Ellen Gray: 'Revenge' plays out a plot twist tomorrow

* REVENGE. 10 p.m. tomorrow,

6 ABC.

NOTHING SAYS romance like an engagement party that ends with a body on the beach.

Or so goes the thinking at ABC's "Revenge," which has taken 15 episodes to get back to the point where it began last fall, managing to plop that pivotal hour into the middle of February sweeps and into a week dominated by hearts and flowers.

Emily Thorne (Emily VanCamp) couldn't have planned it better herself.

The true architect of one of the season's guiltier pleasures, though, is executive producer Mike Kelley, and according to Gabriel Mann, who plays Nolan Ross, the Internet billionaire who's doing everything he can to help Emily avenge her late disgraced father, Kelley doesn't give much away.

When I spoke with Mann last month at an ABC party, where another reporter and I peppered him with questions of the kind he said he'd had himself, Mann was looking forward to finding out what happens in this week's show.

"Literally, tomorrow, we get the script for [episode] 15, which answers all of those questions. We have been begging them, begging, on bended knee, for anything. Nothing," he said.

"Tomorrow morning, we get the script, it has the answers. And I mean, that's the beauty of . . . Mike Kelley. It's just that he delivers what he promises. He's not trying to sort of extend this into some arbitrary kind of endless thing that never gets" resolved.

Not that it's over: There'll be seven more episodes in Season 1, but tomorrow's "wraps up that piece of the story" told in flashback in the premiere, he said.

Kelley, "he's all about instant gratification. And so all I've been told is that this episode is a monster."

In the absence of actual information, Mann's happy to improvise. His character's hookup with the duplicitous - and apparently insane - Tyler (Ashton Holmes) having ended, um, badly, he's looking forward to Nolan's next love interest, whoever he (or she) turns out to be.

"I genuinely believe that when he said he was a 3 on the Kinsey scale that that was what he believes about himself," he said of Nolan. (On the Kinsey 1-6 scale, 3 would put the character halfway between "exclusively heterosexual" and "exclusively homosexual.")

"That relationship crept up on me . . . , the Tyler-Nolan thing," Mann said. "We just had so much fun doing it, and playing those scenes together and just sort of the devious head-to-headness of that situation that I was really kicking off. I'm going to kind of miss this a little bit. But, you know, money buys a lot of things."

On the other hand, "he is kind of a nerd," he said of Nolan.

Asked which kind of nerd - Steve Jobs or Bill Gates? - he hesitated.

"I think he would like to envision himself Jobs, but I think he's more Gates, honestly," Mann said.

"Look, I would be happy with whoever they want to give me at this point . . . I'd like to go with Victoria," Mann said, referring to Madeleine Stowe's Victoria Grayson, who's so far been one of Emily's chief targets.

"Can you imagine them tearing up the Hamptons? And how would that screw up Emily's plan royally? I can't even begin to [imagine] the possibilities," he said.

Valentine's Day means different things to different people, but to fans of ABC's "Cougar Town" (8:30 p.m., 6 ABC), it means raising a very large glass to the return of Jules (Courteney Cox) and the rest of the crew from the cul-de-sac.

I may never completely get it myself (though I like the show much better than I did when it started), but I can definitely see the drinking-game possibilities. I've also wondered, though, if "Cougar Town" hadn't set the bar for a lot of new comedies where drinking seems to be the main form of recreation.

Clutching a rather large glass of something red myself, I asked "Cougar Town" creator Bill Lawrence about that at a gathering he hosted for TV critics last month in a hotel bar in Pasadena, Calif.

"We decided early on, when we had to decide what the show was really about" that it was "about adult friendship and how you while away the hours," he said.

"No one can tell this, but our show is supposed to take place on weekends," Lawrence said. "We used to always take the time to tell people" (as they do at the top of tonight's episode).

"As a 40-year-old with three kids [the mother of those kids, Lawrence's wife, Christa Miller, plays Jules' best friend], literally on weekends, I hang out with my friends, I occasionally go to a restaurant if it's like a half-mile from my house and I drink wine."

No soccer games?

"On Saturday mornings. And I drive to 9,000 sporting events."