Here's a new press release that made me feel old:

With school back in session, INSIDE TV magazine pays tribute to the classroom
leaders on television who really make the grade (September 5 issue, on newsstands Thursday, September 1) by naming the Top Ten Most Memorable Teachers on Television.

Gabe Kotter, (actor/comedian Gabe Kaplan) teacher of remedial high school students in Brooklyn, NY affectionately
known as the "Sweathogs" on the 1970s hit sitcom "Welcome Back, Kotter" was named No. 1, followed by Edna Krabappel (Marcia Wallace) of "The Simpsons" and Laura Ingalls (Melissa Gilbert) of "Little House on the Prairie" in the No. 2 and 3 spots, respectively.

The remaining spots in the top 10 were: 4. Ross Geller (David Schwimmer), "Friends." 5. Charlie Moore (Howard Hesseman), "Head of the Class." 6. Mark Cooper (Mark Curry), "Hangin' With Mr. Cooper." 7. Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzarelli (Henry Winkler), "Happy Days." 8. Carol Vessey (Julie Bowen), "Ed." 9. Lydia Grant (Debbie Allen), "Fame." 10.  Max Medina (Scott Cohen) "Gilmore Girls."

Now, I know these lists are meant to be argument-starters, and that the magazine wants to put on the cover faces that will be familiar to readers it hopes are relatively young.

Still, if I were putting together such a list, I might have dug a little deeper into TV history. Anyone care to pay tribute to Connie Brooks (Eve Arden) of "Our Miss Brooks"? Or Robinson J. Peepers (Wally Cox), of "Mr. Peepers"? (Tony Randall also played a teacher on the show.)

How about another Mr., John Novak (James Franciscus) of "Mr. Novak"? Loved that show when I was young. Then there's Miss Frances — Frances Horwich — of kiddie favorite "Ding Dong School." And what about Pete Dixon (Lloyd Haynes) of "Room 222"?

.

When I suggested that my house would be a good location for storm updates once the rains came here, I WAS KIDDING. Did not mean to invite the harsher forces of weather to the neighborhood. So far it's just a steady rain, but I just got some things off the basement floor in case water decides it's time for a visit.

Things aren't bad down there most of the time, but I'm not taking chances. The last storm brought some nifty puddling because I had neglected to clean my rain gutters — and a clogged one led to a stream down one side of the house and into the basement. Although I cleared gutters as soon as the sun came out, I still picked up some things today.

Of course, who among us wouldn't be nervous right now? We're not in Louisiana, but even occasional views of the TV news channels offer up scenes of destruction and despair.

As for the "Lost" marathon — courtesy of the DVD set, due in stores Tuesday — I have now plowed through 15 installments. I have theories. Oh, do I have theories, and not just about the plot of the show. As I said before, this show seems better with the commercials in it, and another reason has occurred to me: The commercials give you time to discuss what's going on (and what it might mean) before the ride goes on. Similarly, this may be a better show to watch once a week, or at least at intervals; then you have time to go over an episode with other viewers before moving on to the next chunk. "Lost" might easily have been promoted as "made for your water cooler."

Well, the skies are gray over this part of Northeast Ohio, and I can't help but think that we're going to get some kind of residual beating from Hurricane Katrina in the not too distant future.

So let me get right in front of the queue by offering my lawn as a location for TV reports.

It's a good spot. Really. Even a heavy rain can cause cascades of water down the street. And there are tricky winds around the houses, so reporters have a good chance of getting one of those blown-along-the-street shots that demonstrate how brave (and wet) they  are.

(Recent graphic line from Fox News Channel: "Fox affiliate reporter in thigh deep water.")

Now, before I go on, let me make clear that I realize that Katrina is causing terrible damage to people and structures in the South, and I in no way intend to make light of that.

But the coverage that accompanies such events can be almost comic in its embrace of weather cliches: rain-spotted camera lenses, water streaming around automobiles, torn-open roofs and, of course, reporters screaming descriptions while getting drenched.

We've not seen the last of such images. But I'm happy to host people looking for them. We'll even serve cocoa.

The increasing frequency of TV shows on DVD has affected the way I review them. I can't get through every episode of every set, as well as extras, in the time available. So I try to get through all the key extras, some of the available commentary, and a sampling of the episodes.

But I spent a big chunk of the weekend going through each episode in a coming DVD set. That's "Lost," due in stores on Sept. 6. (The new season begins on Sept. 21.) As of this morning I had made my way through nine of the set's 24 installments, so you can pretty well figure out how I will spend any free time in the days ahead.

Why go through this one when I haven't done so with others? For one thing, "Lost" — as I said in a recent column — has proven the most influential series of the past season. A bunch of new shows have made it on the air because of the success of "Lost," among them "Prison Break," which premieres tonight on Fox. That importance merits a closer look.

