basquiat was a good movie but i'm wondering if they portrade him the way he really was, anobody else see that movie? his paintings where freaking rad!

My DVR's primed for "The Office"... I don't watch "Grey's Anatomy" and have faded out on "My Name is Earl". The big Premiere Week for me is two weeks away -- "LOST" and then "Battlestar Galactica".

I'm interested in watching some of "Jericho" and maybe a couple of other shows (my wife will insist on watching "Ugly Betty", as she's a huge fan of the other telenovela versions), but at the moment I find myself hard-pressed to find the time to watch anything -- even Dodger games. So it's DVR to the rescue, and skipping through lots of stuff to find the key bits that I'm truly interested in.

Test.

I don't know if folks ever read Tom Shales, the Wash Post tv critic, but he's pretty well known as a smart, somewhat cranky critic and a blistering writer. He loved Shark, which premieres tonight, and as I enjoyed reading his review, thought I'd link it offer if anyone is interested. (He also reviews the new show by JJ Abrams; doesn't like that one so much: "Think of the new ABC drama "Six Degrees," which premieres tonight, as a kind of gift -- not a gift to the television viewers of this great nation, but a gift to J.J. Abrams, the producer-writer behind it. Because Abrams came up with ABC's big, loud walloping hit 'Lost,' network executives were apparently eager to reward him by buying whatever other ideas might pop out of his head.")

http://tinyurl.com/odqwo

I'm already a little behind and will need the weekend to catch up. Among new shows so far, I still want to check out Kidnapped most of all.

4 - I watched Shark on an airplane without the sound - my suspicion is that it's not that good, but you know, that's not the fairest way to evaluate a show.

1 - I never saw Basquiat.

Has Kidnapped already premiered? I still haven't gotten around to watching Studio 60, which I think I'll hate and Smith, which sounds promising. I've been catching up on all the Office episodes I missed. The first Office episode I saw was last year's finale.

8 I think Kidnapped premiered last night. I switched from the replay of the Tigers-White Sox to my local NBC channel for news and was treated (?) to the credits and teaser for next week's show.

My mother watched Smith and couldn't make heads or tails out of it.

"Kidnapped" has already premiered but they are encoring the pilot Saturday night.

man i'm gonna have to start watching Lost, everybody always has something good to say about that show. all i know is that it involves a plane crash & an island.

A problem for me with Smith could be its premise, which was the same as Thief, which I was really rooting for. But the presence of Virginia Madsen was enough to get me to record the first episode.

I saw Kidnapped the only way I can as a non-Tivoid -- as it unspooled.

Cinematically, it is way over-stylized, duplicating the effects in that movie with Ellen Burstyn and Jennifer Connelly about drug addiction (if you can't tell, I forgot the title). However, it is otherwise well done: Scary, good acting, good music, credible plot, good sets, dialogue fair to good. They're lucky to have such superb actors as Dana Delaney and Timothy Hutton, who are both superb at saying a lot without words.

My pet peeve would be the dark, moody lighting. If I were the father of a kidnap victim, all my lights would be blazing, all the time. People wouldn't have a chance to walk up to me in half-shadows to say meaningful things. They'd have to knock first.

The only premiere I am waiting for is Battlestar Galactica on the 6th. Hella good show. My brother keeps trying to get me to watch Lost and a few other serial-type shows, but I just haven't had the time to catch up on them from the beginning.

I can't wait for the Office, but I am afraid that they will go for the obvious cop out instead of using Jim and Pam's situation. If we get something like: "Pam, you haven't talked to me since that night." "Jim... I have to go." And then they slowly build back towards friendship over the course of the season... I will be very disappointed.

Not a bad start. But this raises a whole new set of questions.

i'm still in shock that Mark Donohue doesn't like The Family Guy.

I laughed out loud several times and we just made it to the first commercial break. It is nice to have the Office back.

Are we allowed to actually talk about what is going on in the episode or are we supposed to remain mum?

You can speak freely.

That Ricardo Montalban cameo on the Office was incredible, huh.

20 I say you can speak freely because Jon put it in the thread post -- OK to talk about shows as they air.

I can't believe they got Pam Dawber to do that. Pam and Pam, very clever.

Hysterical. The kiss reminded me of an incident involving a female friend of mine and a lap dance that was no less awkward.

What is the over under on how many episodes until Jim comes back to work at the office?

Depends how long his oxygen holds out, I'd say. And how well he can dig.

I have checked out four new shows so far:

Studio 60 -- Great

Kidnapped -- Good

Smith -- Bad

Jericho -- Bad

Shark is horrible so far. Bad camera, horrible script, cliche plot, the acting is nothing special. I can't believe that someone gave this good reviews. I haven't seen the end yet, but I can't see what would change my mind.

26 I disagree. Granted, my television viewing outside sports is limited to Scrubs, South Park, The Daily Show/Colber Report, Mythbusters, and Law and Order. But after a pretty terrible episode of CSI, I've found Shark pretty entertaining. All courtroom dramas have been cliche since Perry Mason and Matlock. That doesn't make the show horrible. James Woods is proving why he has a high school named after him (even if it's a fictional high school in a television show that Mark Donahue and I don't like anymore). I don't watch a lot of television, and I'm going to watch the next episode. That's gotta count for something.

ER has new theme music? Sure, that's what was wrong. I'm going to send Amanda Peet a letter, asking her to cancel it.

There were Project Greenlight movies that weren't as bad as this ER episode.

Can I safely erase "ER" and then delete the series recording?

It ended better than I expected. Which just means there's something to be disappointed about, next week. I'm pretty sure this is the year I give up on ER. NBC helpfully killed West Wing soon enough that I didn't have to make the hard choice. But I quit the Simpsons, last year, and I still feel good about that. I've quit watching the re-runs, even, since the garbage years are now in syndication. ER died when Mark Greene did and the body smells awful.

31 - West Wing actually got better in its final season, perhaps it didn't obtain the heights of its first three seasons, but it was very high quality television. That said, I can only imagine how much money they were spending as the show had about 4000 characters plus extras and seemed to features 100s of locations every episode.

I know I am going back to last night's conversation but I thought Kidnapped was really good. My wife and I watched it because we liked "Billy" from Six Feet Under and wanted to see it. My wife and I agreed though, that the kidnappings should only be 3 episode storyline arcs because I don't see how they can drag it on. They seem to have the story going in a different direction, though, based on next weeks previews. As if the kidnapping is a decoy for something else. It was interesting.
For the people that watch Battlestar Galactica I would also tell you to watch a show called Eureka on the Sci Fi Channel. It is very good. It's about a secret town in the USA that has the smartest people in the world living in it. Like Einsteins kids and Oppenheimers kids, and grandkids. They invent all kinds of things that are suppose to help the world, but hijinks ensue when these inventions go haywire. Check it out.

Wait a darn minute...People still watch ER?

I think the last episode I saw was when Anthony Edwards's character had cancer.