"Lost" finale: where's George Jetson when you need him?

And the Cone of Silence has been lifted on "Lost." Unfortunately, I have to spend the next 30 minutes to an hour on a conference call where Kevin Reilly explains why he ripped apart virtually the entire schedule he announced last week, all to move "Studio 60" away from "Grey's Anatomy," and after that, I'll have to write my column for Friday.

But I wanted to open the floor for comments, starting with my own brief take. My Zen-like state of not needing anything on this explained to me has never been more useful than with this finale, which was complete gibberish and a hell of a lot of fun. In terms of crafting a coherent narrative, Lindelof and Cuse are miles out of their depth. In terms of creating riveting individual moments (Locke snatching Eko's Jesus stick, Desmond with the key) or haunting images (the statue of Homer Simpson's foot, the pile of discarded pneumatic tubes), they are amazing.

I'll try to update with more detailed thoughts later this afternoon, but let the comments and hypothesizing commence! Click here to read the full post

Super-mega jumbo catch-up

(In this post, in order: "Prison Break," "24," "Scrubs," both parts of "House," "Gilmore Girls" "American Idol" results and "Lost." Sort of chronological, and also, if you didn't see "Lost" and all the Big Things that happened, it's way at the end so you can avoid being spoiled. No "Veronica Mars" until tonight at the earliest, and I'll spoiler-protect it again, given the local pre-emption.)

"Prison Break" has me, then it loses me, then it has me again, over and over. Has me: Westmoreland and Bellick in a fight to the death over discovery of the hatch. Lost me: Westmoreland wins and leaves Bellick alive in the escape tunnel to cause trouble in future episodes. Has me: Michael truthfully asking the doc for help. Lost me: any scene out in the real world. Has me: Michael being cold-blooded enough to betray his buddy Warden Pope to make the escape work. Lost me: Michael being squishy and naive enough to bring Tweener into the escape. Etc, etc., etc. I laughed for a very long time when I realized they were using the "House" theme song for their opening montage, which some Fox rep tried to spin to my friend Joe was simply a case of the "Prison Break" music supervisor having never seen "House." Because, of course, no one at the actual network would have noticed, either. (The original pilot for "Bones" used the same Massive Attack song over a montage, just in case we didn't understand what they were trying to imitate, but I'm pretty sure they changed it before the thing aired.)

Because I'm coming so late to "24," I don't feel there's much more I can say about the eerie/awkward timing of this episode airing three days after the release of "United 93." But when one of the passengers started to make a move towards Jack, I cringed, deeply. (Fienberg has some fun with Jack's harsh treatment of the air marshall and the innocent passenger.) For me, the most entertaining part of the episode was Chloe repeatedly tasering the drunk asshole in the bar, especially since I had been afraid that she was going to become the latest victim of his misogynist rage and be too distracted to help Jack at a critical moment. From a character I didn't like at all when she first appeared in season three, she's now someone I can't imagine how the show did without for the first couple of years. Mary-Lyn rules.

It's probably not a good thing that I spent so much of "Scrubs" fixated on the presence of Paul Adelstein, who's not only Evil Kellerman on "Prison Break," but who was supposed to play Dr. Burke on "Grey's Anatomy" until a last-minute scheduling conflict cost him the sweetest job of his life. (Shonda Rhimes has said, not surprisingly, that Adelstein's Burke was more of a pent-up dweeb than Isaiah Washington's version.) I had feared that Cox's shame-spiral was going to make it hard to be funny, and the only real joke that worked was "Knife-Wrench!" (the song sounded to me like a Neil Flynn improv), but I don't think it was because the A-story was heavy; I just think the jokes weren't very good. (Elliot's walk in the woods in particular seemed like a missed opportunity; couldn't she have been attacked by a bear again?) Still, McGinley is awesome, and the last scene where Cox showed J.D. as much affection as he probably ever will was nice. (It's too bad the writers let him call J.D. by his given name a few times in the early seasons, or else I might have gotten actual chills when he did it here.)

I didn't want to commenton "House" yesterday because I had watched both parts on a review screener and they had all blended into one big, cool experience. This, ladies and germs, is how you do a Very Special Episode (or Episodes) of a procedural drama. Foreman becoming so desperate that he pulls a House-ian stunt on Cameron (the needle stick) to save his ass, Wilson realizing exactly why House never wants to meet his patients (and yet not giving House a pass on anything), the awful timing of the discover/biopsy... I don't know that this is going to win Omar Epps the Emmy, if only because he may have trouble getting into the category with the obligatory nominations for Terry O'Quinn, the late John Spencer and half the "Sopranos" cast, but the man was really on his game on both nights. (As was Roc Dutton, one of those actors like Gene Hackman who's always playing the same person and yet not.)

