Slowly Going Bald

Still, a solid episode. Always good to spend time with Henry Ben:

"Lost" 6x7: "Dr. Linus"

Some solid moments in this week's two-part episode, but even so, I think the show is nearing the end of its creative life. And that's okay.

"The Office" 6x17-18: "The Delivery"

This show is as much an endurance test for the viewers as the contestants. Every step of the process is simultaneously made to feel like the biggest moment in the season and just another step on the road to the real drama. It's everywhere and nowhere. I'm looking forward to May.

"American Idol," Week Eight: Top 10 Guys Perform

"American Idol," Week Eight: Top 10 Girls Perform

"American Idol," Week Eight: 4 Singers Eliminated

I know it feels like this blog is turning into a giant repository for "Lost" and "American Idol" recaps, but I swear, things will change soon. I'll be at South by Southwest, and have some other pieces kicking around. But for now, well, I'm up to my eyes in TV recaps. I hope you like them, and choose to stick around:

"Lost" 6x6: "Sundown"

This week sees the beginning of "American Idol" proper, with live performance shows and elimination episodes. It's late February; the season runs into May. I have no idea how I will make it.

"American Idol," Week Seven: Top 12 Girls Perform

"American Idol," Week Seven: Top 12 Guys Perform

"American Idol," Week Seven: 4 Singers Eliminated

Kind of. Anyway, a fun episode.

"Lost" 6x5: "Lighthouse"

A solid episode. Always good to see the real Locke tooling around again:

"Lost" 6x4: "The Substitute"

"American Idol" is now wrapping up its Hollywood Week in typically slow fashion. By the end of this season, I'll be exhausted from all the fake-outs and postponed reveals.

"American Idol," Week Six: Hollywood Round, Part Three

UPDATE: "American Idol," Week Six: The Top 24 Are Announced

Better than last week's, that's for sure:

"The Office" 6x15: "Manager and Salesman"

Last night's "Lost" was a decent episode, but mainly a set-up for that final reveal.

"Lost" 6x3: "What Kate Does"

This week saw the beginning of the major cuts that will winnow the group down to 24 semifinalists, with a final winner being crowned in, let's say, April 2012.

"American Idol," Week Five: Hollywood Round, Part One

UPDATE: "American Idol," Week Five: Hollywood Round, Part Two

Last night's "The Office" was flat and boring and not nearly as good as the preceding episodes of "Community" and "Parks and Recreation." It reminded me of how Jim and Pam were jerks for a while a couple seasons back. Here's hoping the show gets its groove back soon:

"The Office" 6x14: "Sabre"

"Lost" is back for its final season, and I'll be recapping it for Pajiba, because I'm just that obsessive.

"Lost" 6x1: "LA X"

This week wraps the major audition phase (it's hard to think of the season as just one very long audition), and as such, there's a kind of finals week sense of boredom and waiting for something to happen.

"American Idol," Week Four: Denver Auditions

"American Idol," Week Four: The Best of the Rest

It's not even to the first round of real cuts yet. We're still in cattle calls.

"American Idol," Week Three: Los Angeles Auditions

"American Idol," Week Three: Dallas Auditions

Over at the Houston Press, I finish my two-part look at the Conan-Jay showdown and what it really means.

Click here for the post.

And for those who missed it, here's his farewell speech:

I waited a month for a new episode of "The Office" and got a clip show. Meh.

"The Office" 6x13: "The Banker"

This season of "American Idol" kept on rolling with more bad singers, good singers, and seriously deluded people. (Also, in re: the art for this post: You're welcome.)

"American Idol," Week Two: Chicago Auditions

"American Idol," Week Two: Orlando Auditions

Over at the Houston Press, I've got a blog post that tries to pin down what's happening with the late-night wars and where the wheels came off the wagon. It's mainly a chance to work through stuff I'll explore more with a follow-up post next week, after (if rumors are to be believed) Conan O'Brien leaves "The Tonight Show" this Friday.

Click here for the post.

I've started blogging about "American Idol" for the Houston Press. I'd thought my time covering "Dancing With the Stars" was a long stretch, but "Idol" runs into May, by which point I'm sure I'll be half-mad from immersion in America's biggest and maybe weirdest TV show. But for now, on with the recaps:

"American Idol," Week One: Boston Auditions

"American Idol," Week One: Atlanta Auditions

For a year and a half now, I've been replaying a conversation I had with my friend's father at the friend's wedding. We (the wedding party) had been pressed into service to set up tables and chairs and place settings for the rehearsal dinner, and though I can speak for no one else, I did my level best to do as little as possible. Once we were done, though, the father chatted me up briefly about my career, knowing that I was a copy editor by day and a freelance film and TV critic on nights and weekends. He decided to ask me about the disparity between critical consensus and box-office tallies; basically, he wanted to know how I could presume to act as if I was in the know when I'd expressed displeasure for a movie that had grossed billions.

I can't reconstruct the dialogue with much accuracy, but I do remember being surprised at his casual glee in asserting that I probably wasn't tuned into the right frequency if something I trashed could make so much money. I didn't know what to say just then, and honestly wasn't in any position to begin to wrap my mind around an actual discussion of the issue; I still had a full weekend ahead of me. But I've been thinking it about it ever since, and I finally figured out what I should have said to him:

I know what I'm talking about.

Does that mean, though, that I know all I need to know, or will ever know, or want to know? No. I am constantly trying to learn more, read more, understand more, etc. Does it mean that I was born with the ability to understand art in a way he never could? Of course not. That'd be ludicrous to suggest and against the whole idea of being a critic, which is to get people interested in and excited about movies they might not know about or might have dismissed the first time around.

But I do know what I'm talking about, and it's falsely modest to pretend otherwise. If I'd had my wits about me then, I'd probably have talked to him about communities of informed judgment, the groups of educated doers in a given field that pass down knowledge and skill through generations. It's similar to an academic field, like mathematics: Every new student isn't reinventing formulas, but being ushered into the world of learning that's been there for thousands of years. Movies are the same way. You start out reaching for anything and everything, and you learn and read and study and analyze and eventually understand, and then that becomes the foundation for the next phase of your learning. The things I bring to the table now are things I wouldn't have known to do five years ago, and they'll seem childish in another five. You're constantly growing, but that doesn't make you ignorant.

I'd also have liked to point out that he's the same, and everyone is. He's a minister, and if I asked him for his opinion on a spiritual matter or scriptural passage, one for which he'd be able to bring his life and study to bear to help me — if I asked him that, and then ignored him because five friends with no training said the opposite, he'd likely be frustrated with the fact that I chose to let a crowd dissuade me from something counseled by a more learned individual. I'd be right to want to get multiple opinions, but misguided to count his as less than or equal to that of someone who lacked the depth of understanding really required by the situation.

That's one of the reasons why I trust some people's analysis of movies more than others. It has nothing to do with personal relationships and everything to do with the fact that they know more than most people (certainly more than me). Quality has nothing to do with reception. A good work of art is a good work of art, whether it's seen by millions of people or just a dozen. And because I trust people who have studied, who have clawed their way to a position of education and reason, and because I am on that path myself, I have to put more faith in their analyses than box-office returns. It's not because I discount the will of the people (at least, not wholly); it's because I know what I'm doing. I ask you to trust me, and see what you think.

Seriously, everyone needs to be watching "Parks and Recreation." Good first season, great second one.

Over at the Houston Press' Hair Balls blog (no, I don't know why they call it that), I take a moment to reflect on the best and worst Christmas specials ever made. Feel free to berate me for any glaring omissions.

The Best and Worst Christmas Specials of All Time

Maybe not as great as "Christmas Party," but still pretty good.

"The Office" 6x13: "Secret Santa"

A great wrap for the first 13 episodes, and a packed set-up for the rest of the season. I'm already looking forward to the show's return in April.

"Glee" 1x13: "Sectionals"

Incidentally, this is how bad the crop is with the local Fox affiliate. The show's masked in widescreen so people like me, with old-school tube TVs, can see the whole thing. But the Fox network here broadcasts it in full-frame. You can actually see it snap from widescreen to full-frame at the beginning of the episode, so the sides of the picture are cut off. Every week. It happens with other shows, too, but I don't watch Fox that often. This is annoying, and I know that I'm probably one of the few who notice it, but I don't like having to watch a show where people have conversations with characters who have been cut almost entirely out of the frame. I guess I'll have to wait until I get the DVDs to really experience the show. Thanks, Fox 26, for sucking so consistently:

This week's "The Office" was one of those episodes you don't enjoy, you just try and survive. I barely did:

"The Office" 6x11: "Scott's Tots"

Finally! Tons of plot and action, and one of the best musical numbers in weeks:

"Glee" 1x12: "Mattress"

[I have no idea how many posts I'll do in this series, or how often I'll write one, but I just couldn't resist creating it.]

I love movies and TV. I have a pretty healthy respect for language. I don't think those two should be mutually exclusive. From time to time, though, I notice weird grammatical quirks that I can't ignore.

"In the Shadow of Two Gunmen" is the two-hour opener of the second season of "The West Wing," and as I've said, it's a wonderful episode. There's a scene in the second half where Josh is waiting in the airport to fly home for his father's funeral when Jed Bartlet, still just a presidential contender, shows up to comfort him. It's a moving scene, but there's a moment that always jars me:

The emphasis is mine. Creator Aaron Sorkin is a gifted writer, but he's no stranger to grammatical slip-ups that masquerade as teachable moments. (Josh's lecture about the proper use of "an historical" instead of "a historical," which is actually kind of wrong, comes to mind.) I don't wanna get into double negatives and litotes; I just think we should untangle the sentence to see what it actually says.

First, let's just flip the negative in the first half and see what happens. The new sentence would be, "If you lose this election, it isn't going to be because you didn't try hard enough." The joking implication here would be that if Bartlet loses, he'll have to share some of the blame. No one will be able to accuse him of not trying hard to lose; this is what Josh would be saying if this were his dialogue. This meaning seems to fit with the tone of the scene and Josh's gentle admonition to Bartlet, who is on the verge of flaking out on his acceptance speech just to see Josh off at the airport. This new sentence would have Josh jokingly telling Bartlet that Bartlet's doing a solid job at throwing the game, and that if he loses the election, well, it won't be because he didn't try, meaning it will partially be because he did try.

But that's not what Sorkin wrote. He wrote, "If you don't lose this election, it isn't going to be because you didn't try hard enough." (Again, emphasis mine.) That reverses the meaning of the first half of the sentence, making it in effect: "If you win this election, it isn't going to be because you didn't try hard enough." Which would make sense from an electoral perspective, I guess — if Bartlet wins, it will indeed be in part because of the effort he put forth — but it's not at all the meaning Josh and Sorkin need. Josh is kindly telling the president to get it together, that his behavior runs the risk of losing the election. Bartlet's appearance at the airport has Josh half-worried that Bartlet will blow the acceptance speech and the nomination; it wouldn't make sense for him to weirdly commend Bartlet on his work so far in a convoluted way.

The sentence, as written and spoken, is wrong. For it to make grammatical sense, and for it to click with the tone of the episode and scene, it should be: "If you lose this election, it isn't going to be because you didn't try hard enough." Oh well.

"Glee" was cute enough this week, but definitely felt like a filler ep:

"Glee" 1x11: "Hairography"

I honestly didn't know if this day would ever come, but it has: This season of "Dancing With the Stars" is finished.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Ten

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Ten Results

"The Office" 6x10: "Shareholders Meeting"

A pretty cute episode, with some fun songs and moments:

"Glee" 1x10: "Ballad"

The end is so, so close now.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Nine

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Nine Results

Ever since the first time I worked my way through "The Wire," it's never been far from my mind. In terms of story, structure, theme, acting, execution, and every other measurable parameter, it's the greatest TV series in American history. That greatness applies to its scope, too, as well as the shadow it casts over a landscape littered with lesser competitors.

Over at Pajiba, our resident video editor has put together a fantastic compilation of the 100 greatest quotes from the series. It's a noble endeavor, worthy as much for what it includes as for the fun debates it can spark over what got left out. Here's what I wrote about the series and its love affair with language:

"The stories are sprawling, epic, Greek-tragic ruminations on the nature of American conquest and the sacrifices made by the people at the bottom of the ladder on behalf of the ineptitude of those at the top. What’s more, the dialogue is this thick gun-blast of hardened profanity, street slang, police argot, and the undeniably Shakespearean pleasures of hearing gifted orators hold forth on the tilted battle between good and evil."

Take a look:

You know the drill by now: "The Office" is great. "FlashForward" is abysmal. Onward:

"The Office" 6x09: "Murder"

"FlashForward" 1x08: "Playing Cards With Coyote"

A solid little episode. It was good to shift the focus to Artie for a while. Hopefully the other side characters will eventually get some more love, too:

"Glee" 1x09: "Wheels"

Aaron Carter got kicked off "Dancing With the Stars," as was inevitable. I also laughed a little when his profession was listed as "singer," since "unemployed pseudo-vocalist" would probably be more accurate.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Eight

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Eight Results

It was another solid night for "The Office" and another typically awful night for "FlashForward." I really can't believe the ABC show got picked up for a whole season. Then again, watching it is like watching "CSI" or something in that it's a window to a world my friends and I don't often visit, i.e., the world of crappy TV. It's an interesting reminder that many viewers only set their bar so high when it comes to TV series.

Anyway:

"The Office" 6x08: "Double Date"

"FlashForward" 1x07: "Already Ghosts"

Also, here's a fun clip someone reminded me of the other day:

Michael Irving finally, finally got kicked off the show this week. Still, I can't believe there are five "stars" left. If that means five more weeks of competition, I'm flying to L.A. and murdering them all.

Also, I think it's pretty clear from the photo that if you aren't watching this show, you are MISSING OUT BIG TIME MISTER.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Seven

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Seven Results

Here's this week's write-up of "The Office" for Houston Press:

"The Office" 6x07: "Koi Pond"

Also, in a move that surprised no one, "FlashForward" sucked again:

"FlashForward" 1x06: "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps"

I'm not surprised that Melissa Joan Hart was sent packing, but really, how is Michael Irvin still in this? I think he's got something on the judges, or he threatened them with a blade.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Six

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Six Results

This week's "The Office" was another great one:

"The Office" 6x06: "The Lover"

And OH YEAH: "FlashForward" was actually fun this week:

"FlashForward" 1x05: "Gimme Some Truth"

This week's "Glee" was back to form, and though I'm getting tired of the way the episodes seem to alternate between quality and something decidedly less so, it's still one of the most enjoyable shows on the air.

"Glee" 1x08: "Mash-Up"

This week's "Dancing With the Stars" featured, among its typical horrors, a tribute to Michael Jackson. The whole thing was achingly bad.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Five

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Five Results

This week's "Glee" was a pretty weak episode of nothing but filler. Disappointing.

"Glee" 1x07: "Takedown"

The episode also made shameless use of auto-tuning and echo effects in literally unbelievable ways. But at least that reminded me to see if a new installment of "Auto-Tune the News" had been released, and sure enough, it had. So here you go:

It was another glorious week on Dancing With the Stars. Seriously: Who watches this? Is it only, as one reader suggested, addled mothers?

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Four

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Four Results

Heck yes I got a little misty. You know you did, too:

"The Office" 6x04: "Niagara"

Related: Dustin wrote a really sweet piece about Jim and Pam as a relatable, realistic couple. Check it out.

Oh yeah: I'm still blogging about FlashForward, which for the past two weeks has squandered the momentum built up in the pilot. What a sadly weak show. I hope it can turn things around:

"FlashForward" 1x03: "137 Sekunden"

This week's Glee was a really solid episode, with some of the most fun performances yet:

"Glee" 1x06: "Vitamin D"

Tom DeLay, that old sweaty bastard, quit "Dancing With the Stars" because of stress fractures. I didn't think he'd make it all the way, but I'd hoped to have at least two more weeks of the guy. Now I just have to watch Donny Osmond. THANKS TOM.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Three

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Three Results

Here's this week's write-up of "The Office" for Houston Press:

"The Office" 6x03: "The Promotion"

I should also here admit that I'm really looking forward to the wedding episode next week. It's possible I got a little choked up at the commercial.

Oh yeah: I'm also blogging about "FlashForward," which is still fun, but I'm waiting for it to get great.

"FlashForward" 1x02: "White to Play"

Here's the latest "Glee" write-up for the Houston Press. I thought the episode was weaker than the previous week's, but still had some good moments. Now that Rachel is finally back in the glee club, here's hoping that's where the focus will be.

"Glee" 1x05: "The Rhodes Not Taken"

Here are this week's Dancing With the Stars posts. Did I use the image of Kathy Ireland because she's the one who got kicked off, or just to get you in trouble for reading this at work? You'll have to click to find out!

...Kathy Ireland gets kicked off. But please read the posts anyway. I need to keep the traffic up so I look like a viable hire. Gracias.

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Two

"Dancing With the Stars," Week Two Results

More from Houston Press:

"The Office" 6x02: "The Meeting"

Oh yeah, I also wrote up "The Vampire Diaries." It's horrible.

