Well, these are six words I never thought I'd hear come out of Simon Cowell's mouth: "I don't always get it right."

Although Simon has very occasionally apologized to a harshly criticized American Idol contestant, Simon rarely admits he's made a mistake. And to be honest, he rarely DOES make a mistake. Sometimes--in fact, most of the time--his critiques are unnecessarily cruel, but they're usually dead-on correct.

However, in a letter to U.K. paper The Daily Mail this past weekend, Simon discussed his other popular show, Britain's Got Talent, after an extremely controversial season that included sobbing underage contestants and the very public post-finale emotional meltdown of frontrunner Susan Boyle after she placed second. "I, of course, am inevitably portrayed as the evil ringmaster. I didn't get into show business to make little children cry or upset a nice lady like Susan Boyle," Simon wrote. "The time has finally come for me to set a few things straight."

He added, candidly:

I can already tell this season of So You Think You Can Dance is going to be rough on me. The caliber of talent is so high this season that no matter who goes home, in any given week, I'm going to be bummed. Tonight SYTYCD fans lost two more great dancers, but I suppose, in my opinion at least, it could have been worse.

Of the bottom three couples tonight, one of them was not a surprise to me: Jason and Caitlin. Their hip-hop routine last night was a disappointment: They seemed lost, out of sync, inauthentic, and lacking in confidence overall. They're obviously both fabulous dancers, but last night they just didn't adapt to the hip-hop genre well at all.

Oddly, also in the bottom tonight were Kupono and Ashley, the other couple that danced a Shane Sparks-choreographed routine this week. Apparently Shane's return to the show (after being on America's Best Dance Crew) was a somewhat anti-climactic comeback. While Kupono and Ashley's routine last night was a letdown after their stunning

I know I declare this every season...but I've never been as excited about a So You Think You Can Dance season as I am this year. Just when I thought the Fox franchise might no longer have legs (heh heh), the show has surprised me and returned with possibly its most gifted cast to date. After watching the top 20 compete for the first time last night--creating gravity-defying, spacetime-continuum-distorting, joint-dislocating stunts with their phenomenal bodies that seemingly only CGI'd superheroes ought to be able to pull off with such ease--my own jaw joint was practically dislocated from hitting the floor.

Yes, the SYTYCD talent this year is nothing short of stunning. It's a shame any of them had to go home so soon tonight, on the first elimination episode of season 5. I personally wasn't ready to see any of them leave just yet.

At least I got some relief early in the show, before even the first commercial break, when two of my favorite couples from last night, Evan & Randi and

Well, So You Think You Can Dance's Vegas Week just rushed by. It was more like Vegas DAY, really. While American Idol's equivalent, Hollywood Week, was extended this year so that viewers could really get to know all the contestants--quirks, crying jags, and all--on SYTYCD all of this season's callback auditions were condensed into a single episode. As a result, surprise Vegas eliminations were hardly explained (Natalie Reid), some contestants who'd made memorable impressions during their initial auditions were inexplicably M.I.A. (Kelsea Taylor), and many dancers--aside from maybe Tony Bellissimo, Evan Kasprzak, Brandon Bryant, and Philip Chbeeb--advanced to the top 20 having had very little TV exposure at all. Until tonight's first competitive round, the majority of this season's top 20 were in fact still strangers to most of America.

But, frustrating as the lack of Vegas Week coverage was, perhaps it was a good thing. Because it meant that most of tonight's competitors were likely to