Betty White stinking up the football field.

I have become a fan on Facebook of having Betty White host Saturday Night Live. You can, too. After the Snickers ad with Abe Vigoda and her playing football, an early Super Bowl hit, it's clear the 88-year-old marvel would pump some life into SNL.

The ads were better in general during the second half. Could that be the influence of the The Professor's exquisite homemade nachos and strong consumption of adult beverages? But the Letterman-Oprah-Leno Late Show promo was 15 seconds of "I Can't Believe It." (Leno and Oprah shot the top-secret spot at Letterman's Ed Sullivan Theater last Tuesday.)

Other first-half faves: The kid telling some local lothario to keep his hands off his mama and his Doritos. Villagers build a human bridge for the Bud truck. And the Dove ad outlining the life of a man (careful climbing that rope in gym class). It helps to have a whole minute, and it only cost, (what?) $5 million.

Later in the game: Megan Fox sending a picture of her in the bathtub out on her Motorola Blur. The e-Trade baby with the milk-a-holic floozie girlfriend. And my favorite of the night (again, benefitting from a minute of air time), the jungle sleepwalker who unwittingly braved everything for a Coke. As usual, there were some funny commercials, like Sumo Death, for products that I barely understand and would never use.

Disappointed at the dearth of animal ads (though highly rated for effectiveness, the fence-busting colt-calf Budweiser booster was too sappy for me) I did like the freaked-out Denny's chickens, and, like everyone else in America, continue to marvel at the ads starring Ed Begley Jr. that, I guess, are supposed to urge us all to fill out our census forms. No wonder so many people have had it with the government.

Some of the ads that CBS rejected as inappropriate are here. And Fancast has a whole bunch of the ones that aired, cleverly brought to you with another ad from Coca-Cola.

Ashton Kutcher.

After last night, I've given up trying to keep up with every new show and back to TiVo-ing only when they have cute female hosts. Even on speeded-up TiVo, it's pretty much a waste of time these days, not to mention that there's no way I'm staying up to 1 a.m. watching TV.

Guest star Ashton Kutcher tried last night, but the material was worse than the lamest prank on Punk'd. I've given up asking him, when he talks to the critics in L.A., how an underpants model can rise up to be a prince of Hollywood, but there he was at the end of his monologue modeling leopard-patterned skivvies. It looked in a brief glance (even thought they weren't briefs) that his undies might have been stuffed, but I decided not to check it out too carefully.

Junior high sex jokes, with a little more homophobia than seems appropriate on SNL, ruled the evening. Two different skits, takeoffs on Fox News and The View, looked at "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and there were also bits on Cialis and a rich 110-year-old woman who died of stage 5 chlamydia (if there is such a thing), leaving her faithful boy toy with nothing but limited swimming pool privileges and a host of STD's. (One of them, crabs Rangoon, was the start and end of the laughter.)

Does anybody who watches Fox News watch Saturday Night Live? The cable news network is a pretty easy target, and SNL hit the bulls-eye, with Abby Elliott playing "an attractive blond lady" as one of the commentators. So many of them have been installed at Fox as newsreaders to appeal to the channel's large middle-aged and elderly male demographic. And there was a standard shot at Glenn Beck. "There is no 'I' in Liberty," Jason Sudakis joked as Beck. That's the best they could do?

Oh, no. Evangeline Lilly may be disappearing.

So the smoke monster (not to be calling anybody any names), or Titus Welliver, or the devil, or whoever he is there inside of Locke's body, tells Ben that the poor real Locke was thinking "I don't understand" as Ben was choking the life out of him.

And Sayd, who was, like, totally dead, wakes up and asks, "What happened?"

Well, don't ask me. I just watch the stuff, and so did a big slug of Americans. Ratings for this season's premiere were up 22 percent from last season, and so what if twice as many people watched American Idol than the 12 million or so who caught up with Lost?

The 8 p.m. catch-up clip job did its work well, reminding me of some of the things I'd missed and making it crystal clear that the ongoing saga would be anything but crystal clear, going on now with two parallel stories, one in which the H-bomb in the well apparently worked after Juliette smacked it with a rock and the whole thing never happened, and the other in which our heroes are captive in a Mayan temple with a puzzlingly well-crafted oversized hourglass to keep track of its unorthodox spa treatments and a Japanese leader with a geek henchman who speaks for him because the boss says he doesn't like the taste of English on his tongue. I've been around this business for a while, and I never even contemplated writing such a sentence as the preceding one.

Three hours of Lost is about an hour and a half too much for me, so I think I'll skip the "enhanced" rerun next Tuesday at 8, in which the producers point out important clues to the faithful. Probably wouldn't help me anyway. But I'm liking the prominent role of our old mechanical friend, the VW bus, and who can't appreciate dialogue like this:

Jacob: "I died an hour ago."

Hurley: "Sorry, dude. That sucks."