"Gilmore Girls" was actually the last thing I watched last night, and I was so tired he quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs... Sorry 'bout that, folks. I typed a bunch of placeholder paragraphs so I could insert the photos easily last night, and I was still so zonked this morning that I forgot to finish this one. Anyway... I was so tired that my opinion of the show might as well involve quick brown foxes and lazy dogs. There was a lot going on (Luke and Michael DeLuise, Michel doing calisthenics, Sookie and Jackson running around with Kumar's wet dream, Rory getting irked at the Mitchum quote, Paris and Doyle penguin-sitting Logan, and Lorelai as chauffeur), and yet it all felt inconsequential. Again, I can pin some of this on physical and emotional fatigue, and some of it on my knowledge of The Ausiello Spoiler depressing me about where all of this is going, but the only stuff I really dug was Michel bouncing around and that last scene between Lorelai and Emily. (Even though I hate where the story is going, Lauren Graham and Kelly Bishop are awesome together.) Oh, and the opening debate about Ashlee Simpson's hair color was pretty good, too. I have a DVD of the finale, and I'm dreading watching it.

Whenever a talented "American Idol" contestant gets an early boot, I always read or hear someone say that they're better off, because it leaves them free of the clutches of the 19 Entertainment hack songwriters. This ignores the fact that Josh Gracin is the only non-winner or runner-up to have a significant post-show singing career, and he has extenuating circumstances on his side. But Paris may actually be the first contestant to go home this early whom I believe could have a career in the music biz. It's not that she's so young and has such a great voice, but that her entire family has connections in the biz, so when she gets a little older and settles on a persona instead of constantly changing her wig and vocal style, she could actually make it. Not really a shock to see her go: DialIdol had her as the bootee (though they also had Katharine in the bottom two, when it was Elliot), and it had been clear for weeks that her versatility was costing her traction with voters who prefer their ponies to do one trick and only one trick. Since I don't think Katharine has the talent to beat out any of the guys (has any winner had a performance as uniformly awful as her "Against All Odds"?), the only question left is whether she goes home next week and creates a sausage-fest final three, or if she can sex it up one more time to carry herself past Elliot.

And, finally, "Lost." If you didn't see the episode yet, you really want to stop reading. I'm cereal! I'm totally cereal! Okay? Do we all understand each other? Very well then.

I have to quote Fienberg, who e-mailed me shortly after it was over to say, "Was pretty much the best anti-Drunk Driving PSA I've ever seen." Amen, brother. Take that, you booze-guzzling newbies! (Lindelof and Cuse insist to Ausiello that this was their plan all along, but I believe that as much as I believe that everything on this show is plotted out far in advance and that it'll all make perfect sense in the end.)

At least Michelle Rodriguez got to spend an entire season annoying the crap out of America. Unless those blankets somehow slowed the two bullets enough to spare Libby (because, of course, there's a fully-equipped trauma center hidden somewhere in the hatch that would allow Jack to save a person who was gutshot twice), then Cynthia Watros had an entire year of her life wasted, and what the hell was the point of the Libby-is-crazy flashback button to "Dave"? You could interpret the previews to think that one of the two survives, but then, you could also interpret the previews to think that Mr. Eko dies next week (Noooooo!!!!), in which case Bernard might want to watch his back. We'll have to wait and see.

A very cool shock ending to what had been an uneven episode for the first 55 minutes. I spent a lot of the Ana-Lucia flashback picturing a slightly different "Lost" where the more annoying regular characters were replaced by people we knew off the island. Imagine that instead of mopey, self-righteous Jack, the castaways' doctor/leader was alcoholic with a God complex Christian Shepherd. Imagine that season two's gullible Locke were replaced by his con man dad, who I'm still convinced is the real Sawyer, and who would see through Henry's latest line of bullshit in a half-second. The constant off-island intersection of the characters' lives -- Ana-Lucia knows Jack's dad! A-L and Christian listen to the same Patsy Cline song from one of the Kate episodes! Jack's dad has an illegitimate daughter whose mom looks and sounds an awful lot like Claire! Sawyer! -- ceased being a novelty for me a while back.

