Competing at the 2006 bee, Finola Hackett and winner Katharine Close (seated). ESPN Photo: Mark Bowen

The 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee, baby! I can't even do this event justice in a small blog post. American kids of far-flung nationalities puzzling over the etymologies of the same dead languages. The dissonance of the ding! of elimination, which sounds like it should signal a correct answer but means the opposite. The eternity between when a kid misses an early letter in a word and when he finishes it.

The final airs on ABC in primetime, but the competition aired on ESPN this morning, and is on ESPN News as I write. The drama moment came when 13-year-old Samir Patel, of Colleyville, TX, a previous 2nd and 3rd-place finisher, was eliminated on clevis, a word of Scandinavian origin that means "any of various connections in which one part is fitted between the forked ends of another and fastened by means of a bolt or pin passing through the forked ends." [He lodged a protest that the word was mispronounced, but his appeal was denied.]

The crowd gasped. The commentators were stunned. And his opponents were visibly moved as they stood and gave him a standing ovation. You'll have to excuse me. I'm getting a little verklempt.

Tangentially related trivia question: Who can name a short-lived past sitcom about homeschooling? Your bonus time starts now...

The people have spoken, and the people want something to do for eight months until we get another Lost. The first suggestion I'm taking from the Memorial Day robo-poll is for a weekly Lost discussion. Think of it as a Lost Summer Seminar, with me as the lazy professor who delivers the phoned-in lecture, and Chaddogg as the diligent, underpaid teaching assistant who does all the actual work in the Comments section.

Ideally, we'll mix up really big-picture questions (How do you think the series will end?) with tiny questions (What the hell are The Whispers?) with sound-off/critiques (Does anyone really care about the Jack-Kate-Sawyer triangle?) and meta-questions (Dom and Evangeline: Can They Stay Together?). Kidding on that last one. I think. And you should feel free to ignore the question and hijack the discussion.

But for the first one, let's keep it simple and begin at the end: Where do you think the first episode of season 4 begins?

There seem to be a few-options after the big reveal of last week's finale. (Speaking of which: can we all agree that if you still haven't seen the finale and care about spoilers by now, you should not be reading any posts about Lost?)

* The first episode could be set in the future, after Jack and Kate (and who else?) got off the island, and we find out more about Jack's quest to get back to the island

* There could be a Battlestar Galactica jump forward, where we see whoever remains on the island, however far in the future, and what has become of them after the "rescue" of the rest

* The show could leave the flash-forward dangling, maybe for a long time, and simply pick up the story immediately after Jack makes his satellite phone call. (This is my guess, until one of you persuades me otherwise about five minutes from now.)

Lost Summer School is in session! Stop staring out the window!

Hidden Palms, on The CW. Because it's Kevin Williamson, because Dawson's Creek gave me such pleasure for its first few years, and because I have subsequently felt obligated to give a chance to Wasteland and Glory Days. Because even though I saw the first episode months ago and didn't like it, and even though the May 30 debut screams "summer burn-off," Diane Werts at Newsday swears it gets better. And because my former colleague, predecessor as Time TV critic and Brooklyn neighbor Ginia Bellafante says the furniture is pretty. I'm not advising that you watch it, so the hour of your life you spend if you do watch is entirely nonrefundable.

HBO: Craig Blankenhorn

Here's one thing I love about blogging. I post a question. You write stuff for me. My employer considers this "work," and continues to issue me paychecks. To the extent that you buy our advertisers' products or watch TV programming produced or delivered by Time Warner, you are literally paying to do my work for me.

Where am I going with this? Well, my question today concerns one of my employer's more lucrative but lately troubled divisions: HBO. The Sopranos, which remains HBO's most-watched series, goes off the air June 10. Now there are certainly other reasons to subscribe to HBO--The Wire, Entourage, Big Love. But in spite of HBO's attempts to create "the next Sopranos" (next up, the elliptical-even-for-HBO John from Cincinnati, and good luck with that) those other series have audiences of millions fewer than The Sopranos. So it stands to reason that there are people out there who have HBO more or less solely for Tony & Co.

You're a TV-intense bunch, so I ask you: if you had HBO to begin with, are you keeping it or dumping it after June 10, and why? If you don't have HBO, do you watch any of the series on DVD instead (a strategy that, especially for dense shows like The Wire, makes a lot of sense)?

Or did you never think HBO was worth it in the first place? I won't hold it against you. Just don't tell my boss I said that.

