing at how they’re dealing with players or confused by the messages coming from the football office. She told me she thinks Stephens enabled one player — Kam Carter — by undermining the tough-love stance taken by defensive line coach Davern Williams.

She ultimately decided to leave because she felt “trapped” in Scooba and was tired of “working against” Stephens. She also felt the show’s popularity was a gift and that it was her duty to use the platform: “I just kept thinking I have to do more, I have to do more, I have to do more.”

But she was hurt by how it all ended. Wagner and Stephens haven’t spoken in more than a year, she said, and there’s no evidence of them communicating in the documentary (director Greg Whiteley always checked to see if they had meetings planned, and there were none). Stephens never said thank you — or even goodbye — when Wagner left.

“That’s disappointing,” she said, “because I put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into that program and those players and helping him — I think — win national championships and change lives. To not feel like he values or appreciates it or respects it is disappointing. It doesn’t change what I did. I feel good about it myself and I know that it’s important work and that it was appreciated by other people, and I know that lives have been changed and that those relationships are in tact.”

Wagner is in New York this week to celebrate the premiere of the second season; Stephens is not attending.

The strained relationship between her and Stephens is only one reason that Season 2 feels “heavier,” as Wagner put it. Returning to Scooba for a second year deepens the relationship with the viewer, and it’s no longer as easy to be charmed by the scenery or Buddy’s outbursts or the latest excuse from a player who hasn’t written a paper that’s past due. The honeymoon has ended, the shine has dimmed on this small town and the character studies have deepened.

“I think the season did miss some of the relationships formed, where I worked so closely with these guys and we really bonded,” Wagner said. “There’s not as much of that; it’s not part of the focus as much.

“But I think if you watch the whole series all the way through, it’s just so powerful. The life lessons, and how real it feels at the end, I hope that stays with people.”