I probably should have seen one or both of the shootings happen, both because Michael's story was full of so many holes considering what we know about the Others (unless, as I've speculated in the past, there's more than one group of Others), and because A-L had sex and Libby was probably about to (loved Jin giving Hurley a reciprocal sex thumbs-up), and women on this island who get laid out of wedlock tend to catch bullets. But they faked me out -- thanks in part to no stupid advance publicity by Cuse and Lindelof about how someone was going to die in this exact episode, and in part because I thought the shock would be Michael opening the vault door and being killed by Henry -- and for a second there, I thought Michael had pulled a Raymond Shaw and killed himself after carrying out his mission. (This was a really bad episode to include a fully-detailed previews; much like the "Sopranos" season premiere, they should have followed it with either no previews at all or one of those "Survivor" finale previews where you see no new footage of any kind.)

So what did everybody else think, about any or all of this? Click here to read the full post

Dave's not here, man

Seems to be quite the difference of opinion about last night's "Lost" in the comments for the previous entry, with reviews ranging from "jump the shark, completely embarrassing, tipping point bad" to "I actually really liked Lost last night." (Okay, so those were the only two opinions expressed; will you please just let me set up my false dichotomy?)

I'd have to go with the latter thesis, myself. A nice double-feint there: the Dave-as-Harvey twist was so obvious that I was on the verge of being annoyed until they revealed it two-thirds of the way into the episode. So I didn't see the Libby twist coming at all. Not that it's a mind-bender on the level of Locke's magic legs, or even Sawyer not really being Sawyer, but at least they finally have given a reason for Cynthia Watros being here, what?, three-quarters of the way through the season?

I like Hurley. He's not really like any other character in primetime, and he's about the only person I'd actually want to be trapped on an island with. (Okay, maybe him and Mr. Eko, because he's cool... and Jack, in case we get sick, but he's not allowed to talk otherwise... and maybe Sun and Jin... and... nevermind.) Anyway, I'm always going to be inclined to like Hurley-centric episodes, and this was an improvement over the last one, which just retread ground from the lottery episode in season one. We finally know why he was institutionalized, they've made his lack of weight loss into something other than a running joke, and they did this without fucking up our image of the guy.

Meanwhile, Fake Henry implied that Zeke isn't really a big deal with The Others, and that nothing happens when the clock hits zero without the button push. Of course, he's been known to lie before -- as have the writers -- but the Zeke thing, if true, could support my theory that there's more than one group of Others. How freaking big is this island, anyway?

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

When Captain America failed

(It occurs to me that, since we all watch TV on our own schedules these days, I should say up-front what shows I'll be talking about so people who are saving that Very Special Episode of "According to Jim" won't have it spoiled for them here. This morning's shows, in order, "Survivor," "Lost" and "Scrubs.")

I've seen some dumb "Survivor" moves in my time, with Lex saving Amber in All-Stars the dumbest by far, but last night featured the dumbest move by a contestant I liked and respected since Colby picked Tina over Keith back in Australia.

Okay, here's Terry, coming into the merge at a 6-4 advantage on paper, but one that could probably be swung to 5-5 thanks to Bruce's unhappiness, and all he has to do is give Bruce an incentive to jump. And what does Terry have hidden in his pack? The Immunity Idol. He knows he's the biggest target on his side, so all he has to do is lose the Immunity Challenge by a hair, draw all the votes from the other side, and then whip out the Idol and send Shane home to his nicotine fix -- at which point Bruce has no reason not to change sides, since he likes Terry a hell of a lot better than anybody from Casaya.

Given the numbers, there is going to be no better time in the game for Terry to use the thing; if he uses it now, it swings the numbers back in his favor, and the combination of a majority alliance and his own challenge bad-ass-ness should send him very far. So what does he do? He refuses to drop from the pole, beats Nick and keeps the damn thing in his pocket so that suddenly his alliance is down 6-3. Now, even if he brings the thing out at the next Tribal Council, all it does is save him for a week and give him no winning strategy other than pulling a Tom Westman-esque streak (and remember, Tom lost two individual immunities and was lucky to not get targeted either time).

Dumb, dumb, dumb -- and that's not even counting his lame-ass sales pitch to Shane and Cirie. To get people to give up a power position, you have to offer them an even better one, and much as I hate Shane, I had to laugh at his incredulity at Terry's "no one has to worry for two whole weeks" line of crap. If that's the best he's got, mentally, he deserves to go home the first time he loses a challenge. And now the previews suggest he's going to offer the Idol in trade? Awful, awful, awful. The only value of letting people know you have the Idol is to scare them into not voting for you as long as they can avoid it; give it up, and I don't care what promise they make to you, you're too big a threat for them to keep you around a second longer than they have to. I guess I'm rooting for Cirie to win now. Go, you leaf-phobic straight-shooter!