Beyond that, given how serialized "Lost" is, I needed to watch a lot of it to get a feel for how those serialized stories play out, commercial-free, in a DVD set.

One early impression: The show may not work as well without commercials as some shows do. "Lost" was very aware of the placement of commercials, and often put a big dramatic moment right before the ad to make sure that channel-flippers came back. But when you take out the ad, you go from DRAMATIC HIGH immediately into a post-commercial scene, creating a jarring narrative flow.

No doubt I'll have more to say by the time I write my DVD column for Friday's Beacon Journal. But for now, I am trying to figure out how I'll fit in this week's other viewing, when "Lost" is going to demand a lot of attention — and I haven't even gotten to the extras yet.

Tonight's telecast of the Browns-Panthers exhibition game on WOIO included a spot promoting visits to the Browns' training camp. "Time is running out," it warned viewers, a bit late. The ad said the last day for visits was Aug. 24.

Remember last season, when The WB ran the season finale of "Gilmore Girls" a little longer than usual — and people who'd set their timers for the show missed out on a key moment at the end? Well, let it be known now that the new WB series "Supernatural" is going to run long. Here's the word from The WB:

DVR ALERT!

DEBUT EPISODE OF “SUPERNATURAL” IS SO GOOD, WE COULDN’T FIT IT IN AN HOUR.

THE SEPTEMBER 13th PREMIERE OF THE ANTICIPATED SERIES WILL AIR FROM 9:00-10:07 P.M. ET/PT.

The premiere, by the way, follows the season premiere of "Gilmore Girls." And "Supernatural" co-stars Jared Padalecki, known to many as Dean on "GG."

This is not the only place to watch your timer, by the way. The season finale of TNT's "The Closer," airing on Sept. 5 on TNT, is scheduled to run about 70 minutes.

I've been meaning to blog about the coming changes at TV Guide. In case you missed it, here's a bit of the official explanation, from tvguide.com:

Debuting with the Oct. 17 issue, TV Guide magazine will be transformed into a vibrant full-size, full-color magazine. The magazine will now be published as a single, full-sized national edition.

The new full-size, full-color TV Guide will include 100 full-color pages with more breaking news and features, more eye-catching photos, and more behind-the-scenes insights and information on viewers' favorite shows and stars. It will include reviews and recommendations of best choices, can't miss and must-see TV which fans say are more important than ever in a TV universe with so many shows and so many ways to watch those shows.

With approximately 40 pages of program listings, there will be plenty of highlights and recommendations. Grid listings will become full-color with a prime-time spread of about eighty networks each night. In addition there will be two pages of program highlights each day.

In rationalizing the format change, TV Guide said this:

Our research indicates that TV viewers want a full-sized, full-color entertainment magazine that focuses on television.

However much sugar they pour on it, TV Guide is still getting rid of the thing that for so long set it apart: detailed listings of programming, local and national, in a given region.

The announcement came when I was at the TV critics' press tour, and writing about a lot of other things. But you can rightly assume there was plenty of conversation about the TV Guide decision, and about how it might affect TV supplements in newspapers.

It seems there are two ways this can go. Either papers can see TVG's abandonment of regional listings as a reason to expand their own, and so serve the audience the magazine is abandoning. Or they can look at TVG's decision as validation of the idea that print listings are becoming obsolete, and so continue the national trend toward cutting back on newspapers'  TV listings. We'll see how things shake out after October.

In any case, the decisions will reflect something I've written about before: the separations along technological, generational and financial lines in the information we get.

I am hard-pressed to remember the last time I picked up a TV Guide to look at its listings. I see tvguide.com far more often than I do the inside of the magazine. But I may be atypical.

Besides having access to an onscreen guide through my cable service, and being a happy Internet wanderer, I have stacks of papers reminding me when shows air. (See the previous posting about my messy desk.) I also get a lot of things in advance, from review copies, so I don't necessarily have to track a week's viewing. (This creates another problem — remembering to check on a show I like for the episodes I didn't get advance copies of. But that's a different conversation.)

Still, there are a lot of people who use resources other than print to keep track of what to watch. That said, there are also plenty of other viewers who rely solely on print listings. Who don't have computers, the Internet or onscreen guides — or have some kind of access to them but don't know how to take advantage. If market research is to be believed, those folks tend to be older or poorer than advertisers desire, so they're SOL* when the marketplace makes decisions.

(*I prefer to think of that as ''sure out of luck," for those of you who imagine that I'm swearing.)

Of course, the people running this country believe in the marketplace, even if that means that every trip the rest of us make to the gas pump should be an article of impeachment. And TV Guide has decided that the marketplace rules, at least the youngish audience it wants to attract to get advertisers.

