Is the world ready for a suicide bomber comedy (suicide bomedy)? Almost certainly not, but it looks very funny.

Also, new trailer for the upcoming season of Lost. I think we can all agree that it’s not marketing hyperbole to call this the television event of the year. I mean that’s just true. It’s a fact.

And now it’s time for me to ask a borderline heretical question: when all the shouting (and also plane crashes, kidnappings, sex in polar bear cages and ghost sightings) is done, will Lost be, on balance, a better show than The Wire?

I think the answer is probably no; The Wire’s characterizations were incomparably richer and the emotional wallops stronger (oh man, that scene of Avon and Stringer by the river at the end of Season 3; everything about Season 4), but The Wire’s seasons feel more tightly self-contained. Obviously, they built on each other, but they don’t feel of a piece with each other in the same way that Lost’s do.

The principal weakness for Lost, to my mind, is that they didn’t negotiate to do fewer episodes each season until Season 4 (with Season 3 kind of falling between since that was the writers’ strike season). Once they were able to do more concentrated season arcs, with fewer wasteful digressions into unimportant elements of uninteresting characters, the quality of the show really picked up. And with the cohesion of a single, big story coming to a close with the force of an unravelling mystery, it creates almost as much sheer joy as The Wire ever did.

This is, incidentally, yet another reason US tv should take a page from British tv and set out to tell stories that have predetermined endings. Then we might have a chance to rival the single greatest 45 minutes of television entertainment I’ve ever seen — the last half of the BBC’s The Office Christmas Special.

(h/t: daily dish & videogum)