Meanwhile, on another miserable island, "Lost" had its first good episode in... how long has it been since the Mr. Eko show? Six months? Ten? Hard to tell. The more shows on network and cable that manage to air all their original episodes in a row, the less patience I have for the traditional rerun-heavy stretches in March and April on the networks, especially on a serialized show like this.

The point is, this was a great improvement over the rest of the Henry Gale arc, because stuff finally happened: Sayid and company found the balloon, we learned definitively that "Henry" was lying, there was some action in the hatch (even if that black-light diagram is just another tease that will get less and less interesting the more we learn about it), and there was a good flashback story. Yes, we already knew that Locke was hungry for his daddy's love above all else, but Terry O'Quinn is still the best actor this show has, and it's good to see him let loose, especially in an arena separate from the monotonous faith vs. science pissing contest he's been having with Jack all year. When I talked at the start of the season about being able to enjoy the show as long as I can divorce myself from any desire to have any major mysteries solved anytime soon, this was the kind of episode I was talking about.

Finally got around to both this week's "Scrubs" and the one from two weeks ago that I missed, thanks to the wonders of iTunes. They're already starting to blend together in my mind the way those back-to-back originals at the start of the season would, but I'm pretty sure the watchie-talkies were from two weeks ago and The Janitor's hurdling career was last night. (Janitor+mustache+'80s athletic gear+cigarettes=genius) Other good stuff from last night: Laverne getting banished to the roof and Keith practicing his winking in the background while Cox told Carla to punish him. Some questions: what the hell accent is Dr. Cox using these days? Because his pronunciation of the word "not" makes him sound like Charles Emerson Winchester by way of Wisconsin. Why was Jordan so giggly and enthusiastic at the party at the end? So not her at all. Can anyone recommend a good brand of pizza rolls? And is it just me, or has Turk become the main character this season?

I'll get to "Chris," "Earl" and "Office" tonight, but may not be able to blog about them until later in the weekend. Click here to read the full post

This and that

Sorry for the delay: been slammed at work today, and, frankly, haven't had much enthusiasm for the last few night's worth of series TV. The Gonzaga choke was much more dramatic than anything that happened on "Lost or "Veronica Mars." Quick hits, in no particular order:

"Scrubs": Ehh. This has been a brilliant season overall, but other than the peek inside Turk's sex dreams ("One time, you were skinless!") and Dr. Cox reading lines from "Streetcar," not a lot there. And would it have killed Zach Braff to shave his head? His "Garden State" girlfriend could do it, why not him? Even if they needed J.D. to be back to the bushy cut in the next episode, they already have a wig from the episode where Elliott turned into J.D. to smooch with Mandy Moore.

"Veronica Mars": Two duds in a row since they came back from hiatus, though I hear the next two are supposed to be really good. (Speaking of shaved heads, it took me forever to figure out who the girl in the preview was until I IMDb'ed it and realized it's Maebe Funke.) The episodes where Veronica tackles adult cases almost never work, and the bus crash clues are pointing so furiously at Woody Goodman that I'll be bored if he did it and annoyed if he didn't. Two bits I liked: Kendall vamping it up for Beaver, Aaron and Logan with varying degrees of success; and Logan realizing that even he has levels he shouldn't stoop to.

"Lost": Why has it taken me three episodes to realize that Balloon Guy was one of the evil genius serial killers from "The Practice"? Maybe because every scene in the hatch tends to put me to sleep these days? (Plus, didn't they eat all the food already in the "Everybody Hates Hurley" episode? Where did those Dharma-O's come from?) Other than some good performances from the underused Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim, plus Ana-Lucia meta-ing that nobody (including the audience) likes her, not a lot here.

"My Name Is Earl": I want to love this show, really I do. I watch episodes like last night's Y2K flashback, I see scenes and jokes that I know I should be laughing at, and yet the most it usually coaxes out of me is a smile. Early in the season, I complained that they didn't think the jokes through far enough, but last night felt pretty thorough to me, and yet I didn't laugh more than once or twice. I appreciate what the show's doing enough to keep watching, but I can't put my finger on what's holding me at a distance from it. Is it just me? Click here to read the full post

Wha happen? Nothin'

Last night was "Lost" at its absolute worst, teasing and teasing and not actually revealing anything or moving the plot forward. Oooooohhhh, the doomsday clock almost went haywire! Ooooohhhh, the balloon guy might be an Other! If it wasn't for the presence of Clancy Brown, a good performance by Naveen Andrews and the unintentional comedy of those awful CGI backgrounds to make Hawaii look like Iraq, the whole hour would've been a colossal waste of time. At this point, I almost prefer the episodes that have little to nothing to do with the mysteries of the island; at least there, you're not expecting more than you're going to get. Click here to read the full post

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Galactica

It's not often that I find myself liking a TV episode more than its creator does. There are plenty of times where the opposite is true (see any episode of "7th Heaven"). But I was still surprised to hear Ronald Moore trashing Friday night's "Battlestar Galactica" in his podcast after I'd enjoyed it so much.

Basically, Moore spends the entire podcast rending his garments and throwing himself on the audience's mercy because he feels the episode doesn't do a very good job of establishing the questionable ethics of the fleet's black market, or of Apollo's relationship with his past and present women, and that pretty much every scene feels like something you've seen dozens of times before in other movies and TV shows.

And, in retrospect, I think he's right about a lot of the show's faults, but in the moment, I thought it worked much better than he did because of the performances of Jamie Bamber and guest star Bill Duke. I dismissed Bamber in the miniseries and early episodes as the token prettyboy that every sci-fi show, even the good ones, gets stuck with, but I've developed a real appreciation of him over time. This whole suicidal Apollo arc could feel out of left field, but he has me buying it.

Duke, meanwhile, is one of those guys for whom someone dreamed up that cliche aboutreading the phone book and making it interesting. I like Michael Clarke Duncan and all, but how much better would "Daredevil" have been with Duke as the Kingpin?

So while I think the overexposition by the hooker at the end was awful, and that the child prostitute thing was a cheat, I loved the two central performances, as well as a deeper look at the rest of the Rag Tag Fleet. Hey, they can't all be "Pegasus."

Meanwhile, I have this one reader who hated "The Office" on first sight, yet out of some masochistic or loyal notion, gives it another shot every time I write an article about it. So when he saw my profile of the supporting actors, he tried it yet again and hated it yet again -- with one exception. Even he had to admit that this exchange between Stanley and Michael was genius:

Stanley: "This wasn't a hate crime, Michael."
Michael: "Well, I hated it!"

This is the first time since the pilot that they've even come close to borrowing a British plotline, since the original had an episode where David gets all worked up because someone e-mailed around a photo of his head on a naked woman's body, only to cool it at the end when he discovers the prankster is his buddy Finchy. At this point, though, the American characters are all so well-defined that even when the plot is similar, the episode isn't. Loved Jim's increasing levels of annoyance with Kelly, Michael's creepy stalker look at Ryan the receptionist, Dwight trying to be caller 107, Ken Howard as the perfectly-named Ed Truck, and the two poignant moments: Pam's 7 voicemails to Jim, and Michael's realization (in the scene with Ed) that he has no friends or family outside the office. I know I've been tough on Carell at times in the past, but I think both he and the writers have finally gotten a handle on the irritation/pathos ratio with Michael.

(Interestingly, when the cast and crew were at press tour, Greg Daniels said that he and the other writers got a better idea of how to write Michael sympathetically after they saw "40-Year-Old Virgin.")

And, as promised 8,000 years ago, "Lost." After the great Mr. Eko episode a few weeks ago, we've had two stinkers in a row: first, the characters' chronic inability to ask follow-up questions reaches its ridiculous apex when Jack and company fail to come away from their parley with The Others with any new information; and this week, yet another attempt to apologize for Charlie's whiny uselessness by bringing up his family issues. Unless they involve a new character (say, Libby) or the writers think of something really new to say about an old one, the show just needs to abolish all the flashbacks. They're adding nothing except another excuse for the writers to delay answering anything. Click here to read the full post

Eko... Eko... Eko...

Okay, I need to get this off my chest right away: I want a Mr. Eko lunchbox, a Mr. Eko t-shirt, and Mr. Eko Underoos. I want a Mr. Eko & Locke spin-off where they kick ass and debate philosophy every week. If I was being given a $10 million bar mitzvah, I would want Mr. Eko to be at the top of the celebrity guest list. He's not only my favorite character on "Lost" right now, he's probably my favorite character on all of television. (It helps that Vic Mackey, Tommy Gavin, Al Swearengen and Paulie Walnuts are all on hiatus right now, but still.)

