REAL TO REEL:

"Crossing Jordan's" Steve Valentine reports the troupe recently wrapped an episode with "the storyline that's my favorite so far" -- which is saying something, since the NBC series is in its fifth season. "We find a World War II pilot who crashed his plane in the mountains, and he's encased in a block of ice, and he's like 22 years old," says the actor. "And we track his son, and his son is like 65, and he comes in and sees his father, the body of a young man ... It's an amazing story." One sparked, in all likelihood, by the discovery of a WWII-era airman's body in the Sierra Nevada last October. Meanwhile, Valentine's working on his own scripts. "I bought an iMac and I love it. I've never had a computer until four months ago, which is kind of ironic because the character I play is a computer expert," he admits. Hey, that's why they call it acting.
 
Of the episodes he's concocting, he says, "I have crazy, crazy stories. I'm a little out on a limb with some of them. If we come back, that's season six, and in season six you can get a little crazy." Will "Jordan" come back? Says Steve, "Unless something bad happens, I imagine we will."