Getting Lost
Over a long, post-festivity lunch today, feisty young free-market champ Jason Talley—known around the office as Crasher in Chief—finally convinced me to take a look a TV series I had been studiously avoiding, J.J. Abrams' island serial, Lost. I’ve now got the first season sitting on my desk, and I suppose I’ll find out soon whether the show lives up to the hype, or whether I was correct to think of it as merely hidden doors behind hidden doors, puzzles that resolve themselves only in more puzzles. Ross Douthat is a fan, but even he admits that the show’s biggest weakness is “offering extended teases that promise more information than they deliver”—exactly the sort of thing that had kept me away.
I’m a several episodes behind on The Sopranos, but a significant part of what makes that show great is its willingness to let things change, often drastically and permanently, and to explore how the same characters react under different circumstances. The old paradigm for TV was repetition: characters and situations that don’t change, don’t grow, where every conflict is resolved in a way so that it leaves absolutely no lasting impact. But the really interesting new stuff is all about making use of the medium to show change over time. Battlestar Galactica has done this in an incredibly bold way (to the consternation of some fans), and one of The Wire’s many miracles has been delivering three separate, self-contained, season-long stories that also feel like a single, epic story arc.
But I’m suspicious about Lost, and not just because Mission: Impossible 3 made a mockery of satisfying story arcs, rich character development, and narrative resolution. As Ross showed, even its fans seem to agree that it doesn’t quite deliver on its setups. Admittedly, 24 also has this problem at times (though this season was much better than the last two). But 24 is far less about the resolution than it is about the ride. The question on that show is never: How will it end? Instead, it’s, How far will Jack (and the show’s writers) go? It’s about pushing the limits of the suspense format, and in that, it works remarkably well. If, as I suspect, Lost can't ante up on satisfying endings, it's going to have to find some other way to make watching it worth my while.
posted by Peter @ 5/24/2006 04:03:00 PM
3 Comments:
Look, I don't want to oversell it, but . . . I would give anything to be back where you are, with all of it still in front of me. Also, I hope you've got a lot of free time over the next few weeks.
Since your views on TV are very close to my own, I'd advise you not to expect too much from it. I got the feeling that the first season was just a television show. It was interesting, but nothing special.
It's the second season that really stands out for me. A new element joins the story, and you sort of get the idea that they hadn't planned to make it so until the late 1st season.
That being said, Lost has often left me dissapointed, like someone has tricked me into wasting an hour of my time. I still watch it whenever I can, but I find something like Prison Break or BSG far more satisfying.
Moment-for-moment, scene-for-scene, Lost is one of the best things on TV.
But I kind of agree with pstonie: I found the larger story arcs disappointing.
I'm not sure that the set-up/premise of the show meshes very well with the seat-of-the-pants, "what the heck can we come up with next" philosophy of the writing team (especially compared to a show like 24).
It was while watching Lost that I decided that American TV would benefit from making more shows along the British model, where a "season" is often just 6-12 episodes that tell a self-contained story, and any subsequent seasons are more like sequels to and not continuations of the previous ones.
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