On Your Mark: CBS Unveils Teams for "The Amazing Race"

It's with a certain glee that I relish the return of The Amazing Race to the airwaves following the cancellation of the woefully dismal Viva Laughlin.

It's been far too long since we've seen Phil Keoghan raise his eyebrow, describe for the umpteenth time what a Road Block is, or comment on what place some uber-competitive Americans with some unusually spelled names came in a race around the world. (Seriously, this time round there's a Goth vixen named Vyxsin.)

CBS has unveiled the contestants that we'll follow around the globe from the comfort of our living rooms as they make pit stops in such far-flung locals as Ireland, Lithuania, and Croatia (typically while sniping at each other and making ethnocentric comments about the locals).

So who's racing this time around? Let's find out.

Ronald Hsu, 58, and Christina Hsu. Father/daughter from Tacoma, Washington.

Kynt Cothron, 31, and Vyxsin Fiala, 29. Dating Goths from Louisville, Kentucky.

Lorena Segura, 27, and Jason Widener, 23. Dating couple from Sherman Oaks, California.

Azaria Azene, 27, and Hendekea Azene, 23. Brother/sister from Torrance, California.

Kate Lewis, 49, and Pat Hendrickson, 65. Married lesbian ministers from Thousand Oaks, California.

Shana Wall, 32, and Jennifer McCall, 32. Friends from Los Angeles, California.

Donald Jerousek, 68, and Nicolas Fulks, 23. Grandfather/grandson from Chicago and Wisconsin.

Jennifer Parker, 23, and Nathan Hagstrom, 23. Dating couple from California.

Rachel Rosales, 23, and TK Erwin, 22. Dating couple from Huntington Beach, California.

Marianna Ruiz, 25, and Julia Ruiz, 26. Sisters from Miami who now live in... (you guessed it!) Los Angeles, California.

Ari Bonias, 21, and Staella Gianakakos, 23. Best friends from California.

Gee, it is just me or did the casting directors for TAR go a little overboard this season with the contestants from California? Could sunny CA be the new Texas? You be the judge.

The Amazing Race premieres Sunday, November 4th at 8 pm on CBS.

What's On Tonight

8 pm: Survivor: China (CBS); My Name is Earl/30 Rock (NBC); Smallville (CW); Ugly Betty (ABC)

9 pm: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS); The Office/Scrubs (NBC); Supernatural (CW); Grey's Anatomy (ABC)

10 pm: Without a Trace (CBS); ER (NBC); Big Shots (ABC)

What I'll Be Watching

8 pm: Ugly Betty.

On tonight's episode ("A League of Their Own"): Henry is not happy when Betty starts to enter the world of online dating; Betty meets a prospective beau at a bowling alley; Daniel and Alexis sit down to dinner with step-monster to-be Wilhelmina.

8:30 pm: 30 Rock.

What's on my mind grapes? It's the second season of the Emmy Award winning comedy. On tonight's episode ("Rosemary's Baby"), Liz is ecstatic when her idol Rosemary Howard (guest star Carrie Fisher) agrees to appear on the show but her radical beliefs lead Jack pressuring Liz to quit; Kenneth competes in a page-off; Tracy sees a therapist.

9 pm: The Office.

The disastrous one-hour installments of The Office are finally over so we can get back to the half-hour format we all know and love. On tonight's episode ("Local Ad"), Michael jumps at the opportunity to showcase his creative abilities when the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin is asked to participate in a local ad, while Dwight gets sucked into the virtual world of Second Life.

10-11 pm: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia on FX.

FX's hilariously subversive comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia continues tonight with two back-to-back episodes. On the first ("Dennis Looks Like a Registered Sex Offender"), Dennis is mistaken for a recently released child molester but is more upset by how overweight the sex offender is. On the second ("Dennis and Dee Get a New Dad"), a repeat from last season, Dee gets a letter from a man (Stephen Collins) who claims to be her real father, leading her to confront her parents.

Have a Burning Question for Team Darlton, Matthew Fox, Evangeline Lilly, or Michael Emerson?

Lost fans: you don't have to make your way to the island via Ajira Airways in order to ask a question of the creative team or the series' stars. Televisionary is taking questions from fans to put to Lost 's executive producers/showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and stars Matthew Fox ("Jack Shephard"), Evangeline Lilly ("Kate Austen"), and Michael Emerson ("Benjamin Linus") for a series of on-camera interviews taking place this weekend. If you have a specific question for any of the above producers or actors from Lost , please leave it in the comments section below . I'll be accepting questions until midnight PT tonight and, while I can't promise I'll be able to ask any specific inquiry due to the brevity of these on-camera interviews, I am looking for some insightful and thought-provoking questions to add to the mix. So who knows: your burning question might get asked after all.

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What's Done is Done: The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil on the Season Finale of "Lost"

Every story begins with thread. It's up to the storyteller to determine just how much they need to parcel out, what pattern they're making, and when to cut it short and tie it off. With last night's penultimate season finale of Lost ("The Incident, Parts One and Two"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, we began to see the pattern that Lindelof and Cuse have been designing towards the last five seasons of this serpentine series. And it was only fitting that the two-hour finale, which pushes us on the road to the final season of Lost , should begin with thread, a loom, and a tapestry. Would Jack follow through on his plan to detonate the island and therefore reset their lives aboard Oceanic Flight 815 ? Why did Locke want to kill Jacob? What caused The Incident? What was in the box and just what lies in the shadow of the statue? We got the answers to these in a two-hour season finale that didn't quite pack the same emotional wallop of previous season ...

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See You in Another Life: Thoughts on The Series Finale of Lost

"No one can tell you why you're here." I'm of two minds (and two hearts) about the two-and-a-half hour series finale of Lost ("The End"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse and directed by Jack Bender, which brought a finality to the story of the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 and the characters with which we've spent six years. At its heart, Lost has been about the two bookends of the human existence, birth and death, and the choices we make in between. Do we choose to live together or die alone? Can we let go of our past traumas to become better people? When we have nothing else left to give, can we make the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good? In that sense, the series finale of Lost brought to a close the stories of the crash survivors and those who joined them among the wreckage over the course of more than 100 days on the island (and their return), offering up a coda to their lives and their deaths, a sort of purgatory for found, r...

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