Can Friday Night Lights survive the loss of its friend in the front office? NBC Photo: Bill Records

NBC's entertainment president Kevin Reilly--the man who programmed Heroes and pushed to keep 30 Rock and Friday Night Lights on the air--is leaving his job. (Technically, but only technically, he quit.) Replacing him, sort of, is Ben Silverman, the head of the studio Reveille, who has had a remarkable hot streak of hit-picking, or at least hit-importing. (Reveille brought The Office and Ugly Betty to the States, and as an agent, Silverman had a hand in importing Survivor and Who Wants to be a Millionaire.)

Reilly's departure was at once surprisingly sudden and surprisingly overdue. It was unexpected to see him pushed out just a couple weeks after announcing his fall 2007 schedule; on the other hand, I hadn't expected NBC to show as much patience with him as it had, with the network stuck in fourth place. (This despite the fact that Reilly, at least, had developed new hits like Heroes and The Office, something that a certain boss of his was unable to do back when he held the job.)

Why should you care? Reilly was punished, as happens in business, for failing in the market, but also, in a way, for successfully pleasing people like you and me: critics and intense fans who go for high-quality, limited-mass-appeal shows like FNL. Friday Night Lights remains on NBC's schedule, but it just lost a powerful friend upstairs.

I don't want to make the Reilly-Silverman swap into the good guy versus the cretin, though. As noted, NBC wouldn't have The Office without Silverman, and ideally, the young Silverman could manage to combine Kevin Reilly's taste (or something like it) with NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker's preternatural business sense. Like Zucker, Silverman (who takes the position of co-chairman with NBC exec Marc Graboff) has a big interest in "new paradigms," and "changing business models," and all those other catchphrases that mean "figuring out how the hell we make make money now that the audiences are shrinking." His reality shows, and even his scripted shows, have unembarrassedly used product placements and sponsorships aggressively, for instance.

That said, unlike Zucker, who seems to have no aesthetic sense other than a fondness for dollar-bill green, Silverman at least seems to see these new business ideas as a means of supporting good shows. Not always good, granted--he also gave us The Biggest Loser. Silverman apprenticed under NBC programming legend Brandon Tartikoff, who deeply understood the tradeoffs between good programming and good business.

I hate to see Reilly go--more important, I don't want to see Reilly's shows go--but maybe NBC could use a little of that. I've only met Silverman once, but he came across as intense and confident, with an evangelical belief that the kinds of shows and sponsorship deals he was creating were the key to keeping TV alive in the future. If he can use that showmanship to keep FNL on the air, that's fine with me.

On the other hand, what was the show that I was interviewing Silverman about? A little piece of TV history that you might remember as The Restaurant. So we'll just have to see.

Charles Nelson Reilly, who introduced schoolchildren of a certain age to the art of the brilliant double entendre on Match Game, died Friday. In the lull between his death and my re-opening the blog for business post-holiday, the comments on my Price Is Right post became a sort of impromptu shrine to Reilly, and commenter LB offered Reilly and the '70s daytime game show a better memorial than I could hope to top:

I was too young to get some of the jokes and double entendres they threw around, but half the fun was the physical humor of watching them (and various other inanimate objects) being thrown. Hollywood Squares of course is a cultural icon, but Match Game had its own cachet. Before Comedy Central, before VH1 and its various celebrity combo "reality" shows, we basically got to sit in on a daily happy hour / roast with the likes of Brett Somers, Charles Nelson Reilly, Betty White, Richard Dawson, Fannie Flagg, and various others just trying to keep up -- while Gene Rayburn prowled the stage with his foot-long microphone and acted as our vaudevillian host when he could take a break from leering at the pretty women.

Seconded. There really was something distinctly '70s about Match Game, with its rakish, racy, not-quite-a-key-party air of adults testing the era's new licentiousness in language just safe enough for the kids. And Reilly, bookended with Paul Lynde on Hollywood Squares, was to many kids of my generation our first experience of brilliantly bitchy gay men sending bon-mot missives from within the celluloid closet--even if we had no idea at the time.

Nervousness about copyright keeps me from embedding the video, but you can see Reilly cutting up on Match Game at YouTube. What's more, here's a mind-blowing clip of the theme from Lidsville, Reilly's postpsychedelic Krofft kids' show, complete with intentional or not drug references, that I had forgot ever watching until I just came across it. (Talk about a period piece: check out the Strawberry Alarm Clock-like music and the groovy color-wheel effects as the magic hat grows, and grows and grows!)

Watch the clips and remember a time when TV shows had two-minute-long theme songs, kids blithely unwound with innuendoes and psychedelia and Charles Nelson Reilly amused the BLANK out of America.

Dear Mark Burnett,

We like our summer reality TV at the Tuned In household. We have fond memories of sultry nights watching Big Brother, Project Runway, the first season of American Idol--hell, even American Juniors. So Tuned In was quite the receptive audience for On the Lot, your filmmaking competition. I told people I had faith that you could make this into compelling TV; I even said nice things about The Contender, for God's sake. But you're losing me, and here's why:

1. The Format. You could have gone in two directions with this show: the boutique, Project Runway approach, where you spend most of your time behind the scenes with the contestants, showing the stress and fights and creative challenges; or the American Idol route, where you parade them on live TV for a home voting audience. Ten times more people watch American Idol, so I guess I can't blame you for making the latter choice, but it totally drains the interest out of your 18 finalists, an indistinguishable mass that I now think of as 17 Finalists Plus the One Guy Who Does All the Special Effects and Will Probably Win.

2. The Host. I will never say anything bad about Ryan Seacrest again. I'll never even say anything bad about Brooke Burke again. The choice of host says a lot about your aspirations for the show, and your choice of second-string entertainment-news host Adrianna Costa--oversmiling, emphasizing every other word with upward-pointed index fingers, referring to everyone as "you guys"--says, "Our show's not quite classy enough to get Jillian Barbarie to host it, so let's settle for a Jillian Barbarie type."

3. The Judges. Since when is everyone in Hollywood so freaking nice? You've managed to convene a panel of Paula Abduls. You have Carrie Fisher, turning every judgment into a self-deprecating joke or Star Wars reference; avuncular Garry Marshall, marveling over and over how amazing it is that they let broads direct pictures these days; and the rotating guest judges, whose assessments of even the lousiest clips conclude, "...but it was really well-made." You need at least one Simon Cowell or Michael Kors type, who is willing to be blunt with the contestants and able to articulate what's right or wrong with their work. Which brings us to...

4. The Movies. I guess I can see why you went with "One-minute comedies" as your first competition theme--that's what people like to watch on YouTube, right? The problem is, it was like watching two hours of so-so YouTube without the ability to click to another video. Even the funniest videos we saw last night weren't really movies: they were well-made commercials. (The bit about the woman taking cell-phone calls during labor needed only a Verizon title card at the end and you could have sold the airtime for several hundred thou.) I mean, I like a puking alien as much as the next guy, and I fully expect to see one during the first quarter of the next Super Bowl for Bud Lite, but can an actual good filmmaker win a competition like this, or will it just go to the most capably glib hack? Which brings us finally to...

5. The Challenges. Part of the problem with the comedy challenge is that it was just too broad. If you want to show the differences between the contestants, do what Project Runway does and give them more tightly restricted challenges--shooting the same premise, or even the same scene--and let their differences, and characters, emerge in the different ways they pull off the same job. (Speaking of challenges, what happened to the make-a-movie-in-one-hour challenge at the end of the second episode? Were the results that bad?)

I could go on, but judging from the ratings so far, I may be the only one left watching at this point. I'm not completely giving up on On the Lot yet, because I know that reality TV, like moviemaking, is a process. But the dailies are not looking good.

No, I'm not working today! Why, I'm so lazy, I barely have the energy to not work today!

But it's the unofficial beginning of summer, and with the change of season comes the end of many of our regular and semiregular franchises at Tuned In: Lost, American Idol, Heroes, The Office and soon The Sopranos. That means I'll soon have some spare time to try a few different things on the blog. So I thought I'd throw it to you: what do you want to read about over the summer? My fall pilot screeners? Summer series? (Rescue Me? Big Love? The Next Food Network Star?) The DVDs of all the movies I usually catch up on over the summer?

Bring on the requests. Will I take your suggestions? I have no idea. But I promise to read them! Or at least look at the number of comments on this post! In the meantime, happy barbecuing and/or drinking.

Two days after her split-screen throwdown with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, TMZ.com and the AP are reporting that Rosie O'Donnell will not be returning to The View, ending her run on that show three weeks early. TMZ quotes an ABC statement saying, "We had hoped that Rosie would be with us until the end of her contract three weeks from now, but Rosie has informed us that she would like an early leave."

This follows Rosie's hint at her own blog (closed to comments today) that she might not return to the show, after the shouting match with Hasselbeck. Rosie had attacked her co-host for not defending her against charges that Rosie implied that U.S. troops were "terrorists" because of Iraqi civilian casualties. (An argument I'll leave for you to weigh in on for now, because there is some part of my brain that resists adjudicating a foreign-policy debate between the former star of A League of Their Own and an ex-Survivor finalist.)