But will the magazine attract that audience with yet another slick magazine that most likely will be driven by celebrity profiles? It apparently did not succeed with all those stupid "collectors edition" covers, where they'd put four people from a show on different covers, so obsessed fans would run out and buy all four versions. Nor have I been enthralled by Inside TV, the magazine from the TV Guide people, where no story is too long, no celebrity is without redeeming value, and no cover is complete without a picture of Patrick Dempsey.

But when I worry most about the loss of TV Guide's listings, I do so because of the loss to TV history. I've used TV Guide more than once while researching books, and not just for the articles, either. The listings were a repository of information you could not find in newspaper lists for the same period: more detailed, more thorough, and often loaded with program and station advertisements that provided additional glimpses at the past. Now TV Guide is going to stop providing that resource as newspapers are scaling back their own listings; future historians are going to lack information that the magazine made readily available in library archives.

I know that's a pretty narrow reason for missing the old TV Guide. But I'll miss it nonetheless.

My wife will tell you that it's because I'm a slob. I plead guilty. But I do so with extenuating circumstances.

Today's mail included review DVDs of the new Fox series "Bones" and the second season of "House."

You know how much space a DVD takes. These two arrived in a box that was 15 inches long, 11 inches wide and 11 inches deep.

Inside the box was a styrofoam cooler. The cooler held some press material, two freezer packs, a book by Kathy Reichs (a real-life forensic anthropologist and novelist, who has a producer credit on "Bones," also about a forensic anthropologist), a couple of bags of plastic bones (where one of the bones was also a pen), an evidence bag with the "Bones" DVD inside it, and a fake blood-bag with the "House" DVD in it.

That was all meant to make me pay more attention to the shows, but I already write about "House" (including in my DVD column today) and expect to talk about "Bones" around the time it premieres in September. This stuff was mostly clutter, and not even good clutter at that.

After all, besides papers and review videos, my desk already has a "Wonderfalls" plastic lion, a "Nighty Night" postcard and a Chuck Woolery bobblehead. No plastic bones can top that.

The mail this morning included a new "Saturday Night Live" compilation DVD, "The Best of John Belushi" (due in stores Sept. 6, along with other best-ofs devoted to Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner). Well, it had to go into the player — and not just because movie critic George Thomas was screaming to see the Belushi-as-Beethoven-as-Ray-Charles skit.

It was Belushi, for cryin' out loud. While I'm still longing for "SNL" to start issuing complete seasons, there's stuff here that will always make me laugh. Samurai sketches. Belushi-as-Brando-as-The-Godfather. "Star Trek." (Belushi is one of the greatest Shatners of all time — even better than Shatner is these days. Aykroyd was a pretty amazing McCoy, too.)

Just the way later generations have discovered the Marx Brothers — and still should — so it is that Belushi can still make people laugh 25 to 30 years after his "SNL" glory days. And what day isn't made better by a big laugh?

I just wish it was more than a single disc. And I'm still hoping for those complete-season sets.

A couple of co-workers complained to me today about the "Lost" reruns on ABC. As I mentioned some time ago in a mailbag column, the network is skipping some episodes on rerun because it doesn't have enough weeks to replay the entire season in order during the summer. But for people who are trying to catch up on plot turns, or simply refresh their memories, episode skipping just adds to the confusion about a show that can be confusing enough when you're playing close attention.

One of my colleagues flatly said she's just going to wait for the first season of "Lost" to come out on DVD — it's due Sept. 6 — and will use that as a catchup instead of slogging through the broadcast repeats. It's a wise move, and yet another reason why an increasing number of shows are rushing to DVD.

The first season of "House" comes out on Tuesday, just a couple of weeks before the second season begins. Late September brings the first season of '"Desperate Housewives" on DVD. "Nip/Tuck" for that matter will release its second season on DVD next week, not long before the third season begins on Sept. 20. The expectations for previous-season DVDs have become so high, some reporters were disappointed that the first season of "Veronica Mars" won't be on DVD until after the second season starts.

And all those DVDs are good for the shows. It gives you a chance to race through a season, commercial-free, at your own pace. If you're late to the dance, you could even record the latest season's episodes and get to them after getting done with the most recent season on DVD. In fact, as I'll be pointing out in my fall preview package in the Beacon Journal on Sept. 11, the availability of DVD goes hand-in-hand with the success of shows like "Lost" in encouraging viewers to participate in open-ended, serialized storytelling. Once a show goes to DVD, there's a complete, season-long narrative. Well, except for silly cliffhangers.

Of course, in the not too distant future, the DVD itself may be obsolete. We're moving ever closer to on-demand viewing as commonplace. We're already seeing it with select shows. I can easily envision a day when every episode of every TV series is available on demand through your cable, satellite or Internet provider, so you can watch any show, in order, when you want.

But, until then, DVD is the next best thing. And certainly better than depending on capricious scheduling by a broadcast network.