Over at the Houston Press, I've started blogging about "Glee." Get your choir on:

"Glee," Episode 4: "Preggers"

And just in case you can't wait for it:

I'm going to blogging about TV for the Houston Press, and while I'm still debating whether to link to every entry in a post here or just promote the bigger ones, I figured I'd promote the first few. Also, I'll be covering a wide range of shows, so while that means I'll get to write about "The Office," it also means I'll be talking about "Dancing With the Stars." Yeah. Last night's episode of "DWTS" was my first, and as insane as I'd thought it would be, especially watching Tom DeLay do pelvic thrusts to "Wild Thing."

If you want to know more, read on:

"Dancing With the Stars," Week One, Part One

UPDATE: "Dancing With the Stars," Week One, Part Two

UPDATE: "Dancing With the Stars," Week One Results

One of the easiest bombs to lob as a professional critic is to demean a film or TV series as "manipulative." This is also one of the most misleading and unthinking ways to attack a work of art. One of the goals of a good story is to evoke emotion, to stir up in the viewer feelings of joy or sorrow or empathy or any one of ten thousand; the fictional narrative is constructed specifically to manipulate you into that state. What we really mean when we call something manipulative is that it is falsely manipulative, i.e., the situations that unfolded to arrive at the given conflict or resolution felt forced, or cheap, or predictable, or dumb, or in any way unbelievable. Good storytelling makes the scripted feel surprising, and it makes the inevitable feel crafted by fate.

This came home as I rewatched the latter half of the second season of "The West Wing" recently. It's revealed in the first season that President Bartlet suffers from a relapsing-remitting course of multiple sclerosis, but the disease is kept secret from the staff and the world at large. The second season of the show becomes increasingly about Bartlet's decision to run for re-election, which would break a promise he made to his wife out of deference to his illness to limit himself to one term, but creator and writer Aaron Sorkin isn't about to make Bartlet's m.s. some clunky weight around the neck of a great story. In other words, though the disclosure of the disease to the public is unavoidable and destined to become an important part of the re-election arc and the rest of the series, Sorkin isn't going to employ some sitcom-level hijinks in which Bartlet's yakking about his m.s. treatments on the phone when some aide accidentally picks up the extension and hears all about it. To have the revelation come out that way would feel arbitrary and stupid and unoriginal, and it would feel that way because (a) it would be all those things, and worse, but also (b) that would rob the viewer of seeing a realistic, natural story play out among a stable of smart characters. No, Sorkin does the best and only available thing: He has someone figure out the secret.

It's impossible to understate just how vital this is to the integrity of the series, the characters, and the viewing experience. Sorkin's political drama moved fast and quick, running on adrenaline and wit and pure unfiltered hope. (For more of my gushing over the show's second season, click here.) It was a smart show about smart people, and to have such a major plot development left to less graceful devices would've been out of place. What's more, these characters had spent two seasons proving their worth, devotion, and intellect, and there could be no better way to honor that than to have one of them — communications director Toby Ziegler — discover the president's secret by just sitting in his office and thinking about the various clues (the president's reluctance to discuss re-election, the vice president's posturing) scattered around him. Toby blasts the president for his behavior, but coming as it does on the heels of his discovery, it doesn't play out so much like self-righteous thundering as it does legitimate anger. The show is honest to its emotions, and that's what makes it such worthwhile viewing. Any series can be a soap, but it takes real skill to make something this intelligent and nimble and captivating. And smart.

I've been rewatching "The Wire" over the past month or so, reflecting on the work as a whole even more than I did my first time through, and I've come to realize that one of the show's many strengths is the way it creates nuanced characters without forfeiting its moral compass. This sounds easy, but it's incredibly hard to do, and pulling it off requires work.

One of the easiest and most popular ways to describe really well-made movies and TV series is also one of the most misleading. Faced with an army of finely drawn characters, especially on a long-form drama like "The Wire" that plays out over several years, it can be tempting to make a claim along the lines of, "There are no good guys or bad guys." It's not that this statement is evil; it's just that it fundamentally ignores the larger complications of great storytelling and places dangerous limits on the art in question.

That's because in a great story, there are still good and bad people, but these people occasionally do things at odds with their basic moral make-up. Omar is a bad, vicious man, a killer and thief not often given to remorse, but he feels genuine love in a relationship. Lester Freamon is a good, decent police, but he's not above burning a political figure for the hell of it. Herc is a brutish and dim officer, but when internal affairs comes calling, he takes the heat for his department and spares two other officers any punishment. Etc., etc., etc.

That's the glory of nuance, and what turns a good story into a great one. Good and bad aren't eliminated, but co-exist within a character. Saying that no one in the story is good or evil is wrong-headed, and it's unfair to just how complicated the fictional world actually is.

Ever since I started to try and form coherent thoughts on why people see bad movies, I've found myself examining a tangential problem: namely, that a lot of people don't know what they want from filmed entertainment in any medium, or even why they particularly respond to certain TV series or movies. There's nothing inherently wrong or evil about this; it's just the way most everyone operates, trusting a vague combination of gut instinct and unexamined reaction to tell them they like or dislike a given story. But I think it's important to think about what you respond to, and what you want to respond to, and what you see others respond to, and how all of those and more can change and affect each other.

I've always been drawn to story and character, falling in love with the movies or series that create the most convincingly drawn universes or arcs or populations. But I've realized those related but disparate areas can be traced back/up to a broader concern for honesty above all else. I love all sorts of movies and shows, but they all either reflect an honest view of the world as it can be understood by those living in it or else construct different versions of that existence that still function under relatable and realistic character motivations as well as respect an internal consistency, refusing to violate their own rules.

Just coming to that conclusion, and learning from it, and knowing how to express it, and what it means to say it, where to look for its evidences, took years of watching and writing and thinking. It just did. The simple and ugly and cruel-sounding truth is that some people think about these things, and some don't. As an example, though Roger Ebert isn't quite what he used to be, he can still hit something out of the park when he tries because he has spent decades thinking about what he loves and why he loves it.

But it's also important to realize that loving honesty, as broad as that sounds (and, well, is), doesn't mean limiting myself to mumblecore or documentaries. It means respecting all brands of storytelling that respect their characters and viewers, and that make an attempt to be honest in their machinations. All fictional stories are plotted, but the good ones make the planned feel natural. For instance, Die Hard operates pretty clearly in the realm of the fantastic, but its enduring appeal comes from the way it creates a likable hero who exists in a heightened world but behaves with a recognizable rationality: He sweats, bleeds, plans, regrets his sins, hopes for a better life, tries to do right. It's my favorite action movie for its style, pacing, story, and originality, but also because of the way John McClane just makes sense on an emotional level. Hold it up against a Michael Bay movie and you can see that not all movies, even actioners, are cut from the same cloth. All explosions are not created equal.

From the other end of the spectrum, too, are the stories whose honesty takes such strong root in the real world that their stylization or lack thereof only enhances that relatability. There's no mistaking the heightened, precisely designed Rushmore for the real world, but it remains one of my favorite films (if not the favorite) for its absolutely honest portrayal of youth, confusion, heartbreak, and the sweet damnation at the core of the human condition that says not only do we suffer, but that we can survive more than we knew. It is true to its characters and their motivations, offering a specifically fictional version of honest and true feelings and events.

That commitment to honesty can have added impact when it informs all aspects of the film or series. One of the (many, many) reasons that "The Wire" is the best television show ever created is the way in which it just shatters the standard for verisimilitude in filmed entertainment. Every moment serves the greater story, every character is sharply drawn and beautifully nuanced, and every fragment of dialogue feels plucked from the mouths of the men and women who lived the lives that inspired the stories on the screen. It is honest to a fault, honest to its heart, and honest above all things. It is recognizable as a perfect story not because it defines quality but because it adheres to the definition passed down through all art, to hew as closely as possible to the beats and rhythms in the heart and soul of every viewer, and to make a made-up world feel like it's right outside the window. I look for honesty because that's what's worth seeking.

DrawMuh

CahMehDee

MissTurHee

SciFi

A pretty decent clip show:

Click here for the review.

Also, because I got laid off from The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday, this will be my last review for them for a while. So, there's that.

Eh. Canadian and dull:

Click here for the review.

Man, I missed Conan.

Click here for the review.

Lightweight but still entertaining. A fun little summer show.

Click here for the review.

A good little TV-movie about Churchill and World War II:

Click here for the review.

From Mike Judge, I expected a little more.

Click here for the review.

Jesse James doesn't come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer. This is not a total surprise.

Click here for the review.

Man, when "Lost" went to a white screen, I just sat there, wondering how the hell I was going to survive until 2010 (!) to see what happened.

Also, in re: Locke, I gotta say: It feels good to be right. I don't do a lot of major theorizing about the show, but that one clicked with me back during "Dead Is Dead."

And finally, because I am a nerd like this, I am already planning my headline theme for next season's write-ups.

Click here for the recap.

A cute, energetic, funny show with lots of potential. (I hope I was able to convey that in the review; space constraints are killer at work, and 425 words is a "longer" review, which for anyone that knows me is a cruel, cruel joke.)

Click here for the review.

The first half of the season finale of "Lost" was, predictably, awesome:

Click here for the recap.

I wrote the feature package at work for the 100th episode of "The Office," which included a story about the series and an interview with Greg Daniels. (Daniels, who's a dry and very funny guy, also worked on the fantastic and underrated "King of the Hill.")

Click here for the story.

Click here for the Q&A.

"Lost" keeps barreling ahead, adding one more solid episode to an already strong season:

Click here for the recap.

Think about it.

Not good.

Click here for the review.

I have a theory about John Locke. Could be unbelievably wrong, but it's still a fun theory. Plus I make an epistemology joke:

Click here for the recap.

My bottom line for the review: "A dull thriller that might impress your grandmother."

Click here for the review.

My bottom line for the review: "A dull thriller that might impress your grandmother."

Click here for the review.

A pretty solid comedy.

Click here for the review.

My first TV reviews for The Hollywood Reporter are now live. First up is the season premiere of FX's "Rescue Me." Click here for the review.

I also take a look at Comedy Central's "Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire," which is just bad. Click here for the review.

Another solid episode:

Click here for the recap.

Also, the Barracks' library is apparently just littered with genre titles from the 1960s and '70s.

Click here for the recap.

[For the forgetful or learning impaired, be warned again that there are of course spoilers ahead.]

Bad TV shows air all the time. Most TV is bad, and there's only so much that can be really gained from wasting ink, pixels, or breath complaining about how much "Two and a Half Men" sucks. There's no surprise there, and the arguments are almost too easy to make. But when a good show — indeed, when a great one — tumbles from its former glory and spends its last few moments gasping in a gutter unimaginably far from the heights from which it launched, then it's necessary and imperative to talk about what happened, and why. That's how "Battlestar Galactica" ended the other night, with a sputtering fall across the finish line, and I greet its resolution not with applause or joy but with the sad commitment of watching a family member finally succumb to a terminal disease. Things used to be so bright and almost transcendent, but this last season has bludgeoned the joy from the series and turned it into an exercise in how to take a fascinating fictional universe and leave it in ruins.

The entire season was one example after another of aborted storytelling and cheated narratives, but things really began to take a turn for the worse in "The Ties That Bind," which shoehorned too many subplots into one episode, one of which followed Cally from her discovery that Tyrol was a Cylon to her attempted escape with Nicky to her murder by Tory. The whole thing occupies maybe 20 minutes of screen time, and though it's an interesting idea that plays on the mercurial loyalties of the crew to each other, it's a horribly botched execution that mangles what should have taken multiple episodes to unwind. The writers and producers could have mined Cally's fear of and prejudice toward the Cylons and how she struggled to reconcile that with her unwavering love for Tyrol, which would have deepened Cally's character and put a specific face on the general atmosphere of paranoia between humans and Cylons. But none of that happened. She was killed and mourned in a cheap memorial that betrayed everything that had come before.

That's pretty much how the series finale played out, too: as a series of solid ideas ruined by execution, with creator/writer Ronald Moore clumsily swinging a wrecking ball at something that had once towered over the rest of the television landscape. The series began as a sharp, well-rendered examination of what it means to live in a just and free society; what it means to live morally when there are so few people left that laws can barely be enforced; the role of religion in government and vice versa; the slippery slope of the military-industrial complex; etc. But it ended with a suicide mission to save Hera, a human-Cylon hybrid whose importance is never fully explained or sold to the viewers. Cavil believes her genetic code contains the keys to Cylon salvation, now that they've had their resurrection hub destroyed, and her blood did beat back President Roslin's cancer for a while. But Adama never managed to make his decision to save Hera convincing, mostly because her value was never firmly established. Yes, the theory of her relevance was constantly pushed, like when her abstract doodles turned out to be the sheet music to the "Galactica" universe's version of "All Along the Watchtower," whose notes can be turned into mathematical equations that plot the course to Earth. (As embarrassed as you are to read that, I felt even worse typing it.) But Hera was always a thing, never a person; she never said a word, just sat there looking beatific and trying to look like she wasn't a randomly invented plot point that suddenly had to become meaningful.

What's more, the flip side to Hera's existence as a narrative place-holder is that the Galactica's final mission wasn't one to save Earth (or New Earth), or defeat the Cylons once and for all, or to rescue their own society. It was to do something that just didn't carry as much emotional weight. The effects and presentation were still fantastic, despite the fact that the Cylon Colony existed on the edge of a black hole that was mentioned and then dropped. (Regular readers will now how much I hate it when movies or TV series break the Chekhov's gun rule.) But the sequence couldn't hold a candle to Adama's decision to ride to the rescue at the beginning of Season Three, when he jumped Galactica into atmosphere above New Caprica and launched a Viper barrage to save the imprisoned colonists. That earlier scene had better action and suspense precisely because it was anchored to a greater emotional outcome, namely, the survival of humanity. How would that have changed if Hera had been left behind? Starbuck already knew the jump coordinates, or arrived at them without again consulting the child. What purpose did she serve?

Similarly, almost nothing was gained by the flashbacks to Caprica before the fall, unless someone out there really wanted to see Adama puke on himself again. The characters' personalities weren't advanced in any way — Tigh still likes booze and strippers! No shit! — and whatever sense of destiny or fate for which Moore may very well have been striving was smothered under the weight of a bad soap opera. The only revelation about those scenes was Gaius Baltar's shame in his blue-collar father and how that pushed him to change himself, a moment that actually came home with tender resonance when he was striking out for a homestead on New Earth and broke into tears when confessing to Caprica Six that he did indeed know a little about farming. (I'm still too frustrated to begin to address the way Starbuck up and disappeared, having apparently been a corporeal projection of her own consciousness created after her death on Earth and whose sole purpose was not, as had been foretold many times, to lead humanity to its destruction but instead to guide them to a new home. Gah.) It's accurate moments like that one that made the finale so disappointing, and have soured me on the ending. The show got close to greatness, but wound up breaking my heart and making me actively upset about its resolution. Only love could inspire such displeasure.

And oh, that resolution. Having the surviving members of the human race wind up in our collective past was a nice touch that underscored the cyclical nature of the series' mythology, but though that also meant that the cycle of war they tried to break had pretty obviously failed, Moore rammed the point home by skipping forward 150,000 years to modern-day New York. Head Six and Head Baltar, who are apparently angels working on behalf of God (who doesn't like His name), are roaming the streets and casually commenting on our decadence and (over-)dependence on technology. Moore seems to be setting the series up to continue in perpetuity, as Baltar and Six say that the planet looks just like Kobol and Caprica before their falls, but he's also delivering a horribly simplistic indictment of current tech, whether he means to or not. As Baltar and Six walk away in slow-motion like, I don't know, Neo and Trinity, the camera pans to take in the neon indulgences of Times Square before transitioning to — and this was jaw-dropping — a montage of our own robots dancing and smiling as they become ever more "humanized." I could barely believe what I was seeing. The structural parallel between society's entanglement with technology and the blurred line between human and human-like has always been a fantastic and well-explored theme for "Battlestar Galactica," but to reduce it to a clip of a dancing robot set to Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" was laughable and pitiable and just damn embarrassing. (I'm guessing the song's presence is meant to convey that in every permutation of human society, someone writes a vaguely trippy song whose notes can be converted into three-dimensional coordinates leading to a new home world, which is kind of a disappointing way to explain the song's use in the series.) Everything epic about the show had been rendered flat and unmoving, and everything complex had been pitifully reduced. The only glimmer of hope is The Plan, a forthcoming "Battlestar" TV-movie that will purportedly reveal the Cylons' plan and shed new light on the events of the series. I pray and plead that the movie will do what it can to restore the show and its characters to their former heights; I can't let them go out like this. So say we all.

[For reflections of happier times, or at any rate more interesting ones, I've got a piece about the series' first season, a look at the third season finale, reflections on the current season before it sank into the abyss, and one of my all-time favorite online transcripts.]

I really want the time traveling to drive someone insane. Not just send them into a bloody-nosed coma and kill them. I want them to go full-bore bonkers.

Click here for the recap.

You're going to want to run back to her. Don't do it. Just wait and see what happens. Plus, Juliet is way less crazy.

Click here for the recap.

