Why?

Hi


So, why do I think that Lost is the best tv show ever?  I have subjected a number of people to this theory in person and I hold onto it as a perfect piece of fan girl reasoning (fangirl or fan girl?) and it is basically the reason I have started this blog.


Lost started out marketed as on its high production values, and we were told again and again how it was the most expensive pilot ever made, etc etc.  We were introduced to the characters and the format and the peril very early on.  It was momentous.  It was beautiful and lovingly crafted and they were all half naked.  It was great.  And each ep was a back story with just enough literary references to make it just pseudo-intellectual enough to be taken seriously by critics and even people who don't really watch tv.


If The X-files was a movie every week, The Wire was a Russian novel and ER/NYP Blue were pure television, then Lost was the tv equivalent of America's greatest literary whole-genre contribution, the short story.  (I also have a great deal of time for the epic poetry of Walt Whitman but this is a much more succinct way to go.)  What the makers of Lost did by stealth - by stealth, mind you - was turn all these stock characters and the time-old story line of a shipwreck into full blown, and pretty challenging, science fiction.  Now, they haven't kept all their audiences, but they have managed to keep many of us and they have done it with a straight face.  And I love that, and I therefore believe that Lost is the best tv show ever.


That is (a motif may be crystallising even as I type) simplistic and reductive but I do think that this will be a theme I return to time and again.


But I do applaud Lost for reaching out to those members of the tv watching population who do triage on the movies they go see like "is there time travel, spaceships, aliens, unanswered non-closure questions, a mythology, the possibility that the twist at the end is that Charlton Heston was on Earth all along, any variation on the above?  Yes?  Then we'll go see the Adam Sandler instead, or else do you have something in a hostage situation?" and basically punking them into watching science fiction.


Bravo, Lost.  Bravo.