definitely, possibly, maybe

it's taken a week for my thoughts on "lost" to settle. that's how mind-blowing the premiere was. as last season came to a close, i was adamantly against a reset. for one thing, i felt it would eliminate the five seasons that came before. i should have realized that there didn't need to be an either/or situation for the producers. because lost has excelled at training it's audience to follow two completely disparate storylines, showing us a reset of flight 815 and the continued story from the island is simply brilliant. the new flash sideways structure allows us to explore both possible outcomes to the hydrogen bomb's detonation, and ultimately i think that was the absolute right decision for the show. lost will struggle to find the absolute right ending, or rather it will struggle to find the absolute right ending that will satisfy one and all. but these first two hours of the final season proved that the writers know what they're doing. and that the b

after last season's surprising turn of events and unexpected renewal, there were, at least in my mind, a lot of questions about what would happen next on "chuck". how would this show manage to evolve without losing what made it so charming in the first place? i have a well-documented love of spy shows, see "alias", and it's also no secret that when i was little, in the height of the cold war, i thought that being a spy would be a cool career. which all feeds into why i love "chuck" so much. the premise that a regular guy gets involved with a spy world that is over his head is an excellent fodder for both drama and comedy. but when chuck downloaded the intersect 2.0 into his brain, giving himself a whole new set of abilities that make him an even more powerful asset for the u.s. government, you had to wonder where it was all going to go. what is great about the writing staff on this show is that they recognized that their characters needed to evolve