Dance War may be good when the competition actually starts, but I’m not sure if viewers will stick around to find out.

The premiere focused solely on the audition process, and the fourteen finalists were revealed at the end of the episode. But it wasn’t announced which team the singer-dancers were on, so the "Bruno vs. Carrie Ann" aspect of the show played no part in the first episode.

Further, host Drew Lachey never explained how performers would be eliminated in the coming weeks, or how a winning team would be decided. Unless you fell in love with one of the contestants — which I didn’t — there isn’t much incentive to keep watching.

But the show’s biggest turn off was the singing. Most of the contestants were dancers first, singers second, so large portions of the episode were like the worst moments of American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance combined. I kept my TV muted for much of the two-hour long program.

Dance War would’ve been better had they gotten right to the war. By spending the whole premiere on the tryouts, and not even revealing Bruno’s and Carrie Ann’s teams, the show lost me before it even got started.

NBC and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association are scheduled to announce today whether they will go ahead with a televised broadcast of the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, even though the Screen Actors Guild has announced that none of the award nominees will attend.

Due to the limited pool of guests they have to choose from, Jimmy Kimmel and Jay Leno will appear as guests on each others’ shows on Thursday night.

The fourth season of Anthony Bourdain’s quirky travel journal No Reservations premieres tonight on the Travel Channel, and TV Guide interviewed the intrepid chef. As usual, Bourdain aired his thoughts on the declining culinary credibility of the Food Network — which, after dumping Emeril and Mario Batali, was at least smart enough to sign Alton Brown to a new three-year contract.

Starting on January 28, Gossip Girl moves from Wednesdays to Mondays in the hopes of attracting new fans when the show goes into reruns.

TV Guide features a road report from Dancing with the Stars Tour participants Joey Lawrence & Edyta Sliwinska. Fellow dancer Sabrina Bryan chatted with the Chicago Sun-Times when the tour stopped in Chicago last Friday night.

DwtS co-host Samantha Harris gushed to Us Weekly about being a new mom.

And DwtS judges Bruno Tonioli and Carrie Ann Inaba return to the airwaves tonight with the premiere of their new show, Dance War. Zap2It has an interview with the choreographers.

Some readers have asked if we’ll be running a live chat during Dance War episodes. Unfortunately, we won’t. Tonight is the only episode of Dance War that I’ll be able to watch live, as I have an eight-week class starting next Monday night. But we will post a comment thread before the start of the show, and I invite you to join me in posting thoughts there throughout (and after) the program.

If you are (or someone you know is) running a chat during the show, let me know, and I’ll be happy to add a link on our homepage.

Teams got a longer rest period than usual, and it resulted in my favorite episode of the The Amazing Race 12 thus far.

Instead of the 12-hour break that teams usually get between legs, teams started this leg after a full 24 hours off. The benefits of the extra rest showed, as everyone seemed more positive and relaxed than they have in weeks.

The extra sleep kept Ron from arguing with Christina, and even Nate & Jen got along for over half the show — until Nate gently nudged Jen into a cab and she blew up at him.

Teams left the Pit Stop in Mumbai, India for Osaka, Japan at the start of the leg. TK & Rachel took a circuitous route to Japan, yet seemed unfazed by the fact that they didn’t see another team for the entire leg. Maybe it was the extra rest. Or maybe they just found some good weed in Osaka.

While Don was in good spirits, he had more trouble than usual keeping up with Nick. That led Don to nominate his grandson for a Roadblock task for which the directionally challenged Nick was uniquely unsuited.

One team member had to act as a cabbie and drive a Japanese couple to a destination, receiving their instructions only in written Japanese, and without being able to ask the couple for help or follow a local to lead them to the destination.

Time and again this season, Nick has proven that he is terrible with directions, and equally terrible at asking people for help.

After dropping off their charges, Nick’s competitors, Jen and Christina, had little trouble getting back to the taxi stand. But Nick at one point wound up perpendicularly blocking an entire lane of traffic, and he finished 10 minutes behind the girls.

To his credit, though, Nick did suggest that his team partake in one of my favorite Detours ever: robot soccer. While Nate & Jen and Ron & Christina went to sniff out real flowers in a shop that sold only fake flowers, Nick & Don used cell phones to control foot-tall robots in a game against a pair of menacing but clumsy goalie-bots.

I plan on spending a good chunk of time tomorrow finding a YouTube video of the soccer match and watching the little robots topple over again and again and again.

Over at the fake flower shop, Nate & Jen were the first team to find one of the real flowers. But because one of this season’s themes is Nate & Jen’s inability to finish in first place, they had trouble finding a cab, enabling Ron & Christina to beat them to the Pit Stop. Nick & Don finished in third place.

TK & Rachel finally arrived in Osaka as it was getting dark, and because the clues instructed them to complete the tasks — instead of sending them directly to the Pit Stop to get the boot — it was obvious that this was a non-elimination leg.

Next week, the hippies will have to complete a special Speed Bump task. Seeing how little the Speed Bump seemed to waylay Kynt & Vyxsin last week, TK & Rachel are by no means out of the race.

This leg’s 24-hour rest period made this the most enjoyable episode of this season of The Amazing Race for me. Bickering between teammates has its place; I admit to loving a good meltdown now and then. But, ultimately, it should be the tasks that create the tension and make the show interesting.

Instead, this week I wanted to cheer for everyone. I was impressed by how well Jen and Christina did driving taxis in Osaka, which would’ve been immensely frustrating if they’d tried to do it on little sleep and empty stomachs.