It won't go well.

Click here for the recap.

Bad cake, Jack. Bad, bipolar cake that just wants to screw you to forget about her missing son. You need to be okay with that, because she's not worth the orange juice, man.

Click here for the recap.

Halbey: if leoben and bin linus are in a room playing poker
what happens
Me: zero sum game. constant bluffing assures that no one will ever take the entire pot
Halbey: i'd watch that one-act play
Me: kate and starbuck in a crazy-off. who wins?
Halbey: starbuck
we don't even know if she's a human being
that's how crazy she is
kate can fight to survive or whatever but kara doesn't give a frak
plus she is the only possibly nonhuman alcoholic i've heard of
besides tigh i guess
plus kate is stringing along two already-messed up guys in jack and sawyer. i guess she did get that one guy killed. but starbuck is leading along the son of adama and also the caprican equivalent of lebron james
i think your crazy quota has to be higher to pull that off
jack v lee in a "grim face bc i have the weight of the world on my shoulders" stareoff
Me: hmm
jack, but barely. he's had to be the leader, whereas lee keeps finding ways to be no. 2
Halbey: who felt worse about their infidelity
Me: jack
lee was always starbuck's bitch
Halbey: boy that's the truth. i think jack also regrets his prostitution experiment more too. wasn't bai ling a hooker?

I mean seriously, when that dude's arm got ripped off, I kinda yelled.

Click here for the recap.

Also:

My apartment manager is asking the tenants in my complex to call him with the number of their parking spot; he's in the process of compiling an updated list of who parks where, and he doesn't want to accidentally double-book a parking spot for someone new. So, for maybe the first time since coming here, I noted mine and my roommate's spot numbers.

Mine: 4.
My roommate's: 23.

I guess what I'm saying is, if I come unstuck in time, don't say I didn't warn you.

"Battlestar Galactica"
Hera
Chief
Sam
Gaeta
Brother Cavil
Caprica Six
Col. Tigh
Natalie Six
The Final Cylon (also here by name)
Tory
Adm. Adama
Laura Roslin
Tom Zarek
Gaius Baltar
The Hybrid
Leoben
Starbuck
D'Anna
Apollo

"Firefly"
Mal Reynolds
Zoe
Kaylee
The man they call Jayne
Inara
River
Simon
Wash
Shepherd Book
Mr. Universe

"The West Wing"
Toby
Ainsley
Donna
Sam
CJ
Bartlet
Josh

"Friday Night Lights"
Saracen
Riggins

And I have only scratched the surface. (There are, for instance, accounts for a lot of "Mad Men" characters, which caused a bit of a scuffle last fall.) This kind of phenomenon needs to be talked about, or at least used as fodder for graduate research.

Her: Do you watch "The Big Bang Theory"?
Me: [with dismissive but not unfriendly laugh] No.
Her: Oh, that's right — Tim said —... Are you artsy?
Me: Do you mean "discerning"? Then yes.

As a result of the cutbacks that are being felt at print and online outlets everywhere, I've been cut from my position as a freelance TV columnist at the Willamette Week. I've enjoyed being able to write about the good and bad things I've watched over the past 18 months, but sometimes these things just end.

Also, even though the column has been edited to say "Dallas murder police officer," the original draft just said "Dallas murder police." You know I love the Bunk.

Anyway: Click here for the column.

"There's really nothing like seeing a guy realize he's not done yet. Usually it goes the other way."

There was never any doubt that I would buy the newly issued 10th anniversary set of "Sports Night," Aaron Sorkin's half-hour sitcomish drama/serious comedy that ran for two earnest and (for me) life-changing seasons on ABC from 1998-2000. I already own the original set issued a few years ago, but the folks at Shout Factory (who were also behind the "Freaks & Geeks" set) engineered a nice box that adds a few commentaries and featurettes. The series was Sorkin's first foray into TV, and that freshness brimmed over into the plots, the beats, and the general rhythm of the show. But the series will always stand out for me because it's the first one I ever really and truly loved, and I pined for it in the way only a 16- or 17-year-old could, full of love and sadness and a belief that I knew pain and that I was somehow being born into the world of adult drama by regularly tuning in to watch a series the lives of the anchors and production staff of a cable sports show. If we measure a given series' (or film's) impact in our lives by the way it meshes with our worldview, then we love even more those stories that actually shape that worldview, hew it out of rock and fear and youth and give us something greater than what we're seeing; that somehow give us access to the great emotion behind it all, that sense of falling and becoming that's as powerful as it is fleeting. There are a host of other shows I love for those reasons or ones that are awfully close, but "Sports Night" was the first.

"I want you to trust me, just once, when I tell you that you have three 7s and I have a straight."

Sorkin's series was always about the lengths the characters would go to just to save each other from being alone, often/especially in a bigger sense than just a romantic one. In the first season's "The Hungry and the Hunted," Jeremy receives what's known around the office as "the call," the characters' emotional recognition of one of their own and their offer of trust and friendship. It sounds incredibly corny to write and almost impossible to pull off, but Sorkin's heart never left his sleeve, and the episode served as a meta-call for what it wanted in its own viewers. Here is a place, Sorkin seems to say, where people will put their guard down for 22 minutes at a time. I'd never seen that before, and certainly not with any kind of actual effort put into the characterizations. Sorkin was fascinated by the way people are forced to trust each other in relationships, walking right up the blind edge and jumping. Jeremy calls Natalie on her habit of ending relationships before they begin to avoid emotional risk; a year late, Sam tells Dana basically the same thing as he ends his temporary gig at the station. The Dan-Rebecca arc of the first year mined the same territory, from the obvious moments about tearing down walls made of pain to sweet ones set to the strains of "Sloop John B." The stories placed such a premium on acceptance and connection, but Sorkin did it with a sense of genuine humor and warmth and honesty that made everything feel real.

"Sometimes it's worth it, taking all the pies in the face. Sometimes you come through it feeling good."
"Yes."
"And how was your day?"
"Sometimes you just stand there, hip deep in pie."

But the show was also wonderfully funny, the first time Sorkin could begin to work out the kinks in the joke rhythms he carried over into "The West Wing" when it began on NBC during the second and final year of "Sports Night." Yes, the lives of the characters are taken seriously, and not immune to melodrama — the Casey/Dana/Gordon triangle gets awfully tangled and punchy toward the end of the first season, and let's not even get into the whole choreo-animator thing — but Sorkin's humor helped ground the characters. The second season's "The Cut Man Cometh" is a fantastic example of a series hitting its stride, from the writing to the acting to the sharp editing that moved the humor beyond what you'd expect from a typical half-hour show. This clip of the second half of the episode is amazing: Dan's signoff at the very end is still a perfect kicker, and the first few minutes of the clip are just flawless.

"Look, things are gonna be a little rough for a little while, but Lou, I want you to keep your head in the game. We'll come out the other side of this no problem."

More than anything, though, the show was unapologetic in the way these characters were a broken but unshakable family unit, a group of people dealing with stiff industry competition and financial hardships and an uphill battle to do what they loved that they still fought with everything they had. Dan Rydell's emotional breakdown over the course of the second season wasn't just a way to grow the character: It forced the show's world to choose between pulling together or pulling apart, and seeing the character who most often had been the family's moral center begin to veer off course was startling in its effect and heartbreaking in its ultimate resolution. He appears at the office seder to say, "It seems to me that more and more we've come to expect less and less from each other, and I'd like to be the first to start bucking that trend. We need each other badly. Badly. I need you all badly." It was a kind of callback to a speech he gave Natalie more than a year before after she was assaulted by an athlete, saying at the time, "No matter what you decide, you've got friends. And this is what friends gear up for." The series was also the place Sorkin began expressing his belief in the idea of fighting a good fight despite (or because of) losing odds: Jeremy references the line from The Lion in Winter about how when a fall is all a man has left, "it matters a great deal," which was Jed Bartlet's whole thing on "The West Wing." The show was sweet and sad, proud to walk through life wounded if that's what it took to stay honest. When I watch it, I still see its flaws — the network-mandated laugh track in the first season; the over-dependence on certain joke structures; the "Thespis" episode in general — but even those shortcomings remind of what it was to watch it the first time a decade ago, to find myself drawn into a new world that ran for two short years but that was allowed to go out with a strong and genuine resolution that makes you feel that the characters are still out there, that their world is still turning.

Jeremy's hunting experience:

Dan's apology:

Isaac and the Confederate flag:

Casey learns the names:

Over at the Willamette Week, I take a look at "The Life & Times of Tim," which so far is the only fall comedy that's actually made me laugh.

Click here for the column.

Over at the Willamette Week, I take a look at the excessively horny and just kind of weird goings-on of "Entourage."

Click here for the review.

In a lot of ways, I don't have anything new to add to the juggernaut that is "The Wire," David Simon's uncompromising, engrossing, and completely fantastic series that's nominally about the lives and misdeeds of a group of Baltimore detectives but is more accurately a Greek tragedy about the decline of the American empire and that decline's fallout in urban environments. Coming late to the party and seeing a show only on DVD and only after it's ended its on-air run is always a bittersweet experience: Even as you revel in the glory of a show that's new to you, you're hit with the knowledge that you could have been watching it week to week, or month to month, or holding out each year for that hallowed day when the show, your show, returned. But then, absorbing the show on DVD offers that rare pleasure of instant gratification, with each episode's viewing determined not by the whims of the network but only by how fast you're willing to burn through the series.

I began the series one summer night, and viewing it consumed the next several weeks of my life: Rented movies sat unwatched on my shelf, and I was glad that the other shows I cared about had yet to return for their fall seasons. (Although I have not yet begun to process the eventual disappointment that will set in when I return to watching [even admittedly good] pop TV shows after spending the summer with Baltimore's finest.) Watching a series like that always lets you fall in passionate love with it, like reading a genuinely engrossing novel, and Simon and his critics have all talked at length about how the show is in many ways a visual novel, presenting a definite arc and structure with each chapter, whether it's the drug trade, the port unions, politics, education, or the media. Every season is connected, but each one also has a definitive end, a moment where the story concludes. I quote my sister in regard to the show's unflinching introspection: "Simon’s epic is a tragic one, and he’s not content to end the best series in the history of television on a light note. He’s too let down by everything, especially the newspaper industry. But it’s real, and unflinching, and it tells the story of what really is going on in America’s cities."

Everything about "The Wire" is superb, and a lot of the love I (and others) feel for it can I think be traced to one of the tenets of how I view art and film and life and criticism and everything in the first place. When I was a kid, I had just a raging temper problem, lashing out at my family with a regularity that would've driven weaker parents to give up. One of the things my father drove home on the occasions I was lectured (and these were many): "It's not what you say, it's how you say it." His point was one about the way in which anger manifests itself in speech and personal interaction, and while he was right, that maxim has come to mean so much more. A lot of TV series that receive critical attention or success with viewers are lauded for their content, when what's actually being applauded is the idea of the content. In other words, people sometimes don't make a distinction between the story and the way in which it's presented. It doesn't matter how nuanced the performances are in, say, an arc about a father condemning himself to save his son; for some people, the fact that the story exists in the first place is enough to excuse anything from lack of polish to whole great swaths of broad characterizations that leave you with caricatures of people pretending to say things no one would ever remotely say. Look at Don Draper; look at Jimmy McNulty; you will know the difference.

Anyway, here are a few clips. They're spoiler-free and, as such, pretty random, but still enjoyable:

The tale of Snot Boogie:

Bunk teaches McNulty about trace evidence:

"It always starts with something true":

Avon reflects on the game:

McNulty and Bunk reconstruct a crime scene:

me: there's one of these next to my office on the sidewalk:
(sends link)
Sis: nice
me: yeah
kind of a cool jab at, you know, change
i mean, the business sucks right now, completely
still, nice to see someone keep swinging
Sis: seriously
me: like, watching Wire 5 makes me want to be a reporter, but an old one 30 years ago
some old guy who won't even use a fax machine
Sis: right, totally
it makes you sad that you missed the boat
me: yeah
work some small-town rag, know everyone at the hall, flirt with secretaries, where's my hat janet i've got a meeting
Sis: :)
me: "you tell the mayor he can put an egg in his shoe and beat it! we've got the exclusive!"
[goes maybe a little overboard]
Sis: hehe
i want to work at your newsroom
me: we don't have a lot of dolls, but if you're thick skinned enough, we could use you
Sis: ok
i promise i won't get my skirt in a knot
me: do it and you're out on your keyster

First up, over at the Willamette Week, I take a look at the tribute to bloated pomp that is the Olympics. It's basically 17 days of sports smothered by horribly cloying human-interest stories.

Click here for the piece.

Second, touching on a subject I only glanced upon in the column, I can't get over how much the viewing public is willing to put aside in re: China's wild abuses of human rights in order to pretend to give a shit about Michael Phelps. In the spirit of that, here's an online transcript:

slackeer33: (sends link)
sad
me: lame
plus some of the fireworks were digitally done for home viewers
slackeer33: whaaaaat
me: (sends link)
slackeer33: "this is actually almost animation"
hahaha
me: yeah
lame
slackeer33: china is just ridiculous
me: yeah
fake fireworks, oppression, human rights abuses, trying to make it rain
slackeer33: i liked how they opening ceremonies highlighted environmental responsibility and all that harmony and concern for future generation stuff.
yeah. ok, china.
me: haha
yes
harmony IN FIERCE ACCORDANCE WITH YOUR GOVERNMENT
slackeer33: haha yeah
we kept joking during the gymnastics about how the mistakes would cost them a lot more than just a low score
"i have shamed my family. i will have to throw myself to my death promptly after completion of this rotation."
me: now that i would tune in for

Over at Pajiba, I take my third and final turn in our group look at the best 20 seasons of TV in the past 20 years with another modern classic, the first season of "Battlestar Galactica."

Click here for the piece.

• I end every conversation by bumping my fist with the other person's, saying, "Us."

• When my boss asks after an absent coworker, I describe him/her as being "in the wind."

• I classify all calls received as pertinent/non-pertinent.

• I leave early so I can be home in time for "106 & Park."

• I shoot people if they piss me off.

Over at the Willamette Week, I examine "Generation Kill" and its emotional similarities to "The Wire."

Click here for the column.

P.S. I'm only in the third second season of "The Wire," so if anyone posts spoilers about later seasons they will be hunted down and thoroughly beaten. And I will whistle "Farmer in the Dell" all the while.

P.P.S. But it's great to see Ziggy again.

Jonathan Grubbs is making T-shirts.

You should all order one.

I mean, I could give you the whole runaround about how struggling artists need support, and how he's got a kid on the way, and he's got that shrapnel from Nam — all true — but really, they're just fun shirts.

So order one.

Over at the Willamette Week, I look at the number of game shows being remade from Japanese formats. This sketch, both in content and tone, turned out to be weirdly prophetic:

This is a shirt that The Sis sent me as a birthday present. I think it's proof that she understands me, and that she'd make a good vice presidential candidate for the Adama '08 ticket.

Over at the Willamette Week, I examine the colossally flawed "Last Comic Standing," and why it can't do anything but suck, and who's to blame.

Click here for the column.

Over at Pajiba, it's my turn at bat again in our continuing survey of the best TV seasons of the past 20 years. We've bumped the roster from from 15 to 20, which should carry us through the summer and allow us to write about some favorites that we just couldn't pass up. This one, however, was always on the list. My struggle wasn't to decide whether to write about "Veronica Mars," but which season to write about. For reasons I hope I make clear, I went with the first.

The piece can be found here.

"Lost" ended its fourth season doing what it's done all year: Kicking ass and completely entertaining you. What's more, I broke a personal record with this summary, which clocks in at 9,306 words. You've been warned.

Click here for the recap.

And because this is my last recap of the year, here's a gratuitous shot of Evangeline Lilly dedicated to my dad and, well, most American males. Sleep easy, fellas:

Including my note at the end about the upcoming schedule for "Lost," this recap came in around 4,900 words. I can't tell whether to be proud I went so long or disappointed I didn't hit the 5K mark.

Click here for the recap.

[This is a much longer and fundamentally different version of a column running today in the Willamette Week. Also, you should know that this version was written, obviously, shortly after the first episode of the season of "Battlestar Galactica," and by now the wildly disappointing third episode has already aired and we've already moved well past that to seeing Tyrol shave his head and Gaeta get his leg blown apart. But them's the breaks with publishing columns in a weekly paper.]

• "Battlestar Galactica" has always existed in a state of permanent change. A glance at what's transpired over the first three seasons is almost jaw-dropping for the amount of pure plot that the series has packed into about 50 episodes. The series is ostensibly about the remnants of the human race on the run from the cyborgs that annihilated their home worlds and everyone on them, but it's really about the price of humanity and what it means to live with your mistakes, which is why instead of spending an entire season on potentially lengthy arcs — the settlement on New Caprica, or the whole damn civil war when President Roslin and Apollo go galloping off to Kobol and drive a wedge between the military and the government that threatened to derail everything — the series often finds a way to wrap these stories in a handful of episodes while (a) preserving their emotional ramifications and (b) getting everything close enough to normal so that the cycle of change and reconciliation can start all over again.

• The fourth-season premiere, "He That Believeth In Me," in true series fashion, managed to live up to those expectations of growth/challenge even as it managed to broaden the larger story's impact, which is no small thing to do this far into a show, especially since this season will be the last. The episode continued to explore the religious and moral and societal problems facing a people whose numbers are just small enough — 39,000 and change — that they could conceivably implode under the weight of trying to remain upright. Everything on the series has always been about shades of gray, and about doing the best you can in compromising situations, and searching for hope and victory amid despair and chaos.

• For instance, the fact that four of the "final five" Cylon are members of the Galactica crew (except for Tory, who was already pretty expendable and whose confirmation as a Cylon is impactful in that she's the aide to President Roslin but otherwise unimportant because she's a pretty fringe and unlikable character) is amazing on so many levels that it can only be called perfect. Col. Tigh, who's always been the most adamant anti-Cylon voice and who killed his own wife because she was aiding and abetting the robotic alien force of whose ranks he is now a horrified member; Sam Anders, who was stranded on Caprica and led a guerilla squad against the Cylons until Starbuck returned to rescue him; and of course Chief Tyrol, who's gone through this whole thing before when he and Boomer were together only to find out she was a Cylon. The entire concept of betrayal and denial doubles back on itself over and over.

• Which is part of the point: The Cylons were created by man and then rebelled. They have always been mankind's greatest mistake, the decision that led to catastrophe, and in essence the series has been about the survivors running from the physical versions of their own screwed-up lives, of the wrong choices they can never stop making. But the identity of some of the final Cylon models brings that home even more, and it raises a series of killer questions: What does it mean to be human? How much control do I/we have over my/our actions? What is it about someone that makes us love them, and how much of whatever that is is beyond our ability to regulate as far as our feelings are concerned? At what point does the person we love stop being that person we love? Yes, the Cylons wiped out most of humanity; that's gonna make for some bad blood. But what does it mean when we become them, and not in the abstract way where we both resort to similar methods of warfare, but actually physically are our enemies?

• And man, there's no other show on television regularly grappling with tough theology. Baltar's Jesusian appearance and ascendance to cult-like leader were one thing, but the plot involving the sick boy and his anguished mother were deeply religious. When the mother asked Baltar why the one true God didn't want her son to live, she wasn't doing it in that facetious manner of unearned weariness that's commonplace on TV drama; she actually wanted to know why this was happening. She believed; she needed help in her unbelief. And of course Baltar's prayer over the sick boy one night, angrily asking God why a boy who hadn't been alive long enough to sin against his creator was being made to suffer while Baltar himself walked as always free. Baltar's encounter later with Six was another moment of reckoning, as Baltar was held at knife-point and pierced not for the boy's transgressions but for his own lack of moral fortitude. And yet Six — if you act on or at least play along with the assumption that the Cylons can somehow influence Baltar's life and surroundings — granted him a reprieve from death and called his bluff. Now Baltar will have to confront his own feelings about his willingness to be sacrificed, and whether they're real, and what it would mean to act on them.

• Tying religion into the whole human-Cylon issue: Starbuck's apparent resurrection is the first time the characters have to deal with something truly fantastical. Everything else that's happened to them has a vague sense of rationality underpinning it; hell, even the magical jaunt to Earth in the caves of Kobol seems normal compared with this. The Cylons are robots; Vipers run on fuel; water is wet; etc. Everything in the "Battlestar Galactica" universe is usually pretty understandable, but this time, the characters can't avoid the fact that the only thing guiding them for now is their faith. Apollo believes Starbuck is who she says she is, and that she's been to Earth and back; others aren't so sure. And Starbuck is broken by her inability to convince her friends of her humanity, something she's always taken for granted and never thought she'd have to verify. All she can do is tell them who she is; it's up to them to believe her. That's why the script did its best to quietly underscore her human nature: Aside from Adama's (warning) shout of "Starbuck" upon her return, she was almost exclusively referred to as Kara throughout the episode.

• Which is the whole issue. The Cylons are now among the crew of the Galactica, fully aware of what they are and unable to know what will happen to them next. The characters used to ask themselves, Will we survive? But for those coming to grips with their true nature, they face an even tougher question: Do we want to?

I discovered this last night and got an unapologetically geeky rush (click the image for a larger view):

The folks over at Watch "Veronica Mars" used a blurb from my obit of the show as a pull quote at the top of their home page. Thanks to whoever did that, and you should know I'm doing a piece about the show next month over at Pajiba as part of the ongoing guide we're calling "The Best 15 Seasons of the Past 20 Years."

Also, I would probably have failed Richard's test. I would've grabbed the knife, the comic book, and the baseball glove.

Click here for the recap.

There haven't been any posts since the last recap because life and the real world have been all kinds of hellishly busy. Plus this one was written in a state of defiant fatigue, if that makes any sense. Anyway:

Click here for the recap.

I mean, the guy used to just be conniving, but know it turns out he's got extensive weapons training. If I were on that island, I like to think I'd eventually side with Jack, but it would be interesting to hang out with Ben for a week or so and start some real trouble.

Click here for the recap.

Logline: Follow two affable men in their 20s as they hang out with Ted Danson.

Plot: My friend and I just hang out with Ted Danson and his famous friends. The goal isn't to crash parties, but rather to just get some drinks and shoot the breeze. The episodes would be largely plotless, or at least, there wouldn't be any inherent drama greater than figuring out what I'm going to wear to any given social event, or whether we can use Ted's influence to get free stuff, like food or services. That's pretty much it.

Title: "Danson With the Stars"

Over at the Willamette Week, I talk about HBO's John Adams. I could sum it up for you, but that would rob you of the joy of reading it for yourself.

Click here for the column.

Over at Pajiba, I take a look at the second season of "The West Wing."

I watched a few episodes from that season again in preparation for writing the piece, and I'm not at all ashamed to say that I choked back tears several times during "In the Shadow of Two Gunmen." I always do.

This is the last recap for a while. When the show returns, I should be able to return to my practice of making episode-specific references in the headlines on this blog, since by then my friends who are catching up with the series on DVD should be up to speed. (And far be it from me to point out that reading blog posts about a series you're watching seems illogical and unavoidably spoilerish.)

Anyway: Click here for the recap.

My second and final trip to this year's Paleyfest was for the "Friday Night Lights" panel. The rush for the stage was stronger than it was after the Apatow panel, and there were even more collectors there, hordes of people with DVDs and Sharpies who had this weird habit of calling the stars by their first names to get their attention. Still, it was a fun night. And damn if Connie Britton isn't something else, you know?

Also: Seeing Tyra Collette play volleyball on the screen in the Cinerama Dome is an experience I can only describe as transcendental.

Anyway, click here for the full write-up.

I attended the Paleyfest panel last night called "The Comedy World of Judd Apatow and Friends," which despite the vaguely dopey title was a fantastic, hilarious evening. Plus I got my picture taken with Paul Feig. When the panel ended, collectors made a controlled rush for the stage to get things autographed — you would not believe the way some of these bring a Buffalo Bill-level of fervor to collecting autographs — but I headed for the man in the brown suit, dapper and amiable and looking like the nicest math teacher you will ever have. It wasn't that I was overly starstruck, but I couldn't figure out how to thank him without running through every cliche in the book: I'm a big fan, I loved the show, etc. How do you tell someone that the story they made hit you in a place that's indescribably important? And that their work in a way made that place possible within you?

Anyway, I had a good time.

Click here for the full write-up.

But damn, what a good episode. The first season of "Lost" is still its best, as well as being one of the more solid seasons of TV in general in recent years, but the fourth year, and the latter half of the third, are close.

Click here for the recap.

I don't quite know what I can add to this video, other than to say I laughed to the point of tears at the proverbial money shot.

Just watch it.

And what the hell, here's another good one from last night:

Apparently even just mentioning characters names in the headlines of blog entries can send people over the edge when it comes to perceived spoilers, but you know I'd never spoil you, baby. I'm 'a take care of you.

Click here for the recap.

Over at the Willamette Week, I take a look at "Quarterlife," which was bumped from NBC after one episode. Who knew that bland white people blogging about twentysomething angst would be a tough draw?

Click here for the column.

Short version: "The Constant" was just completely kickass. Obviously, in my recap, I go into necessarily great detail about the episode's plot and also (hopefully) fire off some decent analysis, but just in case you're in a hurry, know this: It's a great episode.

Click here for the recap.

Well, that's probably a stretch. Let's just say he's doing well under the circumstances. It's not just that Kate keeps (not) screwing with him; it's that he has no other options. She's literally the last woman on Earth for him, and it's not happening.

Also, I was really hoping the kid was Kate's, and that she'd had it with Michael. That would have been insane, but you know you'd tune in every week waiting to see how that happened.

Click here for the recap.

And seriously, I'm amazed at the people who don't watch the show but still for some reason feel the need to comment in the recap threads. A commenter named BWeaves writes, "OK, I haven't been following this, because it just seems like too much effort. What evern [sic] happened to the hobbit?" Well, Dominic Monaghan's character, Charlie, died at the end of the last season, dumbass. If you don't want to watch the show, fine, but what the hell is the point of not watching it and then popping up in the thread and trying to sound relaxed and cool about your ignorance?

Also, in other news, I did an Oscar post-mortem over at Pajiba, and for reasons I don't yet understand — probably because I refuse to do more than skim the comments very lightly — it seems to be stirring up trouble with some people. Among the probable offenders are my remarks about Marion Cotillard, in which I say, "She’s French, she made a really moving biopic that no one saw about a singer no one’s heard of, and she’s coincidentally beautiful." The point I'm making is about the type of film the Academy likes to honor, and I'm not really bashing La Vie en Rose, but I stand by my analysis. Edith Piaf isn't Johnny Cash or Ray Charles, or even Jackson Pollock. In the general sense, most American moviegoers don't know who she is, and after keeping track of the awards this season, I still don't. And I'm OK with that. I'm sure I'll see the movie eventually anyway.

I used the phrase "luscious man-locks" as often as possible. It seemed only fitting.

Also, I'm kind of amazed that no one has commented to ask what "DTR" means. I have to explain it to people at work, but I guess Pajiba readers (a) know what I mean or more likely (b) skimmed.

Click here for the recap.

When Jeff Fahey showed up on "Lost," I just felt bad for the guy, you know? His character looks the way I imagine Fahey to actually look most of the time: Scruffy, slightly drunk, and wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Sorry, Jeff.

Anyway: Click here for the recap.

So, while watching what turned out to be the final episode of "Friday Night Lights" produced before the writers' strike, I had a weird moment of previously unachieved connection with the show. The opening scene had Tim Riggins and his brother, Billy, at church, where Tim has started going just so he can get Lyla's attention. (The moral and structural issues of this are for another day.) They're both sitting there, and you see them in this two-shot:

I paused the DVR, walked over to the TV, and crouched next to the screen. My roommate, pulled from his book by my actions, looked up at me to see what I was doing. I looked back at him, pointed at the TV, then pointed at myself.

"We're wearing the same shirt," I said. "Me and him. Look." I pointed back and forth to show that not only was (a) Billy wearing a shirt I happened to own, but (b) I was actually wearing it while watching the episode. This of course wasn't planned. I put the shirt on that morning and hadn't really thought about whether some unseen force in the universe might be calling out to me through primetime network programming. But apparently it was.

Here's a screengrab of the scene in question:

For the curious or disbelieving, I can be seen wearing the shirt in this photo, though I would ask you to keep in mind that I was moderately buzzed when the photo was taken, plus the other guy was a drunk stranger at the bar to promote a movie, and I like interacting with happy drunks. So, be warned.

Anyway: Yeah. I dress like Billy Riggins. If this means I will hook up with the hot neighbor who's raising a young boy and emotionally vulnerable to my scruffy Texas charms, all the better. But I think it just means I like pearl snaps.

Today sees my first "Lost" recap over at Pajiba. I'll be recapping this season's episodes every Monday, though don't ask me what's going to happen if the rumored peace talks fall through and the strike drags on. I'm still pissed at potentially not getting all 16 episodes for this season and having to settle for 8. But for now, "Lost" is back, and still pretty good.

Click here for the recap.

And for those who need a refresher of the first three seasons, this is just fantastic:

The "Real World"/"Road Rules" Challenge is back, and I am once again shamelessly enthralled. I really think someone will die this time.

Click here for the column.

Over at Pajiba, we posted our Second Annual (Sh)It List, wherein we take a moment to vent about cultural items or moments that drive us nuts. Some choice excerpts:

• There was no misogyny in Knocked Up or Superbad. Yet, in the Superbad comment section alone, "misogyny" or one of its derivations was used 26 times — for a movie about a couple of high school kids trying to get laid! … If I was guilty of misogyny every time I wanted to have sex at that age, I’d have been executed for war crimes by now. If you want to make the case that the female roles in movies of their ilk are underdeveloped or based on stereotypes, by all means, do so — I’d probably agree with you. For a readership that prides itself on its diction and grammar and understanding of sociological issues, many Pajiba readers fail to understand the significance of the term "misogyny," and it annoys the hell out of me. I don’t deny that misogyny exists in our world; in fact, I agree that it exists on a large scale. But we devalue the importance of the real issues when we misapply words like this. Is it too much to ask that we use words that suit the subject, instead of tossing out knee-jerk reactions? — TK

• (Motion capture) is also called Performance Capture. Or, to keep things brief, Puke. You may have seen it in The Polar Express and Beowulf. I didn’t. I ignored both those movies, so you may wonder why I feel qualified to write about this. It’s because the previews alone offered enough to know that this technology represents everything that’s wrong with movies, culture, nerds, and "progress." — John Williams

• Plus, I swear more in one paragraph than in anything else I've ever committed to the screen.

Go read it.

Over at the Willamette Week, I take a look at how Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are holding up without writers. (Short version: Could be better.)

Click here for the column.

Over at the Willamette Week, I offer up a list of the TV personalities/characters I'll miss most this year, unless of the course the strike ends quickly and amicably and we can all get back to watching TV in peace.

...So, yeah, these are the ones I'll miss.

Click here for the column.

...Name three aspects of recent original programming on Sci Fi Channel.

Click here for the column.

Tigh with both eyes, Boomer in chains, Gaius with no dialogue, and Tyrol nowhere to be seen.

Everything's crazy, but also pretty damn good.

Click here for the review.

P.S. I should also tell you that I agree with Beckylooo about Jamie Bamber's hotness. Does it make me less straight to say that? It does not. Bamber is one good-looking man.

Over at the Willamette Week, I take a look at TV shows you should watch on DVD now that the strike has potentially laid waste to new programming for months.

Click here for the column.

And, because it's always worth it, Charlie's song about going America all over everybody's asses from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:"

UPDATE: Josh, you read my mind:

• I have no idea what people who aren't from Texas think or feel when they watch "Friday Night Lights." Do they understand how real it all is? And I don't just mean the small town whose existence seems to revolve around high school football every fall, because people from towns all across the country think they know what that's about. I mean the run-down middle-class feel of it all. I mean the prayer in school. I mean the Dairy Queens and old cars and yards that have never quite recovered from garage sales in years past. The show is shot in Austin, and watching it felt like being home.

• But the series amps up the football melodrama to a certain degree; it's not just Texas, but the kind of heightened state of being Texans wish upon themselves. And that also works in the show's favor. In mixing real-life drama with (only slightly) exaggerated storylines, the show mirrors the state's actual football-based insanity with the voluntary pigskin fever people invite because they think it's their duty as Texans to have.

• Let's get the obvious out of the way: The extremely shaky handheld shooting style often detracts from the emotional power of some scenes. It's a rookie mistake to confuse shaky camera work with reality and immediacy, but the fault can be traced back to Peter Berg, whose directorial style (cf. Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom) places a premium on cinematography so jittery you'd think the d.p. had some kind of terrible palsy. There were so many times when I ached for a decent two shot instead of the extreme close-ups that drive the show; when Tami and Eric talk on the balcony of their hotel room after the State game, we see only fragments of their faces, sliding in and out of frame, and that's a moment I wanted to really see them, to get a sense of their bodies as they talked through Tami's news. (I'm going through all kinds of linguistic hell here to avoid too many spoilers; you're welcome.) Reducing the actors to close-ups too often does a disservice to those performers skilled enough to use their bodies to send the kind of messages dialogue will never adequately express. When two people are having a DTR, for instance, I want to be able to see (again, for instance) him move toward her and her flinch away, or her shoulders soften as she scoots just a little closer. And I feel like I missed some of those moments.

• Plus, there are almost no establishing shots. None. You get used to it after a while, in a kind of "Hey, I guess the action has shifted to the school again suddenly" kind of way.

• But those legitimate technical quibbles still can't dilute the series' awesome first season, which is about life and love and growing up, as cliched as that all sounds. And over the course of the first season, the show makes clear that the only way to grow up is to give up on your parents. It's no accident that, aside from the coach and his wife, every other set of parents is deeply flawed in some way, guilty of the neartsightedness or inflexibility that are the hallmarks of being a teen. This is an ingenious way to amplify the kids' struggles: They are faced with the choice of committing the sins of their fathers (or mothers) or choosing to move on. Tyra's mother is codependent and weak-willed; Lyla's father is unfaithful; Jason's parents attempt to control him; Tim's absentee father is an abusive drunk; etc., etc. For the young men and women of Dillon, Texas, growing up means letting go of your parents' failures and rescuing them from self-destruction, and then picking yourself up and moving on down the road.

• This is why the coach's decision to transfer to TMU has such resonance when it's unveiled before the State game. Throughout the entire season, the coach has acted as a loving parent to Julie and a willing mentor to his players, but the season finale and biggest game of the year is the chance for the team to finally realize that no adult, no grown-up, will ever stay with them all the way. In a rare moment of clarity, Smash says to his teammates, "It's up to us now." This is the boys' ultimate test: To go it alone.

• Additionally, the series has helped me understand just why exactly I don't care about college or pro sports at all, and the reason is so simple I'm amazed I haven't been able to articulate it until now. It's not that I categorically hate anything to do with sports; I like a good sports movie (Hoosiers, Bull Durham, Rudy) as much as the next guy. But "Friday Night Lights" works for me because it's not just about the game, but about the people playing it. I'm not just marveling at the grace of a fourth-quarter Hail Mary pass to win the game; I'm rooting for sophomore Matt Saracen to step it up and become a leader. I can't just watch a game for the athletic skill of it. I have to, on some level, be involved emotionally with the characters, which is why I get chills every time Jimmy Chitwood says, "I'll make it," but can't remember NFL standings week to week beyond what I overhear at the office. And the reason so many people do care about sports is that they believe themselves to be a part of that story; they've bought into the package being spoonfed to them on SportsCenter and are convinced that they know the players and are witnesses to a great human drama. This is all completely untrue, since no one really knows what's happening in these men's lives beyond what makes it to the police blotter, but it also helps you understand why hardcore fans speak of their teams victories in the first-person plural, e.g., "We totally came back there at the end for the win, and we deserved it."

• The point is that I don't care about sports; I care about the story, and whether it's a good one. And "Friday Night Lights" is a great one. It's warm, and challenging, and realistic, and knows that there is no reason to watch a game unless you've given your heart to the players on the field. It's stirring and inspiring in the truest sense in that it engages the viewer on a visceral, emotional level and also pushes them to do or be something better. It's in the way Coach Taylor looked at a bed-ridden, paralyzed Jason Street and says, "You're a good man. You're what makes guys like me want to coach." It's in the way Matt drops everything to help out his aging grandmother. And it's in the electric moment when Smash and the coach stare each other down in the pourding rain in the "Wind Sprints" episode. Coach has already broken the team's ego, but it's up to Smash to swallow his pride and begin to forge the scattered parts into a powerful whole. He grits his teeth and shouts, "Clear eyes, full hearts ... clear eyes, FULL HEARTS," as his teammates echo his cheer and they turn, suddenly energized, to attack the hill once more. It's impossible not to run with them.

This week's edition of Remotely Controlled in the Willamette Week is all about "The Office." Eat it up. Also, it was written as a bullet-point column, like my take on "Pushing Daisies," but for some reasons the bullets aren't showing up online. That's why the flow between the paragraphs is a little choppy; it's meant to be, only without the bullets, it's impossible to know this. Anyway, that's the story.

Click here for the column.

A rerun of "Entourage" the other night featured Eric fretting over a Variety cover story about Vince's deal for Aquaman, which was still in the works. The scene in question had Eric calling Ari to bitch about the story and the angle it took, to which Ari responded that Variety is like a high school newspaper, saying that "they pay their reporters $28,000 a year to write stories about the cool kids." Aside from lowballing the salary a little, the thing that bugged me most was the headline, which read:

Chase swims to "Aquaman"

It should have read:

Chase swims to 'Aquaman'

It's style at Variety and THR (and the Los Angeles Times, and many other papers) to use single quotes in headlines, not double quotes. It's a space and cleanliness issue, and it just looks better to have the single quotes in headline-size type.

I'm just saying, these things are easy to check, and it never hurt anyone to pay attention to the details. If HBO wanted me, I would work for them in this department, ensuring that the journalism-related props reflect their real-world counterparts. I would do this for free.

You know where to reach me.

• I live in L.A., and L.A. does not look like this. "The Hills" is so beautifully photographed that its vapid characters seem to be floating through a fantasyland (which in many ways they are) of clubs, palm trees, and inexplicably smog-free skies. I've been to the beach. It's sunny, yes, but also hot, and hazy, and clogged with people and kids and birds and the general detritus people leave behind when they sit in front of the sea for hours. But the beach party on "The Hills" was impressively staged and lit, seeming to unfold in an eternal magic hour. Everything looked somehow cleaner than it does in real life, and there's no doubt that this is to make the show's central characters look even better.

• Heidi should totally dump Spencer. That guy's a douche.

This Willamette Week column deals with "Pushing Daisies," which is sweet and tragic and quirky and easily the best new show of the fall season.

Click here for the column.

UPDATE: I'd like to send my love out to commenter Beckylooo, who's the kind of standard functioning adult able to see that my love for "Pushing Daisies" in no way means I guarantee the show's survival, and in fact, knows that reading my column would reinforce the notion that I find this show to be just the kind of wonderful treat that usually gets cancelled prematurely. Beckylooo, for giving the polite smackdown to commenter Ron, who seems trollish and douche-like, you have my respect and gratitude.

Today in the Willamette Week, I attempt to handicap the survival odds for a few new fall series. But really, aside from "The Office" and a few other lighthearted joys, my heart won't beat again until "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" come back in January. That's why I used the above photo from "Bionic Woman." Until the spring, this is all the Katee Sackhoff I'm gonna get.

Click here for the column.

Upon Seeing A Terrible Artist Named Peaches Perform On "The Henry Rollins Show"
Roommate: "If you just described this to me, without me seeing it, I would say you were lying."

Upon Seeing A Terrible Music Video For "Act Naturally" With Ringo Starr On Some High-Number Video Channel
Me: "This is horrible. This used to be a good song, but this video is kidnapping that song and taking it out in the woods and tying it to a tree and just raping the hell out of it and crapping on it."
Roommate: [Agreeing]"It's kinda bad."
Me: "And then you take the corpse and hollow out the chest cavity with spoons and just fill that with the crap."
Roommate: "Wow."

This week in the Willamette Week, I take a look at TBS' "My Boys," which is low-key, predictable, and completely watchable. It's not groundbreaking, but it is oddly comforting.

Click here for the column.

P.S. If I were a superhero, I would be Captain Douchebag.

P.P.S. This is somewhat unrelated, but always appropriate:

Coworker: Jennifer Hudson is gonna be in the "Sex and the City" movie.
Me: That's gonna be a terrible movie. You know why? Because the TV show wasn't that good.
Coworker: Yeah, but it's got a buttload of fans.
Me: So does NASCAR. Doesn't make it right.

"The Pickup Artist" is completely nuts, and my roommate and I set our DVR to record every episode. Good grief. I mean, Mystery's weird fuzzy hat alone could be the subject of an entire book. Who dresses like that? You're just gonna hook up with very drunk chicks who hate themselves enough to sleep with men in funny hats, and man, that's nothing to wake up to.

Click here for the column.

P.S. The headline of the review, for those unaware, is a nod to Magnolia.

So, is the character of Billy Walsh on "Entourage" based on David O. Russell, P.T. Anderson, a third party, or some amalgamation of the above?

I say it's David O. Russell, but I'd like to know what other people think.

This Willamette Week column deals with the frightening sadness that is HBO's "Cathouse." Because some guys are willing to drive to Nevada and pay steep fees to sleep with rough-looking women.

Click here for the column.

6. Carey Lowell

Which one is the man? I don't know. Lowell was a decent actress but a decade ahead of the "Law & Order" habit of assigning slightly more manly women to the D.A.'s office.

5. Jill Hennessy

A victim of unfortunate period-style hair. Yeesh.

4. Annie Parisse

I have no idea who this is, or why she looks constipated, but she's cute.

3. Alana De La Garza

Again, I have no idea who this is. I believe she's McCoy's newest recruit. Her orange shirt seems to be gesturing angrily at McCoy, who I'm starting to believe doesn't even read resumes of these people, just hires the ones he finds attractive. Smart man. Maybe I'll buy some of his robot insurance after all.

2. Elizabeth Rohm

Of the multitude of interchangeable blondes that have walked the "Law & Order" halls, Rohm was the best.

1. Angie Harmon

Harmon wins for a variety of reasons, not least of which is her accent, still Dallasy and twangy and all kinds of awesome. Southern accents are kryptonite to men from Texas. Sure, her appearance in Lawn Dogs didn't go unnoticed by some of us when we were in high school, but she's even hotter in a power suit, squeezing some punk at Riker's for info. (But I couldn't find a good shot of her in character, so you'll have to make do with the one above.) Angie, if you're ever in the Valley, give me a call, or just make that chung-chung noise, and I'll be there.

This week's Willamette Week column is about "Mad Men," AMC's lite version of "The Sopranos."

Click here for the column.

Those of you with Facebook accounts can see more photos here.

In short: It was a huge, crazy event, and the crowds were often terrifying. And I want to go again next year.

UPDATE: There's a geek fight going on in the comment thread over at Pajiba. If this thing keeps escalating someone's gonna throw their TI-82, and then the gloves will be off.

So, today marks my first column for the Willamette Week. I'll be writing about TV, which makes me happy, since some of the best conversations I've ever had have been about season-long character arcs for people who don't exist. Anyway:

Click here for the column.

P.S. When I was a freshman in college, I stubbed my toe on the bookshelf (or something) in my dorm room, and uttered a barking "Dammit!" Immediately, my roommate said, "Janet," and then we turned to each other and sang "I love you" in a rough harmony. I don't even like that movie that much, but you have to admit, that's a pretty awesome moment.

P.P.S. My apologies to any residents of Willamette or the greater Portland area who don't like the fact that I don't actually live in Oregon. But I've been assured by my editors that the TV shows broadcast in Los Angeles are almost exactly the same as the ones shown in the Pacific Northwest, so I think everything will work out.

Title: "Heart Transplant" (or, possibly, "Boning for Marrow")

Cast: A handsome man of stunning athleticism and below-average intellect, age 29ish; a dozen or so physically attractive but culturally unaware women aged 25-31

Logline: One lucky bachelor searches for true love in a flock of beautiful women, but there's more to these ladies than meets the eye.

Synopsis: The show would follow a pretty typical format for arena-dating programs: group dates, one-on-one time, quizzes about a woman's favorite puppy, etc. But the twist is that each of these women has a terminal illness, a fact that isn't revealed to the bachelor in question until he makes his final choice, eliminating all but the tanned and vapid creature with whom he plans to carve out a short-term relationship based on sex and shared interest in wine. The woman who wins will receive money for medical care and treatment of her disease, while the rest of the women will have to make do on insurance or whatever. At the end of the series, the 11 losers will be arranged before the bachelor, who will then have to apologize to each one for unwillingly condemning them to possibly dying sooner than they'd have liked. The host, an affable Ralph Garman type, will intro the women with something like, "You all remember Jenny, who as it turns out as cystic fibrosis." The bachelor's complicity in the dark fate of the women would eventually lead to his own depression, making for a sad follow-up/reunion show in which it is revealed that he and the winning bachelorette wed five months after the show but divorced a year later.

So, NBC, I'm ready when you are.

[Note: This has been cross-posted at Pajiba.]

I'm at a loss for words to describe how happy I am that the phenomenally stupid people who made up the cast of "The Real World: Las Vegas" have been put back on the air and unleashed on an unsuspecting but assuredly grateful nation by the soulless corporate overlords at MTV. The Las Vegas season, airing in 2002, was probably the greatest (read:sh*thouse insane awesome) season of "The Real World" since 1999's Hawaii installment, which was glorious. The cast members were drunk way more often than any of their previous counterparts, which seemed an impossible feat, but they rose to the challenge. They were all also recruited to have sex with each other. This wasn't particularly new to "The Real World," which by the end of the '90s had come a long way from deigning to put fairly average-looking people on TV as it did in its auspicious first run; sorry, but those original New Yorkers weren't exactly photogenic. But most seasons included at least one cast member who was on the show simply because they were an entertaining person, not because they were expected to get laid with any kind of regularity. Examples include Seattle's Irene, who was infamously bitch-slapped by Stephen the day she left the house, and Hawaii's Matt, who was affable and goofy and didn't do much all season except watch Colin and Amaya implode and put up with the deeply weird sexual advances of Kaia, who even as a teenager freaked me out.¹ But the Vegas kids: Now, there was a group of people whose sole purpose was to screw on camera. The first episode involved all kinds of hot tub shenanigans and three-way kisses and crazy amounts of sexual tensions, as if the dumbest and hottest kids at your high school had been dropped into a giant terrarium with a sixer of PBR and five hits of X and told to just have a good time. It promised nothing but glorious drama — by which I mean the kind manufactured by reality TV producers and emotionally stunted women and men, not genuine interpersonal conflict that leads to growth — and it delivered. It even launched the "career" of Trishelle, who would go on to appear on a few of the Challenges as well as pose for Playboy pictorial. (Not that that itself is terribly original; "Road Rules: South Pacific" cast member Cara also stripped for Hugh Hefner and was even a Playmate of the Month. Even in softcore porn, Trishelle is a loser².)

Anyway, perhaps realizing that the show has been tanking in recent years — I kept hoping one of the roommates on the Key West season would die since it was filmed when Hurricane Rita hit — executive producer Jonathan Murray and Satan got together and decided to whip up "Reunited: The Real World — Las Vegas," which picks up 5 years later by rounding up all the roommates and putting them back in that suite at the Palms, where precedent points to the inevitable drama, drinking, and sexually ambiguous practices for which "The Real World" so desperately aims. And man, right away the show is fantastic, by which I mean everyone is just as dumb as you remember them being. Maybe even more so. I love you, MTV.

My memories of the terms on which the roommates parted is pretty fuzzy, but so far it's been great to see Frank and Steven palling around like some kind of Rat Pack reinterpreted by guys who think K-Fed was onto something. I remember some tension between them toward the beginning of the original Vegas season because Frank, who sported a high-wall haircut kinda like Dignan, privately confessed his desire to get all up inside Trishelle to Steven, who subsequently encouraged Frank to go after her while Steven himself played it cool and hung back, essentially setting up Frank for the fall because Frank was willing to go after her, and that kind of directness was bound to backfire. I guess, thinking about it, that this is actually pretty devious of Steven, but I still don't think it means his ability to pull off a hormone-driven scheme means he's any kind of scholar, just that he probably watched a lot of TV and had the kind of high school experience that most people don't (i.e., he got laid way more often). But anyway, now they seem to be copacetic, meaning the story editors are going to have to work to come up with some sufficiently dramatic storylines; so far Steven got hammered and maybe assaulted a girl by the pool, earning him an episode-long ban from the patio that Frank valiantly and successfully fought to have overturned, which is pretty weak plotting. Then again, the fact we're only a couple episodes in and they're already getting so drunk they're attacking strangers can be nothing but a good sign.

The girls promise to bring infinitely more drama, mainly because (a) women can do this like falling off a log, and (b) "The Real World" usually exclusively casts the kind of dumb alpha-girls who make other girls look really horrible by association. Granted, the producers do this with the men, too. But the men usually — usually — are just extreme versions of guys you know; they drink and fart and play basketball, just all to a greater extent and with a lot more riding on it. However, the women are often terrifying creatures, the kind of weird girls who got really into being manipulative ice queens in high school and have made the tragic mistake of thinking people in the real world³ can and do and should still act like that. Part of this is the fact that this particular cast includes four women and three men; had the balance fallen the other way, the season would have been more slanted toward mysogyny and fistfights. It's also an apparent oversight that the casting of the original season had a pretty huge overlap with Irulan and Arissa, both light-skinned black women prone to tears. Usually, MTV and Bunim-Murray Productions try to spread around the stereotypes. For instance, the Denver season had two Christian guys, which normally would've been overkill, except that one of them was black and conservative and one was pretty and blonde and gay. See? Spread it around. But for the sake of the show, Irulan and Arissa are pretty much the same person. The downside of this is that it's harder to care about either of them; the upside is that having two equally crazy people who are crazy in such similar ways in one apartment is a lot more dynamic, and guaranteed to start some pretty messed-up stuff.

It's also hilarious and sad to see Brynn, who's still cute and relatively spunky, carting her infant around Las Vegas. It's not surprising that she got married and spawned in the years since her brief stint as a reality TV star ended, but I really hope that kid doesn't have any kind of congenital defects or alcohol-related problems that have yet to make themselves known, because mama was and is a partier. But the fact that she has a kid, damaged though that kid might become, also makes her the most human, instead of the dramatic placeholders and caricatures that the rest of the roommates became.

