Ellen Gray: 'Lost' finally finds its way

LOST. 9 tonight, Channel 6.

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. - As ABC's "Lost" returns for a fifth season, there are so many things I shouldn't tell you about tonight's two-hour premiere or the episode that follows next week that you might well wonder why executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse even bothered to play show-and-tell with reporters here last week.

The "show" part was a screening of the third episode, the first two having been posted online to a media-only Web site in late December, the "tell" a Q&A session with the "Lost" boys, who reminded a room that included not just TV critics but plenty of spoiler-happy bloggers that they'd prefer teasing to spoiling.

Me, too.

So if you're looking for a play-by-play of the next three episodes, you won't find it here. What I can say is that after tonight, you might be a bit closer to a clue about what's going on there, and that unless you're still holding out hope for the they're-all-in-Purgatory theory of the "Lost" universe, you probably won't be disappointed.

The decision to create a Season 6 exit strategy for "Lost" may turn out to be one of the best things ever to happen to a TV series, restoring a sense of purpose for the show, which had been treading water. Or, as Lindelof puts it, "we got to a point in Season 3 . . . where we all knew it was treading into an area of complete and utter suckiness."

Having an end date "completely liberated us," he said. "We didn't know whether the mythology we had had to last two seasons or nine seasons, and that was utterly paralyzing."

Happily, Lindelof and Cuse were not here merely to trash their earlier work. Here are a few "Lost" secrets it's probably OK to share:

* The Nestor Carbonnel Conundrum: Carbonnel, who recurs pretty regularly as islander Richard Alpert (and co-starred with Jimmy Smits last season in CBS' "Cane"), might look as if he's wearing a bit too much mascara and eyeliner for a guy who's not touring with Gene Simmons. But when a female reporter complained that the actor "wears more eye makeup than I do," Lindelof replied: "Do you want to hear something shocking? This is the God's honest truth. When we first saw dailies of Nestor, we were like, 'Someone's gotta talk to him about the eyeliner situation.' And he does not wear any mascara, no eyeliner, nothing. He is completely, 100 percent sans makeup."

* What They Knew and When They Knew It: According to Lindelof and Cuse, the "non-linear" approach to time that first surfaced with the flash-forward at the end of Season 3 had been part of the plan all along, but couldn't happen until they knew how much storytelling was left. "Once we committed to doing that [flash-forward], there was only a certain amount of distance between that and where the story, in our opinion, had to end," Cuse said.

* That Four-Toed Statue (You Thought They'd Forgotten): "When we introduced the four-toed statue, our idea for doing it at that point was really to sort of show that the history of the island was a long one, that statue was probably built a long time ago, and people have been on this island for a long time," said Cuse.

"Everybody lies," the mantra of "House" doctor Gregory House (Hugh Laurie), appears to have been adopted by his network.

A year ago, Fox gave us "The Moment of Truth," a "reality" show that attached lie detectors to people whose only crime was likely a too-strong desire for money and face time.

Tonight, it introduces a human lie detector in "Lie to Me" (9 p.m., Channel 29), a show in which Tim Roth plays Cal Lightman, a scientist who's turned his research on facial expressions and body language into an apparently lucrative business. Like Laurie, Roth's a British actor. Unlike Laurie, he won't be pretending otherwise.

Based on the very real research of Paul Ekman, who's published several books on the subject, including "Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Marriage and Politics," "Lie to Me" is a terrific idea in search of a story that's a little more terrific than this one seems to be so far. Because while it's undeniably fascinating to find out exactly how our faces, voices and bodies give us away when we're telling little (or great) white lies, where do we go from there?

Prime-time television might be the one place in our lives where we actually hope to be lied to, or at least to be told tallish tales, and despite the quirky nature of Lightman's outfit - where he works with other deception experts played by Kelli Williams ("The Practice"), Monica Raymund and Brendan Hines to catch the guilty and free the merely confused - I bought into Ekman's ideas so immediately that I found myself looking at my watch as Lightman and company tried to persuade others.

In the TV critic business, this is known as Not a Good Sign.

And that, I'm afraid, is no lie. *

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