There will be speculation, I suppose as to whether Rosie is Too Hot for TV now that she's left The View on a note like that. I doubt it. She may be too hot for The View, whose producer-host Barbara Walters created the show as a place for frank talk among women but gets notoriously uncomfortable when that talk gets too frank. But for TV in general? One suspects, given what she did for The View's ratings, some studio out there will be willing to take the principled stance of giving a show to a famous woman whom scads of people want to watch on television.

Too controversial for TV? Ask Nancy Grace, or Bill O'Reilly, or even Ann Coulter, how it's hurt their careers. Or ask Donald Trump--no, on second thought, don't. He might just have something to say.

Schellenberg, foreground, as Sitting Bull. HBO/Annabel Reyes

In HBO's lamented Western Deadwood, we rarely saw or heard from Native Americans, except as severed heads and as a cynically-invoked threat that rationalized brutality and power grabs. HBO's movie Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, debuting Sunday, begins just before Deadwood did--with the massacre at Little Big Horn--but has a distinctly different perspective. The first thing we see are two Sioux boys being set upon by a line of U.S. soldiers, who kill one of the children; but the fighting then leads to the famous rout of Gen. George Custer and his troops.

The recriminations and reprisals that followed were background noise in Deadwood, but they--and the ensuing years of systematic humiliation and destruction of the Sioux--are the subject of this movie, adapted from Dee Brown's nonfiction book. (The movie itself reportedly takes some liberties with history and chronology.) The wide-ranging film chronicles the efforts to solve the "Indian problem" (part of the "problem" being that the Sioux have gold on their land) by the government, starting with the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. (Played by--who else?--perennial fictional prez and real-life possible candidate Fred Thompson, whose Law & Order boss, Dick Wolf, produced the film. If Thompson runs, HBO may have to cast Rudy Giuliani as Fiorello LaGuardia in the interest of equal time.)

The movie focuses on Sioux chief Sitting Bull (August Schellenberg); Sen. Henry Dawes (Aidan Quinn), who drives Indian-affairs policy; and Dawes' conflicted young aide, the American-educated Sioux Charles Eastman (born Ohiyesa). [Update: He's played by Adam Beach.] Dawes' charge is to persuade, or threaten, the Sioux whom Sitting Bull leads to sell their land, a plan that, for all its racism and coercion, he genuinely believes is in the Indians' best interest. Sitting Bull resists, believing the payoff will cripple his tribe in the long run, but the standoff leaves the Sioux divided and destitute, leading finally to the desperate Ghost Dance movement (in which the Sioux embraced the mystical belief that they could summon their spirits of their ancestors and drive the white man away).

Given the film's historical scope, it feels compressed at two-hour length; it seems like it should have been a miniseries, and none of the characters get much room to breathe. But within those constraints, they're treated as ambiguously as you'd expect from HBO. Dawes is at once idealistic and arrogant, compassionate and condescending in his desire to force assimilation on the Sioux by any means necessary. Sitting Bull (played with monumental presence by Schellenberg) is at turns noble and vain, fighting with heart but often choosing the wrong battles, standing proud but often acting out of pique. And Eastman is well-meaning but conscious of what he's lost through assimilation; you wonder, as he does, how well he truly understands his fellow Sioux anymore. (As schoolteacher Elaine Goodale, Anna Paquin is the film's biggest name but mainly fades into the background.)

Wounded Knee's sympathies are clearly with the degraded Sioux; there's a depressing scene on the reservation in which a staged "hunt" consists of shooting cattle in a corral. But like Deadwood, the movie sees no blameless actors in this tragedy. There's striking scene in which Sitting Bull and U.S. Col. Nelson Miles (Shaun Johnston) argue the basis for their nation's claims on the gold-laden Black Hills. Miles is high-handed and ruthless, but he makes the point that, although the Sioux say they have a religious claim on the land, they themselves took the land brutally from other tribes, after being chased from Minnesota by the Chippewa. Sitting Bull counters that it's ironic for the Americans to be sanctimonious now, when they gave the Sioux the arms they used in that battle.

The exchange could just as well be about the Middle East or a dozen other areas of competing national and religious land claims. Regardless, it's not sophisticated arguments that win the battle, but rather the relentless pounding of Miles' massive artillery shells. If not a perfect work of HBO drama, Wounded Knee is still a stark and chilling illustration of how the West was won, and what happened to those who lost it.