BSG vs. Lost vs. 24

The new TV season is finally upon us again! Entertainment Weekly recently announced the end of the second Golden Age of Television - a good thing, since television abhors pomp the way nature abhors a vacuum. Every Golden Age is followed by a dark and weird unsettled deconstructive phase - think of Romanticism following the Enlightenment, or Modernism following Victoriana, or Godard following Hitchcock. Tonight's season premiere episode of "Battlestar Galactica" was maybe the most magnificent ode to existential despair to ever air in the fourth season of a television show. Certainly, it contains a few of the most memorable images yet captured on digi-film - the Chief's shadow merging with a nuclear silhouette on an ancient wall (the production design on the scorched earth suggests a more rugged, gritty revision of "Battle of the Planet of the Apes," another 70s compelling camp-sci failout deserving a more convincing redo), and Lee and Dualla reconnecting in a facing profile silhouette, and the grin on a face two milliseconds before messy death.

I wasn't a huge fan of the last half-season of Battlestar Galactica - it seemed to have lost all its old allegorical swagger, in service to a newly propulsive plot that seemed to be running in circles. The first few minutes of this premiere - all bleached monochrome and tight wide angles and eternal sadness - seemed to justify all of that. In my head, BSG is in constant conflict with Lost for the title of Great 21st Century Fantastical Television Quest Global Mystery Theater Masterpiece. They play out like yin and yang; the popular big-budget Technicolor broadcast channel show, shot on location in Hawaii (which stands in for the whole world past and present); and the barely-seen micro-budget underlit basic cable show, shot on sets in Vancouver (whose exurb landscape stands in occasionally for uninhabitable radiation-heavy planet spheres.)

Both feature multi-ethnic casts of underrated TV actors, playing characters trapped together by disastrous happenstance, both searching for a way home and ultimately doomed to find it. Both shows have pushed the accepted boundaries of television - flashforwards, megatwists, characters who turn homicidal, heroes becoming villains. There was a time when having these two shows both on TV made it seems like it was easy. Then "Heroes" came along, and made them both look slow. Then "Heroes" had a second season, "Invasion" and "Threshold" and "Surface" and "The 4400" and how many other god awful pretenders flamed out, and "BSG" and "Lost" looked like the wily elder statesman, biding their time until the youth group implosion.

The pretenders have disappeared. The dust is settled, awaiting battle. The real TV season is beginning - the January-June rush, when HBO and the cablers bring back all their non-summer shows (Mad Men waits in July, pondering a reality without Matthew Weiner as its benevolent tyrant god.) BSG is entering its final season - nine episodes to go, now, until immortality. Lost is entering its penultimate season, and must prove that its resurrected fourth season was a sign of things to come, and not a rehash of Season 1 (excitement, new beginnings) followed by a new season 2 (sedation, ossification, delayed action.) In the dark horse lane is "24," once the very definition of the new TV, now a symbol of everything that can go wrong with serialized television (one nuclear-sized misstep is all it takes.)

They couldn't be further apart in most obvious ways - it's almost as if the Jordan Bulls, the Bryant-Shaq Lakers, and the Bird Celtics were all in the game at once. Will they raise each other's game?