Ultimately, "Reunited: The Real World — Las Vegas" is one of the greatest ideas MTV has ever had, and also the surest sign yet that the network's eventual downfall is inevitable. MTV cultivates a mindset that of both infinitely reusability and instant forgettability; this is how videos can dominate "TRL" for weeks at a time⁴, only to be promptly forgotten when something better newer comes along. It's also how MTV can keep churning out the exact same reality show for 15 years but slap on a facade of freshness by relocating to a new and as-yet-unsullied (by the roommates anyway) city. But the reunited Vegas cast is being recycled from something that already aired, and not just the specific concept, but the actual people. These people aren't supposed to be here; we finished with them a long time ago. By turning back on itself and offering up a part of its past as something ostensibly new, MTV is effectively eating itself. It won't be long before the kids are being reunited to talk about what it was like to be reunited, and what used to be seven fresh-faced and weak-willed individuals wil have transformed into a bland entity whose sole purpose is to sell the worth of its own existence. So drink up, kids; you're only young twice.

<sup>1. The Hawaii season actually highlights the inherent problem of casting more intellectually gifted roommates, namely, the fact that gay elitist Justin hated everyone else because he (probably rightly) thought they were kinda slow. He said that fellow cast member Teck's antics were "so tired it's comatose." Justin quit the show to go back to school; Teck went on to costar in National Lampoon's Van Wilder with Ryan Reynolds and a set of fake bulldog testicles. Draw your own conclusions.
2. Google her. She had obviously not yet appeared in Playboy in the spring of 2003, when my roommates and I would catch reruns of the show and one of my roommates, who shall remain nameless, would pontificate about Trishelle's hotness. He, or perhaps one of his friends, also remarked upon seeing Britney Spears one day on "TRL": "Man, look how low that skirt is. I bet her hoof starts right below that." That guy worried me. Anyway, the point was that had Trishelle's nudie photos been available at that time, I doubt I would have seen that particular roommate more than 4 hours total per day, and I also would have had to start using the other bathroom.
3. Hehe.
4. I assume. I haven't seen the show in years, and can only guess at what's actually going on there. But I'm probably right.</sup>

• The first scene had some pretty deep geek resonance for Tim Minear fans: Nathan Fillion being interrogated by Richard Brooks. The final episode of Fillion's previous show, Minear and Joss Whedon's "Firefly," ended the same way. And the fact that Fillion's wife is played by Amy Acker, whose career was made on Minear's "Angel"? Come on. Just ... come on. How am I not gonna smile at that?

• The original draft of the pilot was reported to open with a lengthy, complex race scene, instead of dipping into the brief backstories of three of the leads. That would have undoubtedly been a more interesting approach, since (a) the juggling plotlines felt a little too much like every other pulp serial that's been airing the past couple years, and (b) the highway chase scenes were legitimately exciting, and very well choreographed.

• J.D. Pardo, who plays Sean, looks like a burn victim in a bad wig. It's bad enough that his "bad boy" half-brother, the ex-con who talks and acts like every bad gang stereotype in Hollywood, hasn't been summarily executed or at least run over by a rival car. But Pardo scares me. Kind of a lot.

• Some of the dialogue — more than some, to be honest — was pretty awful. Not that forgettable dialogue is lethal to a show; "Battlestar Galactica" is one of the smartest, most poignant, most politically relevant dramas on the air, but I can't remember more than a handful of memorable lines from three seasons of episodes, and most of them are from Apollo's heartfelt defense of forgiveness/atonement in this season's finale. Good characters and plotting can do wonders to overcome shabby dialogue. But "Drive" seems almost willfully committed to the kind of cheeseball lines you'd expect from a Fox show (see below), which is a shame, considering that Minear has written some damn fine TV: Aside from "Firefly," he wrote for the criminally underviewed "Wonderfalls," as well as some amazing "Angel" episodes. I'm willing (for now) to give Minear the benefit of the doubt and say that some of the clunkier lines came from co-writer Ben Queen. Some advice for Minear: Don't let Queen do the dialogue. Story help, yes. Talking, not so much.

• The show's premise — a group of disparate strangers plucked from their lives to compete in an illegal, underground, cross-country road race — is the kind of gloriously ludicrous plot that can really only shine on Fox. ABC's "Lost" can never escape the weight of its own supposed importance, which is one of the reasons it inspires so much love and furor among its most ardent fans and spawned more conspiracy theories and water-cooler hypotheses than "Twin Peaks." But while each episode of "Lost" has to "mean" something, Fox dramas require you to check at least 80% of your brain at the door and go along for the ride. This is why "24" is a success, despite its astounding disrespect for the laws of reality. (It's also why Fox viewers remain fascinated with overhyped pap like "House," which is the same damn episode, week in, week out. It's "Law & Order" with pretty people in white coats.) "Drive" features the kind of you-have-to-be-screwing-with-me setup that is only barely plausible, even for network TV, but that's what makes it so alluring. It's aware of its own preposterousness, right down to the fact that one of the characters makes a slightly cheesy speech to her dad about "blasting off into the unknown," only to lament how lame it sounded. "Drive" is serious about having a good time, and that's what makes it work as well as it does. As far as B-level thrillers go, it really could have been a lot worse.

• "Behind the Music." Was this show ever not entertaining? The narrator infused an insane melodrama into the ins and outs of rock-star hedonism that made you care every time, whether it was about Slash going through bottles of Jack like they were Dasani or the totally awesome edit they had to do after one half of Milli Vanilli died. Seriously, that episode was already depressing, but when they re-cut it after Vanilli (I think) died, it took on stunning new levels of pathetic brilliance. The one where Leif Garrett apologizes to the friend he paralyzed? The one where David Cassidy talked about laying all those fans? Come on. That show needs to come back in a big way.

• "Pop-Up Video." This show was right in line with VH1's programming strategy in the late '90s: completely inoffensive mainstream videos and specials aimed at people who just didn't feel like keeping up with MTV. (Though MTV was having a bit of a golden age back then, too; "Road Rules," we hardly knew ye.) VH1 as a network was some kind of emotional representation of what would happen if Matchbox 20 suddenly became their own music channel, and "Pop-Up Video" had the kind of hamrless clips like the songs you still hear on the radio at the cafe in your office building: "Stay" particularly sticks in my mind. The show was endlessly watchable, and you always learned a little something, even/especially if it was pointless.

The network now seems hell-bent on capturing a truly horrible demographic, namely, the kind of people who think "Flavor of Love" is good TV. But if VH1 would just stop producing snark-filled talking-head shows and godawful reality programming, they could get back to doing what they did best: Churning out innocuous fluff.

The most recent episode of "Lost," the compelling "The Man From Tallahassee," is probably the best episode of Season 3. While it's clearly better than most of Season 2, which played out like a turgid melodrama stripped of any real consequence, it's also not quite up to the level of Season 1, which barreled along like a runaway train while successfully using a character's individual backstory to deepen the main island plot. Granted, it's not exactly rocket science to psychologically link a given character's past with whatever they're going through on the island — Charlie leaned on drugs and now can't emotionally support himself, or something — but when it cooks, it cooks.

What made the episode so great was Jack's willingness to morally compromise in order to get things done and pursue what he perceived to be the greatest good for the islanders, namely, growing somewhat friendly with the Others and even offering medical care for Ben in order to secure passage off the island on the mythical submarine and possibly get help back in the real world and return later to rescue his friends. Jack has been the (often overly) moral leader of the group since the first year, playing the part of the great physician and watching over the flock of castaways to keep them safe and even journeying into dangerous parts of the island to rescue the one who'd gone astray or been kidnapped. He was an occasionally flat but ultimately noble representative version of all things good and true, which was the center of his beef with Locke: Locke was willing to redefine his worldview after landing on the island, and in fact deemed it necessary to mining the island for all its potential rewards, but Jack held even stronger to the ethical code that had guided him back home.

But Jack, after three seasons of getting jerked around, is finally starting to see the light by going dark. When Kate, Locke, and Sayid attempted to rescue Jack and wound up getting predictably captured in the process, Jack wasn't tossed into lock-up with them but actually given the opportunity to visit Kate and interrogate her. The scene was a fabulous inversion of the trials Jack had gone through while held captive by the Others, and the way he casually dragged up a chair and asked Kate just what she was up to spoke volumes about Jack's enlightened way of looking at things. Kate asked him, "So, you're with them now?" And Jack looked back at her with a mixture of annoyance, defiance, and even mild confusion, saying, "I'm not with anyone, Kate." Jack wasn't simply using the Others until he could escape back to his camp, or even get off the island. He was merely taking advantage of something that would first serve his interests and later, possibly, those of his friends. Locke has always been doing his own thing because of what he felt he owed the island after it magically healed him, which is why his decision to scuttle the sub and keep everyone trapped there, though lamentable, wasn't really surprising. No, the show turned a corner not by digging deeper into Locke's personal demons — though the episode was typical Locke-centric greatness, since Terry O'Quinn is hands-down the best actor on the series — but by finally setting Jack free to see where he goes. By eliminating the hero's strict moral code and having him venture into the surprisingly accepting waters of ethical unaccountability, "Lost" may be poised to have its characters do something I've been wanting them to do for a long time: Grow.

[A special dedication and salutation up front to the citizens of Curious People for a Curious America. This has been a long time coming.]

O "Lost."

Things have been going pretty poorly for the castaways for a long time now, and though the show isn't out of the woods (or jungle) yet, it just might be headed for a turnaround. Might.

• The biggest problem facing the show is that very, very little happens in each episode. Since half of each weekly installment is devoted to a flashback (the merits of which are also up for debate), only 20ish minutes per eipsode are used for actual plot progression. It's like watching one season of "24" stretched over three years, and it's more than little trying. The narrative boredom is compounded by the fact that this season, instead of sprinkling in repeats with the new episodes, the show took a 13-week break between its fall and spring segments. "Not in Portland," the most recent episode, feels so far removed from last fall's events I can't remember anything but the last few minutes of the fall "finale." (To be addressed shortly.) As for what's happening with the rest of the islanders: Who the hell knows.

• Juliet's ex-husband is Edmund Burke, apparently named afer this guy. This is not in any way deep or significant or a sign of writerly skill. The Wachowski brothers weren't brilliant for naming their hero the prefix for "new" and the anagram for "one," either. "Lost" already has Locke, Rousseau, and Hume. Adding Edmund Burke to their roster is neither original nor meaningful.

• Edmund is played by Zeljko Ivanek. You should all learn his name.

• Juliet is also one of the few hot grownups on TV. (Most women are in their 20s playing 18 or in their 30s playing 26.) I don't really know where to go with that. I'm just saying, if she made a movie with Diane Lane ... boy howdy.

• This is probably one of the better episodes of this season. The six episodes last fall had sporadic moments of greatness — the opening of the season premiere that revealed the second island was right up there — but on the whole, the best part of those half-dozen installments was the final moments of the previous episode, "I Do," which was a Kate-centric episode showing how she kept on breaking hearts and running from her problems back in her old life (this is easily the billionth time that's been pointed out to us). But it ended with a spectacularly taut sequence that recalled the show's heady early days: The stakes were high, the choices were clear, the consequences were unknown, and something big and bad was about to rain down.

• Jack's decision to use Ben's life as leverage to free Kate and Sawyer was a strong one, and Juliet's complicity in planning the murder finally gave her character some depth beyond the ice cold schoolmarm vibe she was putting out. "Not in Portland" picks up in that heated moment of balance, with Jack screaming at Kate over the walkie to run and escape with Sawyer.

• Juliet's backstory, though it follows the same pattern as everyone else's — get involved in something bad in the real world, look for similar situations on the island, attempt to right past wrongs, repeat — is rewarding because it actually has a bearing on the overall story and the reasons the island(s) exist in the first place. But for every sly hint the show makes at the details, it also beats the viewer over the head with meaning.

• For example: Juliet tells Shady Hispanic Doctor (Nestor Carbonell) that she can't go work for his creepy-ass experimental hospital without her husband's okay, and that will never happen, so unless he gets hit by a bus, she's stuck in Miami. SHD laughs it off, but sure enough, not too much later, Edmund is steamrolled like that kid in Final Destination. It's pretty clear that SHD arranged the vehicular manslaughter, which is driven home by the fact that he shows up atthe morgue to pass on his condolences, and he just so happens to have Ethan in tow. The shock of recognition as Juliet puts the puzzle together is wonderful, but it's completely undone by the fact that she keeps telling SHD about how she'd mentioned the bus thing before, and then SHD has to deny this, and blah blah go on already. The scene would have been stronger if she'd figured things out and then internalized it and gone right to "Why are you here?" The series wants to be a smart mystery, and that won't happen until it respects its viewers enough to expect them to keep up with the emotional changes of the characters and not spell out every little thing.

• What the hell happened to Walt and MercutioMichael? Oh, that's right, they sailed off into the sunset and were promptly forgotten by everyone. I haven't seen a series so spectacularly blunder characters since "The West Wing" phased out Ainsley.

• I strongly identified with Jack's mix of what could be called bemused indignation when Juliet informed him that yes, he would have to go back to his cell until his fate could be decided. That look is the look I usually have when watching "Lost" now: I just can't quite believe this all still happening.

• I've written before that "Lost" feels like two shows trying to co-exist in the same space, with one show following the medical conspiracy of Dharma and the other connecting the castaways through unbelievable interpersonal contrivances¹. The series is straining under the weight of its breadth, which is why "Not in Portland" could herald good things to come in that it represents a small but marked attempt to streamline the two warring shows-within-a-show. The relevance of Juliet's backstory provides welcome hints at the kind of genetic hijinks the Dharma folks have been up to, as well as explain why she's on the island and how she relates to its inhabitants. Granted, "Lost" still has a long way to go if it ever wants to come close to recapturing the fiery brilliance of its first season, which blended mystery and action in a kind of pop art/comic book mix that is poorly imitated to this day, most notably by "Lost" itself. But the show seems like it might finally have gotten the crap out of its system, and could be once more returning to its roots. I'm hopeful.

^{1. I stole that phrase from JMW's latest review. Just so you know.}

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If ever I needed proof of Veronica Mars' enduring humanity — i.e., her proclivity for stupid decisions — I had it Tuesday night as she fell for the thousandth time into Logan's arms as the music swelled.

Far from being a superhero with an overdeveloped sense of justice and the nature of right and wrong, Veronica at times has an almost fetishtic way of singlemindedly pursuing a goal. Granted, she's matured as the series has grown; when she was hired to discover the identity of the campus rapist in the first major story arc of Season 3, she didn't set out to crucify the frats like the rape victims wanted her to, but instead tried to find the truth of the situation. But she also has the habit of relentlessly pursuing a chosen goal and letting that lead her, however ungracefully, to the truth. For instance, in Tuesday's episode, she suspected a campus anti-fur crusader group in the recent vandalization of a research lab and the freeing of the lab's experimental monkey and 20 or so rats. So Veronica went to one of the group's meetings and started broadcasting in huge, violent, incandescent letters that she would be willing to go all the way with the group's "more active" protests. It was a pretty stupid way to blend in when she was on a case, but more importantly, it underscored her tendency to simply attack the first line of reasoning until it plays out, instead of more carefully weighing the alternatives. She still solved the case, of course, and did it with compassion, but that's not the point. That stuff came later; in the beginning was the wrath.

So I'm not completely surprised that Veronica went in essence crawling back to Logan, who'd ended their relationship in the previous episode. It's likely that the showrunners decided that they'd been apart long enough; after all, the story's chronology was roughly made to match its recent broadcast hiatus (the previous episode aired Nov. 28, 2006, and I've been waiting for the show's return like no other). But this was only briefly established when Keith referred to the death of Dean O'Dell "six weeks ago." As far as the viewers are concerned, it's only been one episode, a lousy 45 minutes, since Veronica and Logan called it quits (again), and to have them recouple so soon is an oversight in narrative structure. There's a difference between taking a break for repeats and actually extending the show's timeline; sure, it may feel like a long time since "Veronica Mars" has aired new episodes, but that doesn't mean that the writers should behave as if the residents of Neptune, Calif., have actually been up to their old tricks for six invisible weeks while the viewers waited. No major story arcs happened during that time; nothing did. This will become even clearer when the show is eventually released on DVD, effectively eliminating the emotional break caused by the hiatus and leaving only the erratic story that has Veronica and Logan bouncing from off again to on again in a matter of minutes.

But even worse, it's a betrayal of the kind of strength Veronica is purported to possess. Her character is one giant ball of trust issues and emotional unavailabilty, and creator Rob Thomas has gone to great lengths to show that while Veronica is capable of love and devotion, she doesn't come by such sentiments easily. She's been burned by a mom that left and then returned only to wreak more havoc, not to mention a string of complicated relationships that tend to end, well, badly. Veronica's loyalty has had to be earned by the other major characters, but she's got a blind spot for Logan. And while that sucks, I also think it's a good thing, in it's way. Her weakness in that area is a reminder of her fundamentally flawed nature. Everyone has that blind spot, too; for some its gambling, or alcohol, or whatever, and for Veronica it's intelligent assholes with a little too much hair product. I was surprised, and more than a little annoyed, when Veronica went running back to Logan so soon (or "soon"), but I also know that it's one more thing that gives the character dimension and reality, and a reminder of just how good this show can be.

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me: if i had to shoot you in the gut and blow your blood across the wall so you could die and download into a new you just to save our baby...
me: i would do it
RMS: thank you
RMS: If you crashed over a hill 2 clicks away, I'd send sarah out for you
me: thank you
me: if you were stuck on the surface, i would act like i would nuke you to save the world, but i would be bluffing. i would let you live
RMS: thx
RMS: if you defied the authority of the group, I would tranfer your sentience to cold storage
me: i appreciate that
me: if you kept killing yourself to see the face of God, i would encourage you to follow your dreams
RMS: thanks
RMS: if you tortured me, I would imagine I was having sex at the time
me: good
me: if you got shot by a robot, i would totally kill her in cold-blooded vengeance
RMS: thanks
RMS: if I was really mad at you, i would have an intense boxing match then hug it out
me: aw, thanks
me: if your wife wanted to sleep with me, i would wait until she divorced you first
RMS: thx
RMS: If you betrayed the resistance, I would poison you
me: you'd better
me: if your wife was wounded a couple miles away, i would force you to stay with me at gunpoint
RMS: good
RMS: if you lost your eye and were embittering the crew, I would tell you to shoot me or get the hell out
me: if sarah was being held captive, i would go with you and help kill the guys who were about to hurt her
RMS: thx
RMS: if we got stranded with the rest of a sports team, I would lead us in the resistance
me: thanks
me: if you sided with the enemy during the occupation, i would consider throwing you out the airlock once we escaped
RMS: thanks
RMS: I you were under my command, I would speak in low tones and not look at you until things were bad and I started to growl
me: thanks
me: if i were captured and asked about you, i would let them pull out my eye, since i would never give you up
RMS: thank you
RMS: if they killed you in a raid on the temple, I would blow myself up at graduation
me: if you were shot in an away mission on the surface, i would lie to you and say the ship was here, so that you would be happy when you died
RMS: thank you
RMS: if you were captured and held prisoner by the cylons for years, I would admit that I lied to you
RMS: about being shot down by me
me: thanks, man
me: if you were a mean commander of a rival ship, i would arrange your assassination

In case it's escaped the notice of even the dullest reader out there, I've got a pretty special place in the black rock I call my heart for "Veronica Mars." Now cruising gamely along in its third season, despite low ratings and a network dumb enough to pair it with "Gilmore Girls" (a show about absolutely, positively nothing at all), "Veronica Mars" is still one of the best shows on TV. But after two full years of exploring high school life, Veronica up and graduated, and is now attending Hearst College. Her matriculation mirrors not just the show's transfer from the defunct UPN to the new CW, but also the fact that the show itself is at a crossroads, namely, the elimination of its premise — high-school private eye — and a gradual change in its mission statement.

This is bound to be a polarizing time for the show's hardcore fans, and it's reminiscent of the similar struggle faced by what some have called the show's ancestor, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Granted, I think that comparing any two shows beyond a certain point is unwise, and most people are just linking "Buffy" and "Veronica Mars" out of a well-meaning laziness: Both shows were centered around a strong, flawed, complex female character in high school; both shows placed a premium on witty dialogue and interpersonal relationships; both shows are on low-rated pseudo-networks; etc. But the shows do have their similarites, primarily their ability to explore the hell of growing up through the archetypal lens of high school, the one experience that unites us all in common misery. After its third season, "Buffy" went through the same growing pains now working their way through "Veronica Mars," as Buffy went off to college and the show struggled to find its larger purpose even as its core dynamic was forever altered. More than just having key characters removed and assigned to a spin-off, the "Buffy" universe had to deal with its very own existential crisis: What happens when the teenage superhero starts to grow up?

The show dealt with the inevitable problems the only way it knew how: By pushing through them. The first episode of the fourth season features another pack of vampires led by one of the lamest ringleaders the show ever came up with, but the villain of the week did one thing right: She broke Buffy's umbrella, a symbol of the good work she'd done in high school. It was a crushing, visceral way for the show to proclaim that the times were changing in a big way.

The fourth season, though certainly not a favorite of some fans, nevertheless turned out some great episodes — the experimental "Hush," the crossover "Pangs," the enjoyable one-off "Superstar," the excellent "Fear, Itself" — and, much more importantly, broadened its worldview. College is a world of gray tones next to the starkly defined areas of high school, and Buffy interacted with a greater variety of people with more darkly human (as opposed to demonic) traits, including Parker, who slept with Buffy and never called her again. He wasn't supernaturally evil, just a tool. It was in important step for the show, and one that paved the way for more complex relationships in the characters' collective futures. The fourth season was radically different from the first three because it had to be.

That's the problem, and possible solution, facing "Veronica Mars." The show's first two seasons delved into the dark sides of class warfare between the haves and have-nots of the small town of Neptune, smartly recognizing that cash is the biggest dividing line between the lunch tables in the cafeteria. But university life is rarely that stratified, and the only people who cling to such dated notions of how to define themselves are the jerks who seem to think college is basically Grade 13. "Veronica Mars" is going to have to figure out how to let go of the rich-poor struggle that so often defines the stories.

Veronica used to be a high-school snoop, and but she's going to have to transform into a bigger, more nuanced character to get the show over the tough bumps coming out of two solid years of stories. The show should set about trying to define Veronica in grander terms, like what kind of person does she want to be, in order to work. The central group of characters has been altered — Duncan's gone, Beaver's dead — and the remaining ones aren't what they used to be, none more than Weevil, who's gone from ruthless gang leader to the equivalent of wacky sitcom neighbor in only a few months (seriously, making Weevil the janitor at Hearst was a low blow, especially after offering up the tantaloizing possibility that he might work with Keith). But "Veronica Mars" can and will succeed if it pushes the characters to grow, and if it becomes comfortable with somewhat redefining itself. You don't go back; you go on to the next place, whatever that is.

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[Permanent disclosure: Any and all TV shows or films discussed here will inevitably contain minor spoilers. Deal.]

I think it was the moment when Leoben the Cylon revealed to Starbuck that her excised ovary had been salvaged and used to create a human/cyborg daughter that I began to understand that "Battlestar Galactica" is one dark, sad show. The sci-fi drama's third season kicked off in high gear on Friday, picking up after last season's cliffhanger pretty much imploded the show's universe by jumping forward a year to show the struggle of the human settlers on New Caprica and the return of the Cylons, who invaded the fledgling colony and established their own rules. The show is simply amazing.

It's nothing new for a series to walk the line between light and dark; ever since "The Sopranos" bowed in 1999, darkness has been in vogue, especially on cable, with "Deadwood," "The Wire," "Rescue Me," "Nip/Tuck," and "The Shield" going all-out to show the inner horrors of the human psyche as their characters fell to impossible depths of loneliness and depravity. But "Battlestar Galactica" is different from most of those shows because it features likable, relatable characters, whereas most of the other series are just crazy for the sake of being crazy.

Take "Nip/Tuck." It's a visually stimulating show, but absolutely pointless. It does dark better than most — Sean's recent drug-fueled hallucination of his personal demon banging his personal angel was attention-getting, to say the least — but the darkness isn't tempered by any kind of genuine emotion. It's not that I want the show to be lighter; I want it to make me care about the characters who are dealing with such hard, dark times. And I don't. Sean is a whiny punk, his wife is a bitter wreck, and Christian is a soulless husk of a man who sees the futility of his ways and doesn't so much refuse to atone as much as he just lets thoughts of atonement drift away like a bad hangover. Let them suffer.

Conversely, the rough road that the denizens of the "Battlestar" universe walk is heartbreaking precisely because the writers, producers, and actors put so much energy into making me care for the characters. The stunning casualness with with Col. Tigh loses an eye serves to underscore the colonists' dire straits, reinforce the image of the Cylons' murderous ways, and instill sympathy for Tigh all at once. The show isn't in a rush to show how dark and crazy it can be, as in the story line on last season's "Rescue Me" when it seemed like everybody was raping everybody just for the hell of it. And "Battlestar" stands in dark contrast to Showtime's new series "Dexter," which is so busy trying to look cool you forget that it doesn't matter who lives or dies; you just don't care.

So many shows are wallowing in pointless vice without having it smack up against virtue, which is what creates genuine conflict and memorable relationships for a series' characters. The physical violation of Starbuck is that much more horrifying because we've already come to identify with her and relate to her, to sympathize with her struggle to balance the coldness that keeps her alive and the love (lately for Anders) that keeps her going. Tigh isn't some cartoon villain, but a man who wants to do right and has a blind spot a mile wide for Ellen, his duplicitous wife, and the series even tempers her acts of betrayal with emotion: She does what she does to save her husband from the Cylons. The plots develop from the spark between people's basest interests and purest intentions, making the darkness something we recognize as our own.

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I sit here, basking in what could only be described as the post-coital glow of a long-desired reunion with one of the greatest shows on TV, feeling somehow more complete than I did when I got up Tuesday morning. In the interests of sparing you seven loyal readers from slogging through some kind of half-assed essay, my regurgitations will be limited to bullet points. You're welcome.

• The season premiere of "Veronica Mars" was pretty much everything I'd hoped it would be. I didn't have quite the emotional baggage tied up in it as I did with the "Studio 60" premiere; my early, earnest, teenage love for Sorkin's "Sports Night" pretty much ruined me on that count. Likewise, I'm curious about "Lost" this year but am wary of the show after the gradual decline of its second season. But "Veronica Mars" is still engaging, honest, and confident of the road it wants to walk. Creator Rob Thomas' script did a solid job at handling some necessarily clunky exposition: Having all the high schoolers wind up at the same college; having Keith address Fitzpatrick by name while driving him to meet Kendall; having Logan and Dick mention Beaver's suicide; etc. He introduced new characters, hinted at possible relationship conflicts, and ended the episode on dual cliffhangers. Brilliant.

• For instance: The light. The show has always confounded a realistic expectation of lighting design, casting its characters in stark rays of pink or blue or green in the midst of such mundane settings as classrooms and low-rent apartments. Keith's office is still bathed in an orgy of neon coming from nowhere, and Veronica's criminolgy classroom has stained glass windows for no other reason than that the show is constantly injecting flourishes of color into every situation.

• Veronica's criminology professor? Jeremiah f***ing Lasky. What a weird bit of typecasting.

• The only bad note: Thanks a pantload to the CW for foisting the godawful Aerie Girls on the viewers. It's just a group of stupid women who sit around and pointlessly discuss the show during the commercial break. That's bad enough, but infinitely worse is that it's sponsored by a women's clothing line. Look, I've already got enough to deal with loving a show that's been paired with "Gilmore Girls" by the clueless network, not to mention the fact that most of the shows I love seem to revolve around a strong female lead. I'm already doing my best to fake my way through life, okay? The last thing I need is to see a gaggle of dim giggling women speculating about Veronica and Logan or Lorelai and Luke (which come on, you know she's not gonna wind up with Christopher).

• The show is still committed to unraveling a weekly mystery and progressing a larger story arc, as evidenced by Keith's trip to the desert with a Fitzpatrick, as well as sidelong confirmation of what was in Kendall's briefcase in last season's finale (apparently a mountain of cash). But there was no major introduction to a season-long puzzle, as in the murder of Lilly Kane or the school bus crash. That's not to say that this season's planned multiple-mystery set-up won't be satisfying. It's just a little sad to see the show's original conceit go.

• Is Duncan still hanging out in Australia with his dead ex's baby? Is he okay with Veronica sleeping with Logan? Didn't they part with all kinds of professions of eternal whatever? I'm just saying, she could call the guy.

• Seriously, the whole Aerie thing made me deeply self-conscious.

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I miss "Lost."

Sure, on the surface that sounds like an easy enough problem to solve. The show's third season starts in a few weeks, and the second season just came out on DVD. But re-watching the first few episodes of the second season, I was struck again by the problems that would come to plague the show's sophomore year. In no particular order:

• Man oh man, this show is boring. The Season 1 episodes always presented a specific challenge: Leave the cave/beach/jungle and go find the water/food/pilot/cocaine in the cave/beach/jungle. The characters were constantly moving, and the flashbacks beautifully illustrated each castaway's traumatic past and how it had led them to Australia and how it connected with any number of other characters. The story's development had an organic quality, the crystallization of the growing relationships stretching out before the viewer. Unfortunately, this all came to a screeching halt in Season 2. The show did more than just get stuck in neutral: It fell down the hatch and got stuck in a giant hole in the ground.

• Seeing the characters walk into the hatch for the first time is completely different than when I saw it happen last fall: Whereas I was then filled with a sense of awe and foreboding, this time around I felt nothing but a sinking dread as the castaways discovered the dank, circular room that would come to dominate their lives and stories for the season.

• I've only made it through the first five episodes in the past week, which definitely shows a lack of motivation on my part. As I slid the first disc into the DVD player over the weekend (I'd delayed the inevitable till Saturday, hoping that would help), I felt none of the familiar rush of anticipation I usually get when starting a newly purchased season of TV. Always a bad sign. I watched out of duty, not joy.

• It doesn't help matters that I'm watching Season 2 of "Lost" so soon after re-watching Season 2 of "Veronica Mars," which is easily one of the best shows on TV and definitely the best show that no one's watching (and it's only on against "Law & Order: Another One," "Standoff," "The Unit," and "The Knights of Prosperity," which means it's officially the best show airing in the Tuesday 9 p.m./8 CT time slot this fall, so you'd better all tune in). "VM" packs more into some episodes than other shows do all year, something that became painfully obvious when I finally struggled my way through to the fifth episode of "Lost" Season 2, which is actually titled "... and Found" but could more accurately be called "The One Where Absolutely Nothing Of Consequence Happens."

• The "... and Found" episode was another Jin/Sun flashback, which means it will merely be boring; a Charlie-centric episode is enough to make me throw things at my TV. And instead of continuing the flashbacks from Season 1, where Jin starts to be drawn into a life of violent crime by his wife's father, the whole stupid episode was about how they met. The island story involved Mercutio, Sawyer, and Jin being rounded up by the Tailies and setting out for the good guys' side of the island. (I'm already eager, by the way, for Ana Lucia to take one in the chest.) The only moment worth anything was when Jin and Mr. Eko hid in the bushes and saw the Others walk by, clad in tattered pants, one of them dangling a child's teddy bear. That moment could easily have been grafted into another episode involving the Tailies' trek through the jungle, which would have bought the producers an entire episode to, I don't know, make something happen.

• Maybe it's because I've been spoiled by Sorkin and Whedon, but the dialogue on "Lost" has long since degenerated into vague generalities that do their best to remain monosyllabic: "It's all going to be ruined," "This isn't right," "I can't—..." followed by a trail-off. I'd give anything if these people talked in complete sentences.

• Only five episodes in, I can already see the show getting bogged down in itself and losing its sense of purpose, of direction. The numbers, the hatch, the symbology: It becomes a heaviness that weighs on the characters and the viewers, crushing them.

• And if it was a giant electromagnetic snafu that wrecked the plane, what's the point of having everyone be connected to everyone?

• There's only so long a show can draw out a mystery before people get tired of caring (call it the Twin Peaks Theorem: an inverse relationship exists between unsolved mystery and viewer interest). "Lost" is great at execution — introducing new mysteries, broadening the puzzle — but it's horrible at resolution. Answers come few and far between, which used to be exciting but is now just frustrating.

That said, I'm still a loyal viewer. Hell, I stuck with "The West Wing" through its abysmal last three seasons; I know what it means to commit to a show and see it through. I just hope that "Lost" gets back some of that momentum, that magic, that made it so captivating in the first place. Fewer flashbacks and more plot progression and interaction in the present would be a good way to start.

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I know it's only been a week since I talked about "Battlestar Galactica," but in that time I watched Season 2.0, the DVD set of the first half of the show's second season (the rest of it won't be out on DVD until the fall, which is an unholy and criminal thing for Universal to do, but whatever). And I'm stunned at how good it is.

Some genre background: I admit to liking "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when I was a boy, and looking back, it makes perfect sense. That show was made for boys: Effects-driven, flat characters, and a stunning lack of arc, drama, tension, direction, themes, and pretty much everything good you can ask from a TV show. It was like an interstellar version of a police procedural in its relentless sameness: Watching the pilot episode and watching one from four years later is almost the same experience. It's a shame that the show is one of the first things that springs to mind when people think of sci-fi, because in a way, it's one of the poorest examples of the genre. It's like a war film that focuses on explosions and bad characters instead of the nuanced lives of the troops. But I loved that stuff as a kid: The whiz-bang action, the fact that none of the main characters was ever for one moment in any kind of real peril, the fact that it was not only unnecessary but impossible to imagine the life experiences or emotions of the characters to have any impact on their present actions. The show was undone by its timidity in approaching its premise: It meekly went where no one really cared to go.

But when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man (or at least a much older male), I put childish ways behind me.

"Battlestar Galactica" (again, any and all references are to the new version unless otherwise noted; as far as I'm concerned, the original show never happened) is a gut-wrenching, adult drama with a political, spiritual, and emotional resonance too rarely seen on TV. The show packed more drama, tension, and heartbreak into the first 10 episodes of its second season than a lot of other shows do all year, or ever. A plot line that sends the fleet spiraling into possible civil war could have rightly taken up an entire season, but this show moves faster than that, and by the season's midpoint, the ragtag fleet of humans who survived the massive alien attack that began the series has been restored, only to face greater challenges.

