Dave on Demand: 'Crusoe' casts off in stellar fashion

A smashing debut for NBC's

Crusoe

last night. Jolly good. Cinematic qualities and a stellar supporting cast, including Sean Bean and Sam Neill.

But I have concerns about the show, which is based on the Daniel Defoe classic. Pilots are often big-budget spectaculars. The artistry falls off steeply in subsequent episodes. And I doubt we'll see Bean or Neill again.

I found Crusoe's sidekick, Friday, disturbing. We are told that he is fluent in 12 languages. This is a man who quotes Milton. So why is his English so primitive? ("Friday needs a coat.") Can you say Jar Jar Binks, kids?

Finally, the premise is that Crusoe is stuck on this island. But for dramatic purposes, it's likely he'll have to have weekly visitors, who in the end sail away without taking him along (like the pirates last night).

In other words, we're talking about the new Gilligan's Island.

Advanced placement. Having done the college campus tour with two of my kids, I'm still laughing at this week's Gossip Girl, in which the whole gang visits Yale.

They not only got personal interviews with the dean of admissions, but some of them went to his house for a private reception. I'm also wondering where the dean found a string quartet for the party to play, not Bach, but the Killers.

Blair bragged, "I'm a straight-A student." Dan's father told him, "You have near perfect grades." Chuck told Nate, "Yale is your safety school." And Serena received a handwritten letter from the dean asking her to visit campus.

That's pretty impressive, considering that in two years we've never seen any of these geniuses crack a book. They spend every school night out clubbing. It's hard to see any of them as Ivy League candidates.

Or else Yale's standards have really deteriorated since Rory Gilmore went there.

The Midas touch. Simon Lythgoe, the producer who "voluntarily" left American Idol this year, revealed this week that Simon Cowell makes $36 million a year from the Fox talent show.

That sounds obscene, but if you break it down, it really works out to only about $5 an insult.

Bless me. ABC's Eli Stone returned this week, which is good news, because the lawyer-with-visions series has one of the best casts on television.

But I was thrown by Sigourney Weaver's guest turn as a cross between the Almighty and the Oracle from Matrix.

If someone resembling this stuffy actress is in fact running the universe, I've wasted untold hours praying.

A snack nightmare. What a sports Sunday we had, huh? The Eagles game, followed by the Phillies in the playoffs. That's a lot of couch time.

Fortunately, I've been training for years for just such a marathon. Members of my family take turns every few hours flipping me on the sofa so I don't atrophy.

The bad part of the day was that I have different superstition foods for football (Cheez Doodles) and baseball (Good & Plenty).

I can now tell you from painful experience that those two food staples make a deadly combination.