The Eko/Locke scenes were the highlight of an especially strong episode of "Lost." I bag on the show a lot for all the narrative foot-dragging, but for once, the writers didn't screw around with the audience. We finally know what Kate's crime was (not that it was a shock, but it was still well-played by the usually uneven Evangeline Lilly, and especially by the actor who played her adoptive dad), we know what was on at least one of the gaps in the Dharma film (though there could be others), Sawyer is finally conscious again, Jin finally got the damn handcuff off his wrist, Walt made another appearance (sort of), etc., etc., etc.

But best of all was Eko's Bible story to Locke (and if there were any doubt before over whether the guy used to be a priest, there shouldn't be now), and his later suggestion that John not confuse coincidence with fate. Someone's needed to tell our resident zealot that for at least half a season now.

Between that and "Veronica Mars," that was about as good a two hours of TV as you're gonna find, and since I'd already seen "Veronica" last week, I didn't have to tape one and watch the other.

Far too many highlights to list 'em all, so I'll give just a few: the Cordelia vs. Willow smackdown (though the best line in that scene -- and possibly the season -- was Logan's "Rode Hard, meet Put Away Wet."); Logan and Weevil doing the whole "48 Hours"-style "We'll team up, but only after we kick the crap out of each other" thing in the men's room; the (now former) vice-principal manipulating Veronica into doing his wetwork; and Trina Echolls showing actual emotion (her hug with Lunchlady Doris put almost as much dust in my eye as the Rose/Bernard hug last week on "Lost"). The alternate ending on AOL.com was an interesting little bonus feature, but I'm glad the real show didn't go in that direction. Without spoiling it (and, if you haven't seen it yet, the only change is in the last two minutes), it would paint Veronica and the show into an uncomfortable corner that would take weeks, at least, to get out of.

Finally, today's All TV column makes fun of Fox's usual switcheroo scheduling. NBC predictably followed that by moving "My Name Is Earl" and "The Office" to Thursdays, while having back-to-back "Scrubs" episodes airing Tuesdays at 9, starting Jan. 3. (More details in tomorrow's column, or you can just read the press release here.) J.D. and Turk are back, baby! Is it time to do the Rerun dance? Click here to read the full post

Wha happen?

I know, I know, I know... the four of you who actually read this blog have all been complaining about the tardiness of the latest entry, so I'll try to tackle Wednesday through the weekend (or what I've seen of it) as quick as I can.

"Lost": The whole Zen "no answers" thing works out really well for an episode like this, which was basically a one-hour expansion of a few lines of Ana-Lucia dialogue from the week before. If you're willing to accept that there's going to be wheel-spinning and hedging and no new information except when the writers have absolutely no choice, then you can enjoy the character and thriller aspects. I liked the extended look at the tailaways, and the sort of parallel structure to the main characters, with Ana-Lucia as Kate, Mr. Eko (my favorite character on the show by far these days) as Locke and Goodwin seeming to be Jack. Brett Cullen, who played Goodwin, is one of my favorite Hey, It's That Guys (TV division), and once again he got the job done. Hopefully, either this or "West Wing" is going to lead him to another regular job. (He has a supporting role on a WB midseason show with Rebecca Romijn, but it's so lousy that he'll probably be looking for a new gig inside a month.) The scene on top of the mountain where Ana-Lucia and Goodwin pleasantly chatted while each was sizing the other up for the kill was the kind of character-based suspense this show does so damn well that I'm willing to ignore the non-info thing.

The one problem the producers have is that they introduced Ana-Lucia in a way designed to make viewers just despise her -- sneering in every scene, bullying three of the main characters, yelling loudly whenever anyone tries to get answers and, last week, killing Shannon -- and now they're backtracking and trying to show why you should like her. It doesn't work that way, which J.J. Abrams (who I know isn't very hands-on these days) should remember from the "Alias" season with Melissa George. She was also intro'd in a manner where fans had no choice but to hate her (disrupting their long-awaited Sydney/Vaughn romance), and when the effort to make her sympathetic didn't work, J.J. admitted defeat and turned her evil full-time. Ana-Lucia has built up so much bad karma with the viewers over only a few weeks that she may never enter their good graces. Maybe she'll have to go and join The Others at some point.

"Veronica Mars": An odd episode, tonally darker than even this show usually gets. Sheriff Lamb is one of the show's better recurring characters, so I like giving him some depth, so long as he doesn't suddenly turn into a nice guy. (His jerkiness is his most likable trait.) Little movement on the bus crash and only slightly more on Logan's case, though the idea of having Logan and Duncan live together is genius, since it forces Veronica and Duncan to trade insults on a regular basis.