Meanwhile, in the real world, there's terrible news: Evangiline Lilly told eonline.com she may never act again: "Acting is something I appreciate, and I think it's been an amazing experience. But I'm not passionate about acting the way you probably should be to call yourself an actor." 

Matthew Fox says he's quitting TV, too, but who cares about that?

I'm on vacation. Will be back blogging next week.

Amber Riley.

The diehard critics who are still left on the Press Tour rode around in a bus Monday, hanging on the sets of Modern Family and How I Met Your Mother and Chuck and The Middle.

Snooze patrol.

Then it was off to the biggest soundstage in the world (at least that's what they said) on the Paramount lot, the only place large enough to contain the hearts and souls of the kids from Glee.

Amber Riley (who plays Mercedes) sang "Don't Make Me Over," and Lea Michele sang "Maybe This Time," and executive producer Ryan Murphy talked about how cool it was that the show was turning young people on to Burt Bacharach-style pop and Cabaret-style show tunes, at the same time it was turning older folks on to hip hop.

The cast was all there getting ready for the "Madonna" episode. Madge won't show up, as far as we know, but she's a Gleek, too, and she has given the show the rights to her entire catalogue. We won't say who spilled the beans, but you can listen for "Vogue" and "Like a Prayer," among others.

Jennifer Lopez, on the other hand, is in Murphy's sights. Jenny from the Block "would make a really great cafeteria lady," Murphy said.

As if they're not busy enough, the whole cast has a "small summer tour" on the drawing boards, cities to be announced in the next couple of weeks. And, Murphy and perhaps some of the kids are lining up to testify before Congress about the importance of high school arts programs. "Arts education really saves lives," Murphy said.

The kids (and I don't care if Mark Salling, who plays Puck, and Cory Monteith, who plays Finn, are both 27) say they have no qualms about the newbies who will be picked this summer as part of a televised national search.

"We're a family," said Michele. "A family grows. That's what a family does."

Tip to would-be Gleesters: Singing is important, but it's not the most important thing. The finalists will have to screen-test with the current cast. "We're looking for a very certain level of chemistry," Ryan said.

Martin Short as the deliriously funny Ed Grimly.

Give me a break, the producers of Damages must have been completely mental, I must say, to hire Martin Short, because their show, doncha know, is hardly a humorous one.

I wonder, how could they possibly put the man who was Ed Grimly, Jiminy Glick or Father of the Bride's gloriously funny wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer in Damages? It was very decent, I must say, for them even to consider Short.

Turns out he's great as an unscrupulous lawyer -- I wonder if there's any other kind, dontcha know? -- who's defending a Bernie Madoff-like swindler who finds himself in the sights of the truly amoral Patty Hewes, played by Glenn Close, who has won the acting Emmy for each of the show's first two seasons.

"I think of myself as a character actor," Short said via satellite from New York, "and you play
characters in a sincere fashion. So even if you’re playing Franck ... if you’re trying to be funny as that character, you won’t be. But if you sincerely play him as this eccentric person who exists in the world, then you’re basically acting the character. ... So I don’t really look at it as a differentiation between comedy and serious. It, to me, is just what the role is, what it requires, how you can most effectively give the author what he had hoped to achieve."

Lily Tomlin also stars this season. She came to the critics Sunday morning via satellite from Key West, and she appeared to be drinking a glass of wine during the interview.

Nope, just water. "I was drinking wine earlier," said Tomlin, who plays the swindler's wife.

The producers deny they have a list of unlikely actors in line for each show, but Short said he knows differently. "Carrot Top is in the next one. He's very effective." 

Kerr Smith.

"Once you're hired here, you never leave," says West Chester native Kerr Smith, who has lasted longer at The WB than the network's name did.

Smith bows Monday night on the son (or, more likely, daughter) of The WB, The CW, in Life Unexpected, playing the fiance of Shiri Appleby's character. TV heads and Tabasco Sauce fans will remember that Appleby played the wide-eyed Liz Parker in the WB's aliens in America show Roswell, around the turn of the century. (The spacefolk drank Tabasco by the gallon, and there was plenty for them when disappointed fans flooded The WB in a campaign to revive the show.)

Smith goes back even further, as TV's first long-running gay teen character, Jack McPhee on Dawson's Creek.

Smith quickly forsook his finance degree at the University of Vermont before kicking around New York for five years seeking acting work (he got some on As the World Turns), but it wasn't exactly a bonanza, so he took off for Los Angeles. He was there a grand total of three weeks when he met with legendary WB casting genius Kathleen Letterie and quickly wound up on Dawson's.

How good was Letterie? Oh, let's see: Katie Holmes, Jessica Biel, Katherine Heigl, Joshua Jackson, Michelle Williams, Keri Russell, Emily VanCamp, Scott Foley, CSI's George Eads, Alyson Hannigan, Charisma Carpenter, and I'm getting tired of typing so many, all passed through her shop back in the day.