And the extended rest period seemed to make Nate funnier than usual, whether intentionally or not. As they rode in a cab, Jen tried to tell to Nate about her experience during the Roadblock. Nate interrupted her, nodded at their driver, and said, "It’s hard for me to pay attention right now when he’s driving. Sorry."

When Jen looked confused, Nate explained, "No, I’m listening to everything you’re saying. It’s just hard to…you know what I’m saying."

Speaking for all of us, Jen replied, "No, I don’t."

In a post-leg interview, Nate gave his take on his team’s inability to finish in first place: "The best team is going to finish in last, and that’s going to be Jen and I!"

TAR’s sound editor inserted the sound of a needle scratching a record as Jen looked at Nate and asked, "Gonna finish last?"

Nate blurted, "I mean finish…the last leg first."

Next week, Christina smiles kindly and instructs a ticket agent to withhold information from the other teams.

The WGA is trying to put the brakes on Jay Leno’s self-written monologues, claiming that he’s violating guild rules by writing anything for NBC. This should make things interesting on Monday when The Daily Show and The Colbert Report return with new episodes, as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are in the same position as Leno.

I’m glad I didn’t bother to watch last night’s debut of The Apprentice 7, as every review of the show seems to be negative. Reality Blurred described the celebrity edition "a half-assed knock-off of itself."

If you’ve ever dreamed of dancing with Cameron Mathison, here’s your chance: the soap star is auctioning off a private dance lesson with himself and his Dancing with the Stars pro partner, Edyta Sliwinska, for charity.

To fuel excitement for one of the few new shows debuting this winter, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Fox is posting the show’s pilot episode on Yahoo! tonight for a 24-hour special preview.

People has interviews with a few recent reality show castoffs: Project Runway’s flaky Elisa and The Amazing Race’s goth couple, Kynt & Vyxsin.

The staff at TV Guide is pumped for Sunday night’s premiere of The Wire. TV Guide’s website features an interview with Clarke Peters, who plays Det. Lester Freamon. The site also has a post in their new Strike Survival Guide titled "The Wire: Why You Should Tap into It."

For a lengthier read, The Believer posted an interview with Wire creator David Simon, conducted by author Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy). Simon describes The Wire as "a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason."

Business Week has an article featuring highlights from last night’s return of the late night talk shows. Jay Leno beat David Letterman in the ratings, despite the fact that Letterman had writers and Leno didn’t.

TV Guide features another interview with cast members of the Dancing with the Stars Tour, this time with lovebirds Sabrina Bryan & Mark Ballas.

For some reason, I was fascinated by this in-depth article about Heather Mills’ declining mental well-being, fueled by her public divorce and the unexpected lack of offers following her appearance on the fourth season of DwtS.

Entertainment Weekly has the definitive cast list of Survivor: Micronesia. Jeff Probst gave his take on each of the contestants, all-stars and "super fans" alike.

Fox has revised its midseason schedule yet again.

The Golden Globes fail to strike a deal with the WGA, and Variety has an interesting article about all of the people, from celebrities to party planners, still unsure about what they’ll be doing on January 13.

At long last, the release date for the Battlestar Galactica Season 3 DVD has been revealed: March 25th.

TV Shows On DVD reviewed The Wire Season 4 DVD, and the reviewer made the excellent point that the show is really a live-action novel. It’s especially satisfying when watched straight through, as Greg and I did this past weekend.

Every other series that I love, such as Battlestar Galactica, has at least a few episodes that are so bad they interrupt the flow of the story. But in all four seasons, The Wire manages to avoid that trap. Every episode has a purpose in the larger scheme of things; there’s never a "throwaway" episode that only exists to fill a gap between plot points.

Like a book that takes a few chapters to get rolling, it may take a few episodes for a particular season of The Wire to hook you. But I don’t think any other series provides conclusions as satisfying.

A word of warning to anyone thinking about jumping into the series when the fifth season premieres on HBO this Sunday: don’t. Just as you wouldn’t bypass the first two books in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, you have to start The Wire at the beginning. Fortunately, the first four seasons total only 50 episodes, and you’ll be surprised at how quickly 50 episodes go by when you’re completely engrossed by the material.

While some of us took a break for the holidays, the Dancing with the Stars Tour rolled on. TV Guide has two interviews from the road, with Monique Coleman & Alec Mazo and Cheryl Burke & Wayne Newton.

You can catch a rare glimpse of DwtS 1 pro Charlotte Jorgensen in Manila at the inaugural Philippine Star Ball on February 16, where she’ll serve as a judge.

Reality Blurred compiled a seemingly official list of all-star cast members from the forthcoming Survivor: Micronesia. The site also found snippets from some New York City ads for a new reality show based on Gossip Girl. The new show is seeking teens to star.

David Letterman and Craig Ferguson return to TV tonight, with the assistance of their writing staffs. Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, and Jimmy Kimmel are also back tonight with new episodes, sans writers and possibly without any big celebrity guests.

Another show returning to TV in the near future is High School Reunion, only this time the contestants will reunite after 20 years, instead of ten. I’m not sure if watching a bunch of near-40 year olds get drunk and make fools of themselves will make this season of HSR any more or less palatable than seeing the same behavior from the near-30s of the first three seasons.

MSN features a slideshow of upcoming shows in 2008. And, with a plethora of "Best TV Shows of 2007" lists from which to choose, I’m taking the buttkissing approach and linking to the one written by Wendy Fox Weber, one of my editors at the Naperville Sun.

Finally, MTV has renewed A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, which must mean that things didn’t work out between her and the winner of the first season. Perhaps the network wanted to capitalize on the buzz generated by Tila being named The Soup’s Entertainer of the Year: