Top Gear is one of those shows that feels like it could go on forever. It's been on for a long time, yet still manages to retain a rare youthful exuberance that makes it feel fresh and forever young. It's the Dick Clark of the British television world.

But nothing lasts forever and producer Andy Wilman told The Guardian that Top Gear, like all great shows, is headed towards a finale.

And there is no bigger critic of the show than Wilman. He said they were "too rushed and too knackered to get everything right" and were just wanting to get to the end of the latest season running in the UK. He even described the presents as caricatures of themselves with "Jezza (Jeremy Clarkson) the walking nuclear bomb, Richard (Hammond) the daft Norman Wisdom, and James (May) the bumbling professor."

Does this put you off of the new season coming to the States in January? It sure does for me.

In sports parlance, every now and then a rookie sensation comes along and is an instant success. Like Robert Redford in The Natural, only it's fact and not fiction. In TV parlance, Simon Baker -- who kind of looks like younger Redford (think The Sting and The Way We Were) -- has pulled off a rookie success that makes him look like pure gold.

The latest weekly Nielsen ratings are in and The Mentalist is number one, just slightly ahead of NCIS, with 18.8 million viewers. Simon Baker has a certifiable, solid and probably long-term hit series on his hands, and you know the powers that be at CBS have to be dancing in the corridors at the Black Rock.