Smith has an oil painting, a watercolor, a pastel and a sculpture or two disintegrating in the attic, keeping his boyish good looks in real life even though he's divorced and turns 38 in March. He's very happy to be on Life, enjoying, he says the show's "big heart."

He credits his father, Robert, for encouraging him to stand up for himself and take leadership roles at West Chester's Henderson High School, where he was president of the freshman and sophomore classes and worked as liason to the school board. And, for understanding when Kerr decided to go into acting.

Rosie O'Donnell, among many entertainers backing Conan.

Here's one man's late-night prediction: David Letterman, a big Conan O'Brien fan and no friend to Jay Leno, signs O'Brien to his Worldwide Pants Production Co. Conan takes a long vacation. Then Dave retires when his contract runs out in 2012.

CBS replaces him with Craig Ferguson, the most appealing of all the late-night personalities, currently doing The Late, Late Show at CBS. And it puts O'Brien, clearly a bigger success in the wee hours than the late ones, into Ferguson's current slot. Win. Win. Win. Win. For Letterman, Ferguson, O'Brien and CBS.

And yet another kick in the crotch to NBC.

The Peacock's crazy midnight smashup may put a bunch of people out of work, but it's also swelling the employment ranks in one career group, sources.

Sources now are telling both the Associated Press and the New York Times, reasonably reliable arbiters of journalism, that O'Brien and his beloved network are thisclose to reaching a deal that would pay O'Brien upwards of $30 million to leave NBC altogether and also allow him to start work at another TV outlet as early as September.

Someone would take him, but it might not be who you'd think. Conan joked that he could go to BET and do a show called White All Night, or maybe do a Lifetime movie about a woman in an abusive relationship with her network. Or, he could go to Fox, behind its hit 24, and do a show called 24:05.

Despite a strong anti-Leno backlash among entertainers under 50, Conan is damaged goods. CBS, in the post Late Show slot, may truly be his best alternative a couple of years down the road after all this dust has settled. ABC's not interested. Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly would clearly love to stick it to the network that unceremoniously dumped him 30 months ago (after which the Peacock's problems really started to accelerate). But people at several Fox affiliates have said they don't want NBC "leftovers," and there would be tremendous hurdles to clear space at the stations, many of which have multi-year contracts for syndicated shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons in their late-night slots.

NBC executives, most notably super-ego Dick Ebersol, who's pretty good at sports programming but not so much at comedy, have mounted an anti-Conan campaign, and the wiseguy redhead has descended from ratings king at 12:35 a.m. to big-time also-ran at 11:35 p.m. One reason, says Ebersol, rightly, I think, is that O'Brien didn't make enough of an effort to appeal to folks in the middle of the country, who watch The Tonight Show at 10:35 p.m., Central and Mountain time. Yet another reason for O'Brien to go back to the later slot where he thrived.

On the other hand, Conan has lots of show-biz support. Younger entertainers are almost universally trashing Leno for not doing the stand-up thing (and we're not talking comedy here) and just bowing out gracefully, even though the situation is entirely NBC's fault. The antipathy could cripple Leno's guest list if he does regain hosting duties at Tonight.

Rosie O'Donnell, who has a feel-good family special coming up on HBO, told the critics Leno had a good run: "If you’re privileged enough to be asked to drive the bus, you should say 'thank you' and drive it to the best of your ability. And when it’s time for them to hire a new driver, you should say, 'Thank you for allowing me to drive this for as long as I did,' and pass the keys to the new guy with red hair and try not to flatten his tires before he even gets going."

Al Pacino as Dr. Death.

Big time star Al Pacino taking another shot at TV? (He won a 2004 best-actor Emmy, you might recall, for HBO's Angels in America).

Yep. He likes the pace of TV work, one reason he signed up for another HBO film, You Don't Know Jack. He plays Dr. Death, Jack Kevorkian. The film's skedded in spring.

"There’s something about going fast that catches you up, and sometimes it creates a certain spontaneity," Pacino told the critics. "But, you know, you’re going fast with highly tuned people who are there and are with it, and they’re not going so fast that they’re negligent."

"At one point we did 16 -- 16! -- scenes in two days, so that, to me, is a lot of stuff in two days." Two or three scenes a day is the norm in a feature film. "But at the same time, it was exciting. ... You do get very tired sometimes when you’re sitting around for hours in movies, so, sort of, you get depleted. Here, that doesn’t happen."

Pacino stars with John Goodman, Susan Sarandon and Brenda Vaccaro, and how do you like that lineup? Vaccaro, who plays Kevorkian's sister, was a hoot and half at the Press Tour, walking around the hotel in those little slippers women get when they have a pedicure.

"I think Al is right about the energy and the vibration of working that fast," she said. "And it’s intense. It’s intense. ... I found it exciting. ... I think they waste an enormous amount of time in movies sometimes with the lighting and with this and that and the other, so the actor dissipates. It’s almost an occupational hazard."