"South Park": I'm the only person I know who saw this one and was underwhelmed. I just feel like Tom Cruise and Scientology are like a turkey shoot these days, and this could have been a lot savager and funnier than it was. The two best jokes: the "THIS IS WHAT SCIENTOLOGISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE" caption over the history video, and Stan (and, by proxy, Matt and Trey) daring the Scientologists to sue, followed by a closing credits full of John and Jane Smiths.

"Survivor": Hogeboom lives to landscape another day! Woo-hoo! What I liked about this episode the most was the irony Jamie becomes so paranoid that his allies are going to turn on him that his paranoia drives them to turn on him. Ever since Alanis Morissette ruined everyone's definition of irony, you rarely see the concept in its 100% pure form like this. Oh, and this blog entry has been brought to you by Folger's. Damn, that's good coffee! And hot!

"The O.C.": Well, I give them points for not letting Summer be dumb enough to fall into Taylor's jealousy trap -- yet -- and for letting Julie plausibly outsmart 7 of 9, but the show's overall IQ has dropped so many points since the first season that I feel uncomfortable watching it. Season three "O.C." is the kind of show that season one "O.C." would have mocked.

"ER": I'll give 'em this: as stupid as I thought the plane crash in Chicago idea was, it got me watching the show for the first time this season. Incredibly stupid, but entertaining in a C-level disaster movie way. No "ER" disaster episode is ever going to top season one's blizzard episode (where the producers didn't have to blow the budget on snow and crash effects, since everything took place inside the hospital), but this wasn't any cheesier than the helicopter crash, or the train crash, or the toxic waste spill, or the spree shooting, or... (As Matt put it, "Did they build this hospital on top of a Hellmouth?")

"SNL": I'm starting to feel like one of those monks from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" who wander around constantly smashing boards into their faces as mortification. Why else am I watching this show week after week? The problem isn't just the lousy writing and flimsy premises (a house music parody? a sketch designed to let the cast showcase their impressions of late '50s celebrities?), but the fact that it's a cast full of second and third-tier "SNL" types. The writing has been uneven practically since the show began, but the good casts always have at least one or two people who are funny even with lousy material: Gilda, Belushi and Murray in the original cast, Lovitz and Hartman in the late '80s, Will Ferrell in the late '90s. This group has some talented impressionists (Heder's Pacino is the best I've ever seen) and people who can be funny on the rare occasion when the sketch is working, but the closest thing they have to people who can rise above the material are Will Forte and Amy Poehler, but even they only occasionally can make something out of nothing.

"The Simpsons": Not the funniest episode of the season by a long stretch, but I give them points for a relatively coherent Homer-Lisa story, though the California recall election parody felt like filler between emotional beats of the story. This is two weeks in a row where they've tried to return to smaller stories about the family, and it's clear that most of the current writers have either let those muscles atrophy or never had them in the first place (the younger ones who grew up on the years of the show where Homer flew in the space shuttle and toured with Hullabalooza). Still, I appreciate the effort now and then; the first couple of seasons weren't always that hilarious, but there was a heart to those stories that kept me around, long after our hero turned into Jerkass Homer.

More on "Grey's Anatomy," "Curb" and other Sunday shows either later Monday or on Tuesday morning. I'll get a relatively fixed schedule on this thing sooner or later. Really. Click here to read the full post

Buddy ball

My big viewing extravaganza for the evening was going through the special features disc on my new DVD copy of "Hoosiers" (only my favorite movie and the inspiration for my hopeless addiction to underdog sports stories). Thanks to the deleted scenes, I now know how Buddy winds up rejoining the team and what Barbara Hershey was doing in the movie in the first place. Good times.

I saved the new "South Park" to watch tonight, but I got to Wednesday's other two big shows, with mixed but mostly positive reaction to both:

"Lost": Another flashback with no real new info, but Jin and Sun are two of the show's best (and most underused) characters, so I was happy to see them get some time in the spotlight. In the present tense, I like Mr. Echo a lot, especially now that I'm no longer expecting him to throw Sawyer over a table and do to him what Adebisi did to Peter Schibetta. On the other hand, Ana-Lucia seems to exist solely to complain whenever any of our heroes (and, by extension, the audience) try to get answers about what's going on, and if I didn't think she could stomp me good, I'd want to punch her. Good to see Jack has temporarily removed the stick from his ass, and that Jin is slowly getting to use English outside of dream sequences. From a What Did We Learn standpoint, not much here; from a Did I Enjoy It point of view, lots to chew on.

