Ask Matt

Matt Roush: Don't blame it all on ABC — we critics forced their hand last month. Blame the spoiler culture as well, fed by fanfests like Comic-Con, or even the Lost producers for using that forum instead of the critics' press tour to discuss and leak details about where the show was going next season. If you read the coverage of the ABC portion of the press tour, you'll only scratch the surface of the feeling of resentment among the critics in that room, many of whom had rallied around Lost in the second half of the season but still felt they were being snubbed in favor of Comic-Con. The questions to ABC Entertainment prez Steve McPherson got so heated that his PR staff eventually stepped up and got the OK from Lost's Damon Lindelof to break the news a day early about Michael returning to the show. Honestly, I wasn't expecting or even hoping for a plot spoiler like that. I was hoping more for a discussion about the creative direction of the show in the wake of the flash-forward surprise of the season finale. No specifics, just a state-of-the-moment assessment of how the show is primed to tell its stories for the final two seasons. Instead, we were tossed a bone with this casting announcement, which apparently had been planned to break the following day at Lost's Comic-Con session. So whether it was ABC or the Lost producers themselves who broke the story, this nugget of spoiler news was going to get out. That's the way the entertainment business works nowadays, for better or worse. It's increasingly difficult to watch a show anymore without having many of the best twists ruined in advance — unless you go out of your way to avoid the coverage, and then the coverage of the coverage, and so on. I do my best to stay away from material like this, but when it's put out in front of the entire mass of people who cover TV, you can't exactly ignore it.