The second season of "Battlestar Galatica" was, impossibly, even better than the first. There's a track record of truly great second seasons, and this one's up there. It heightens the drama, pushes the characters to new heights and depths, and amps up the pain big time. I'll admit, I even got a little choked up a few times. It's one of the best shows on TV right now, hands down. More than once, I thought, "Now this is what 'Lost' should be like." After all, "Lost" is a genre show, too, just heavier on mystery and woefully lighter on character. But whereas the entire point of "Lost" is to watch more "Lost" (the show is like "Twin Peaks" in that way), "Battlestar Galactica" is rewarding for its growth, change, and progress.

Granted, the show's dialogue is nothing stellar. It lacks the punch or inherent wit that are hallmarks of other great modern showrunners. But neither is the dialogue useless exposition focused on worthless technical jargon that sacrifices character for the sake of gee-whiz technology. It always serves to enhance and grow the characters. In one of the best signs of a good TV drama, the characters show marked change over time. People aren't the same as the were in the pilot episode, and that's a good thing.

For a futuristic show, it's also amazingly grounded in reality. The phones on the ship are wall-mounted and rely and cords; high-tech radar exists, but none of the impossible "on-screen" tech on "Next Generation"; the ships have a gritty, lived-in feel, pioneered by Ridley Scott almost 30 years ago and beautifully continued to this day; but best of all, nothing comes too easy. That's the thing that bugs me most about "Next Generation." Shot? Sick? Hungry? No need to worry, the ridiculously outfitted Enterprise, complete with sets borrowed from a mid-'90s Chevy Suburban, is here to help. Food appeared out of nowhere, diseases and wounds were healed almost instantly by the bored doctor, and those freaks has so much free time that they used a phenomenal amount of computing power to play Robin Hood with holograms. That show presented a utopian, bizarrely idealized version of the future, during which mankind has apparently decided to get together and end all war and economic dispute in the interest of exploring space in matching jumpsuits. But in the much more engaging world of "Battlestar Galactica," guns still use bullets, and people still die. The second season begins with a major character suffering a gunshot at close range, and it's a life-threatening wound. The stakes are legimate here.

The series runs deep with questions of justice, law, ethics, morality, and what it means to be human. There are fewer than 50,000 people left in the universe, and the show depicts the small society struggling to hold firm to the laws that have guided them for years, laws that have even greater meaning now that there are so few left to uphold them. After all, who's to say what's a crime? What does it mean to live in a just society? The characters in "Battlestar Galactica" are never more than a few steps from slipping over the edge. At one point, military officers rape and torture an enemy agent, citing its inhumanity as grounds for the treatment. The Cylon is an enemy, true, and is one of the refined models of robots originally created by humans before the Cylons rebelled and ignited the war. (In another brilliant update from the first show, having the Cylons be man's creation tightens the dramatic structure immensely, moving the antagonists from merely just another group of aliens to physical representations of our own sins visited upon us.) But their behavior is shocking, not in spite of the nature of the enemy, but because of it: Presented with an opportunity to display their humanity, the humans reverted to animals.

One of the sharpest bits of dialogue comes in a throwaway exchange between two Galactica officers who intervened and stopped what was about to be the rape of another prisoner. One of the men says, "I thought the Cylons were the enemy." His friend replies, "Yeah, well, now it's us." The show is uncompromising in its intent to mine the painful truths of life, and that places it far beyond most other shows on TV.

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A few weeks ago, the trades shipped issues with hard black covers bearing critical blurbs praising an unnamed TV show. The gist:

"One of the best shows on TV. … [T]he toughest smartest show on television …" — Rolling Stone

"… one of the best shows on television …" — The New York Times

"… much much better than you can possiby imagine …" — Salon.com

"… one of the most original and provocative programs on television …" — Newsday

And so on in the same vein. The hard covers contained a perforated circle in the middle, behind which was an Emmy consideration DVD. I was curious as to which show could draw such praise from so many critics and have its title go unmentioned anywhere in the ad. I punched open the cardboard and pulled out the contents, which turned out to be a disc with three complete "Battlestar Galactica" episodes and a few selected scenes.

My knee-jerk response was one of mild disappointment, which was exactly what the nameless ad had been so desperately trying to avoid. The marketing department behind "Battlestar Galatica" surely knows this: You can't just go spring a sci-fi show on somebody, especially if you're trolling for mainstream awards. No, you have to slip it in the back door, make people read the critical acclaim before opening the box. And that's a shame.

It's a shame for many reasons, because after viewing the first season of "Battlestar Galactica," I can tell you honestly that it's an amazing show, full of drama and pain and heartbreak and sex and violence and betrayal and death and death and death and everything you could want in a drama. And it happens to be set in outer space. This reborn version of the 1978 series has nothing in common with the original except its name. I saw a few episodes of the original when I was younger, and even back then I knew it was campy, cheesy, and unbelievably stupid. (Now that I'm older, I can also see how it was really, really gay: Men with feathered hair who wear capes and pilot phallic spaceships into long metal tubes all day. I mean, come on.) But this reimagining of the show is infinitely superior to the first, so much so that it's impossible to even compare the two. The first doesn't even exist, as far as I'm concerned. Think of the creative leap between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and multiply it by something like 19 and you'll begin to understand how much better the new "Battlestar Galactica" is compared with the old one.

But I was reluctant to check out the show at first. For starters, it's an original production from Sci Fi Channel, and their raison d'être seems to be creating and airing some truly godawful programming. Their made-for-TV movies are a joke in everything from effects to casting to story, and their original shows tend to err on the side of alienating anyone who wants a sharp drama in favor of people who prefer cold facts and random scientific-sounding jargon. I therefore figured that "Battlestar Galactica" would surely fall into the latter camp. I've found myself writing off a lot of sci-fi sight unseen — I'm almost reluctant to do all this talking about sci-fi, period — but that's a dangerous habit to have.

Every genre has its successes and its failures, and to wall yourself off from a certain type of film because of prejudice toward the genre just doesn't make sense. A lot of dramas suck. A lot of action movies suck. A lot of romantic comedies suck. I'll save us all a lot of time: A lot of movies just plain suck. But it would be foolish to avoid all films because some of them were of low quality. No film is automatically good or bad by virtue of its genre. That's like saying "All Westerns suck" or "All World War II films are great," and those are the kind of broad, sweeping statements best left to wayward undergrads, and I think we're all past that.

So I gave "Battlestar Galactica" a chance, and discovered a truly great show. It's a tightly woven, compelling drama about what it means to live in a free society and the importance of justice in the presence of chaos; the sci-fi setting is the backdrop, not the focus. It's shot in a hand-held, documentary style, and the sets have a wonderful lived-in feel, as if the characters actually inhabit that fictional universe, as opposed to the clinically sterile feel of better known but vastly inferior shows. It's already been proven that an honest, character-driven drama set in space can work. "Battlestar Galactica" is another entry in that field, and it would be unfortunate if people avoided it just because of its genre.

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That pic's mainly for my dad, who's developed a near pathological crush on Evangeline Lilly, despite her early work. Anyway, there you go, Dad. It's gonna be a long summer of reruns, so let the photo tide you over.

As for the rest of you, I know you probably weren't even able to sleep or urinate or eat or do anything out of sheer anticipation of my knee-jerk, off-the-cuff reactions to last night's second-season finale of "Lost." Well, ask and it shall be given unto you.

• When Desmond, in a fit of drunken rage (the best kind), told Locke that there's nothing left but the island, he referred to it as a "snowglobe," which I couldn't help think was a thinly veiled reference/jab to "St. Elsewhere," the events of which were all inside some autistic kid's head while he played with a snowglobe. I'd say it's the writers telling us that such theories are bunk, and that the whole show isn't happening inside Hurley's head or something, which would be beyond stupid.

• Last night's episode was merely the last one of the season, whereas the first year's climax was a full-blown finale: The stakes were higher, they packed a lot more action and plot into two hours, and the parallelism of the cuts between the castaways boarding the plane before takeoff and watching them blow open the hatch were heartbreaking.

• The Dharma Initiative is shaping up to be this show's version of Milo Rambaldi. For those who didn't watch "Alias," Rambaldi was a 15th-century inventor whose prophecies unfolded on the show and whose writings influenced the show's overall direction, writing, story lines, etc. Depending on how the "Lost" showrunners handle it, Dharma could be very cool, like Rambaldi, or very bad, like Jenna Elfman.

• How depressed am I that I actually made that Elfman joke.

• Speaking of "Alias": The shift "Lost" seemed to make last night, away from the castaways as subjects and toward the story of Dharma and the island, could in time be seen as the moment the show decided to reboot its main focus, and its future success will be judged on whether viewers are willing to accept that. In the middle of the second season of "Alias," the good guys won, and I'm not talking a minor victory; I mean they beat the huge syndicate of villains, the Alliance, they'd been fighting all along. They took down SD-6, the local cell run by Arvin Sloane, as well as every SD outpost around the world. Halfway through the second year, the show abruptly changed from Sydney's efforts to take down SD-6 while living a double life to her attempts as a CIA agent to pursue the now independently evil Sloane, and the rest of the series hinged upon whether this switch was pulled off efficiently (it was) and whether it was a good idea (not completely). By abandoning the show's original conceit of double agents, double lives, and the pursuit of justice via vengeance, "Alias" lost most of the energy that had kept it going, so that by the end of its third season, it had run out of emotional and creative steam. Case in point: The fourth-season finale involved Russian zombies. So while it's possible that "Lost" could survive such a creative realignment, if indeed that's what happened last night, whether such a move would be wise won't be made clear until next season. Offhand, though, I'd say it's a bad idea.

• Eko was pretty stupid to think that dynamite would open the blast doors. They're called blast doors for a reason, man. Crazy priest.

• First Locke, then Rousseau. Now Desmond Hume. I get it, okay, guys? I get it. You took Intro to Philosophy. I get it. But knock it off. There hasn't been a forced mishmash of supposedly relevant philosophy this bad since the Matrix films, and we all know how those turned out.

• So the plane crashed because it was sucked down by the electromagnet? What's the point of having all the characters know each other from before the crash if the accident was Dharma-related, i.e., didn't involve them at all?

• There are now two shows trying to co-exist within the same space: The first involves Dharma and the hatches and Desmond and the electromagnetic clusterf**k that wrecked the plane, not to mention the multi-layered sociological experiments that were performed there. The second show wants to make use of the fact that the castaways all had tangential relationships before the crash, and that something pretty spooky and otherworldly is going on with the island, see for example the island's ability to restore Locke's ability to walk, Walt's natural psychokinetic abilities launching off the charts, the fact that everyone seems to have pretty relevant dreams about ghosts and/or the future, the whispering voices in the woods, the duplicitous Others, the black sentient cloud of whatever that flies around and at one point had a stare-down with Eko, etc. I like the second show.

And just like last year, I'll have a solid four months for my questions to be answered. ABC is supposed to air the first seven or so episodes this fall, then break, then air the rest. Here's hoping they stick to that, since the uneven repeat schedule this year was annoying. And here's hoping that J.J. Abrams gets back in the saddle to do some writing and directing. He should bring back David Fury, too. "Lost" promised to be a great show, and it was, and it could be great again. Just not the way things are going.

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I got home from work after 9 p.m., but decided to catch the last 40 minutes of "Lost" anyway, since the show has long since regressed past the point where you need to actually watch every minute of an episode to get the full effect of the story. And within 30 seconds, I sadly called the Dave-centered revelation, since I've seen Fight Club and A Beautiful Mind and the "Normal Again" episode, not to mention that it was pretty much the most natural twist you could want.

The first season of "Lost" was extremely well-plotted. A friend of mine recently nailed it when she said that throughout the first season's arc, each individual episode was driven by a journey: Somebody was always going across the island to get a radio or a briefcase or dynamite from a pirate ship or whatever. But this season, everyone just seems to be sitting around, not doing much.

Plus, it's beyond disappointing that there are only four episodes left and it looks as of now that the Henry Gale thing will be bigger than it should have been. Henry should be the doorway to the finale, not the destination.

P.S. It would have been funnier if Hurley had recognized Libby because she was a porn star. At least that would have been different from the truth, which turned out to be pretty predictable. And she's definitely chasing him for the money.

"Do you know what I do when I feel I'm about to lose it a little? I buy a lamp."

"Well, lady, you must have one well-lit apartment, because you turned a corner somewhere."

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Can I just say: Finally.

Basically, I'm going to pretend that most of the second season of Lost never happened, like the Matrix sequels or the Bush administration. Last week's "Lockdown" episode featured movement on the Henry Gale plot (I never trusted that guy), some slight progression with the love-hate-animal-attraction between Jack and Sawyer, and even a reappearance from Libby the Trashy Tail Section Girl, who has got to know that Hurley's rich back in the States, since no sane woman would tease any man with the strip-down wardrobe show Libby gave Hurley in the hatch back in the day.

It was the first good episode in weeks, not least because it dealt with Locke, one of the three genuinely rounded characters in the bunch. Locke's flashback also had an actual bearing on the current island situation, something the writers forgot about with the stupid Charlie-can-see-ghosts and the-island-gave-Jin-magically-restored-sperm plot lines. You know Locke's heart was gonna get broken about 45 minutes in, but that didn't make it hurt any less. Killer. Great stuff.

They've only got five more episodes this season to turn things around, and I think they can do it. Pull J.J. Abrams off postproduction and publicity for Mission: Impossible 3, since that thing's gonna be huge regardless. Let him write and produce one of the few good shows on network TV. The show needs him.

Also, in the interest of turning you, dear reader, into an all-around better person, I'm inaugurating the Quote of the Day. It won't always happen, but when it does, be prepared to change for the better. And now:

"Hello."

"AHH!"

"Why'd you scream?"

"I meant to say hi."

"What happened?"

"I misspoke."

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I know I expressed some concerns recently about the internal consistencies of Lost, and though I still maintain that some hygiene issues are just too big to be ignored, and that Jack's hair should really be noticeably longer, I've got a bigger bone to pick with the show.

Nothing's happening.

Sure, on the surface there seems to be plenty going on, especially compared to most other shows on network TV. But creator J.J. Abrams sets the bar high, and the show's not living up to it. The first season of Abrams' Alias was a phenomenal display of action, mystery, and emotional conflict; except for the random clip show episode where Sydney is interrogated by the FBI (repped by Terry O'Quinn), the entire season is tight, and almost flawlessly paced. Lost took the same mix of soap and sci-fi to epic new heights in its groundbreaking first season, a year that may prove impossible to top. Maybe it's because Abrams' energies have been focused elsewhere of late, but Lost is definitely suffering from a sophmore slump. The best evidence of this?

Nothing's happening.

The show's myriad plot lines, once so tightly interwoven, have become almost helplessly unraveled. Michael's been off in the woods looking for Walt for who knows how long, and except to make a few cameos to welcome Shannon to an apparently pretty Twin Peaks-ish afterlife, Walt hasn't been seen all year. Sawyer finally went bad again and swiped the island's stockpile of guns, an arc which was summarily dropped the next episode when Sawyer spent his time chasing a tree frog.

We're 14 episodes along in season two. At this time last year, Locke and Boone had already found and begun to excavate the hatch; it was revealed that Sawyer knew Jack's father; Claire had been kidnapped; the anagrammatically evil Ethan Rom had made his presence known; Sayid had already been captured by Rousseau and escaped; Charlie had already kicked the monkey off his back; and, of course, Walt was psychically manifesting giant polar bears, and possibly the daily rainfall. Last season was packed with drama, while this season has slowed to a crawl.

Maybe it was impossible for the show to continue on the stellar trajectory it charted its first year. But rather than continue to push the characters forward, to have them grow, the writing this season (again, with the exception of "The Long Con") has been stuck in neutral. The best dramas are ones whose characters show marked change over time, which Lost pulled off in its first year: The characters weren't the same at the end as they were when they started. But this entire season has felt like one long, turgid answer to the question posed in last year's finale of just what's down the hatch. The answer, it seems, is less than we hoped.

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I love Lost, but:

How can Jack and Sawyer maintain that perfect Indy-level of stubble? And how can Locke stay clean-shaven?

Shouldn't Kate's dye job be fading?

Where do the women get the makeup?

What happens when the women run out of tampons? (This could be an amazing, murder-filled season finale.)

Why isn't Jack's hair growing?

Why hasn't anyone suffered food poisoning or some kind of food or plant allergy?

How many olive-colored wife-beaters did Sayid bring with him?

Why aren't the castaways tanner and thinner? According to the show's chronology, they've been stranded for like two months. Their bodies should really reflect it.

And on a completely unrelated note, how can Ferris be so smart but still expect the odometer to roll back by driving in reverse? This is unacceptable, and takes me out of the movie every time. It's like when Johnny goes from evil to good in the literal final seconds and hands Daniel the trophy. It just doesn't hold water.

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