"Veronica Mars": Shortly after season one's "The Girl Next Door," Rob Thomas told me that he wasn't crazy about Veronica getting involved in adults-only cases, that it felt too "Rockford Files" for him. (No disrespect intended for ol' Jim Rockford, TV's greatest private eye, but this is a very different kind of show.) The A-story about the paranoid fiancee-to-be was a slight improvement -- Veronica's airhead bimbo routine is always worth some laughs -- but still felt like it didn't belong here. Lots of ongoing subplot business in the background, though I think I need to rewatch the Veronica/Weevil scene at least three more times before I can figure out what the hell they were talking about. Good to see the return of Mac and the Mars Investigations office, but outside the Veronica/Logan argument (because when aren't those great?), a B- episode. Click here to read the full post

Hurley, Hamlin, Hogeboom and hating

Yesterday was Yom Kippur, but I've caught up on most of my Wednesday and Thursday shows.

"Lost": Hey, an episode that gave every castmember (except Malcolm David Kelley) something to do! Is that allowed? They've only done a few of these ensemble pieces, but I liked it; it's refreshing to take an occasional break from the various Big Mysteries to just spend time with the people of the island. (And we did get a fair amount of development in the story of the other Flight 815 survivors, including the touching and surprising introduction of Rose's husband.)

Also, I can never complain about an episode where the main character is Hurley. On the other hand, I don't think any of this season's flashback stories have been especially illuminating. We already knew that Jack had married a woman whose paralysis he'd miraculously cured, that Michael was upset about losing Walt, that Locke was bitter about losing his kidney, and that the lottery money was the worst thing to ever happen to Hurley. Admittedly, this was a slightly different angle on that than the cursed numbers, but I'm starting to wonder if we just need to stop seeing flashbacks of anyone but Sayid, Sawyer and Kate, all of whom still have some secrets in their past.

(By the way, I downloaded an earlier "Lost" episode from iTunes to get a sense of the quality, and about the most I could enlarge it was to 3" x 3", which isn't good enough for a widescreen show like this.)

"Veronica Mars": Well, that didn't take long. Veronica appears to have solved the big mystery by the end of episode three: Logan's dad hired his old stunt driver to crash the bus he thought Veronica was on. Except that nothing on "Veronica Mars" is ever that simple, and I'm sure that by the time the season is over, we'll discover that Aaron had absolutely nothing to do with the crash.

I've heard complaints about the season so far, and I suppose it's human nature to decide instantly that the new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff ("I loved Dave Pirner until he sold out and started dating Winona Ryder, man!"), but I'm not seeing it. Was the season premiere a little heavy on exposition? Yeah, but so was the pilot. I'm really enjoying all the new storylines and characters -- Dick Casablancas Sr.'s "Shred everything!" exodus was like something out of "Arrested Development," only he got away with it -- and the writers haven't lost their touch with the older ones like Sheriff Lamb, whose staredown with Veronica was hysterical. With a lot of my cable favorites on hiatus, I'd say this is the best show airing on television right now.

"Survivor": This is around the point where I've dropped previous seasons like Thailand and Vanuatu, but this episode may keep me around a while. For the first time all season, it didn't feel like "The Stephenie Show" (and the more I see of her, the less I'm liking her; it's like Rupert on All-Stars, where knowledge of her celebrity has ruined what made her so appealing in the first place), as we got decent glimpses of Brian, Amy, Blake, Danni and others. The environment still seems too brutal for decent scheming and plotting, but I'll give it a few more weeks, if only to see whether Danni creates a spin-off of "Bait Blake" called "Goad Gary." ("So, Gary, didn't you play quarterback for the Cowboys?" "No, but I worked for the Cowboys, in a helmet-wearing capacity." "Oh, okay.")

(And speaking of Danni, I haven't been this concerned about the well-being of a TV character since Christopher tried to strangle Adriana. Lots of people make the mistake of going on the show without fat they can afford to lose, but she may be the first contestant who went into the game with a negative body fat percentage. When we got a sideways look at her in the pool, Marian gasped and said, "She needs to be in a hospital right now!" I mean, at this point, she makes Calista Flockhart look like a Picasso model. Check out how far her hip bone is jutting out here.)

"Everybody Hates Chris": Last week's two-laugh episode had me worried, but this one was at least as good as the pilot, if not funnier. The sausage, the detention lady, the montage of Rochelle quitting her jobs for no reason -- everything was clicking. And after two weeks of ratings dips, the numbers actually went up last night. Die, "Joey," die! Click here to read the full post