For this week’s LDG, let’s go back to the first season and a character who promised to be very, very significant in Lost’s future: Walt. In the first season, we got a glimpse of Walt’s apparent psychic abilities, which made him a kindred spirit to Locke. (Walt, after all, was the one character who wanted [...]

We’re only one episode in, but I’m getting a better vibe from this season’s Top Chef than from season 2, with its over-the-top personality clashes, head shavings and what have you. The premiere last week was perfectly enjoyable, but it made me wish that someone had persuaded Anthony Bourdain to be a regular judge; the [...]

The idea of Rosie O’Donnell taking over The Price Is Right has been floated–by Rosie herself–and repeatedly knocked down in the press over the past several weeks. But it looks like Rosie is not taking no for an answer; she’s reaffirmed on her blog that she’s interested in the job, and she recently scored an [...]

Trae Patton/ The CW A programming note about Test Pilot. I realize that at the rate I’m doing them, it will be the 2009-10 season before I finish. There’s a good chance I won’t get around to all of them but instead focus on the ones you and I are most curious about, so keep [...]

Saturday mornings may never be the same. Kellogg’s has announced that it’s going to phase out the marketing of high-fat, high-sugar foods to children under 12, a step that could mean the end of characters like Toucan Sam, Shrek (as a cereal pitchman) and whatever weird creatures they use to sell Apple Jacks. Oddly, Tony [...]

Nate Fisher cleans up nice. ABC: PATRICK HARBRON Test Pilot is a semiregular feature this summer sharing my first impressions of the pilots for next fall’s shows. These aren’t reviews, since these pilots can be rewritten, recast and retooled before airing, and the shows that eventually get on the air can prove much better or [...]

Ana Marie beat me to a post at Swampland, but politically uninvolved readers may want to head to HillaryClinton.com to see Hill and Bill reprising the Sopranos’ final scene to announce the winner of her campaign-song contest. You may commence reading way too much into the symbolism of the video now. Personally, I always pegged [...]

Margene steps up to the salad plate. HBO photo: Lacey Terrell Unfortunately, when the Emmys get around to handing out nominations, there’s only so much HBO heat to go around. This has hurt The Wire before, and this year, it’s likely again that the big nominations will go to The Sopranos and bypass Big Love, [...]

I should not admit this as a professional TV watcher, but there are some shows I simply do not get. One of these is The Closer, which back in its first season I decided got far too much credit for glomming the slightest bit of character development (Kyra Sedgwick’s crime-solver-with-issues basically amounting to Jane Tennison [...]

In this morning’s HBO roundup, Tuned In habitue Chaddogg posts a question too good not to milk a whole blog post out of: How does HBO measure the success of its shows? Is it just ratings, and if so, how does it factor in the decrease due to the number of people who don’t subscribe? [...]

Trojan, the condom maker, is launching a new ad campaign for its prophylactics this week, but on Fox and CBS, it appears the advertiser is instead going to have to, um, pull out. The New York Times reports this morning that the two networks rejected the condom ads, which will run on ABC, NBC and [...]

Hearts of lightness. HBO: Claudette Barius A little while ago, I mentioned one thing that’s bugged me all along about Entourage: the difficulty of telling whether Vince is actually supposed to be a good actor or not. Last night we finally got to see him on set, and it didn’t clear much up. On the [...]

From left, Showtime’s Meadowlands and HBO’s Conchords Work on an unspecified Big Fat Project has prevented me from cranking out many full-fledged reviews lately but I want to put in a word for Meadowlands, an eight-episode British import drama that starts on Showtime Sunday. It’s a dark, fanciful mystery about a tough guy and his [...]

After awarding his last Showcase of all time today (well, a week or so ago, but his last Price Is Right just aired), Bob Barker said his final farewell to his audience: “I want to thank you very, very much for inviting me into your home for the past 50 years. I am deeply grateful. [...]

My Culture Complex column in this week’s Time (the one with Mike Bloomberg and Arnold getting all cuddly on the cover) is about two personal obsessions of mine: real estate, and TV shows that obsess about real estate. More specifically, the fact cable home shows have gone from focusing on decoration and DIY and become [...]

By which I don’t mean TV-program-that-is-a-work-of-fiction–I mean a TV program that was fictionalized within another TV show or movie. Off the top of my head, I have to give the TV-division award to The Itchy & Scratchy Show. They fight! They fight! They fight and fight and fight! Is there any show-within-a-show that better captures [...]

I’ll be catching up on last night’s premiere of Top Chef, which I didn’t get around to between Rescue Me and having gone to a screening of Seth Rogen’s Superbad. It’s supergood! Michael Cera’s character talks exactly like George Michael, except he gets to swear. Jonah Hill’s character talks exactly like Seth Rogen, plus his [...]

I just sat in on a conference call with CNN and and YouTube, who are teaming up on what they are calling the “first-ever viewer-generated presidential debates.” The debates (one with the Democrats on July 23, one with the GOP on Sept. 17) will feature questions taken entirely from the public’s online video submissions, which [...]

We’ve spent a couple of weeks on the season 3 finale here at LDG, so for this week I thought I’d take a different tack, go (slightly) back and toss out one of the bigger questions about the island’s mythology: What (or who) is the smoke monster, anyway? There are a lot of subquestions implied [...]