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Rating: - HIGHLY overrated high-concept soap opera. Agonizing to watch.
I really wanted to like this show. My favorite series of the past few years ("The Shield" and "The Wire") had ended, and I wanted a new show to enjoy and get hooked on. I knew "Lost" was already several years old by that point, but I figured I could start from the beginning with the DVDs and get caught up quickly.

However, this show stinks so bad, I am having a hard time getting the smell out of my DVD player.

This show is overwrought melodrama, and is full of manufactured tension and forced dialogue and situations. The premise is fine (and even interesting), but the dozens of little moments used to fill the time between plot developments are ridiculously melodramatic. The show doesn't have to be realistic, but there needs to be some verisimilitude -- the actions, dialogue, etc of the characters need to be grounded in reality and naturalism (even in a surreal or fantastical context) or else it looks cartoonish.


Watching this show has helped me become a master at physical multi-tasking: I can now yawn and roll my eyes at the same time. I never saw the show until August of 2009. My boss recommended it to me (we were both huge fans of "The Shield" and "The Big Bang Theory", so I was willing to accept his recommendation). I rented Season 1 of "Lost" from Netflix and somehow managed to watch almost the entire season without wanting to slit my wrists from boredom or having my eyes roll permanently into the back of their sockets. It wasn't easy to get through the season, that's for sure. It was quite the endurance contest. The most notable reaction I had to this show (other than intellectual agony) was when I ran, and I mean RAN, to my computer to delete the rest of the season's discs from my Netflix queue.

The premise was interesting, but that's where the fun ended. I accept the fact that this is a network television show, and for that reason this show will feature an inordinate number of attractive young actors playing stock characters and that there will be an ethnically diverse cast of characters that somehow feels "forced" (Handsome young male lead? Check. Add a few impossibly beautiful young women? Check. Black guy? Check. Asian characters? Check. Chubby comic relief? Check. Dangerous rebel? Check. ....You get the point). If it seems like the network had a checklist for the stock characters and ethnicities they wanted represented so as to widen the show's appeal, well it did. That's how network TV works. That's how network execs think.

Next ingredient: make it eerie but not too complicated. Don't make it cerebral, but make it LOOK and FEEL like it is cerebral.

Make the post-plane crash behavior as unrealistic as possible. The survivors are at first without a decent supply of food, water, shelter, adequate medical care, etc, but they go about their business like calm sheep, only pausing to stare in wonder whenever they hear a strange animal growl or trees moving. Even then, they only react when the camera pans to them. It's kind of a "rolling acknowledgement" - each one of them on the beach hears the sounds at the same time, but their reactions are in "staggered time". Apparently it is important on a television drama for the camera to capture the startled reactions of each and every character, no matter how much time it takes, whenever something startling occurs. It looks so hokey and cliche and REHEARSED that you'd swear Steven Spielberg himself had shot it.

By the way, the plane wreckage and debris looked totally unrealistic. It looked like the debris was simply placed on the beach. I didn't see any tell-tale signs of a large object having a violent crash landing and/or coming to a stop. A plane crash (even just a downed fuselage and two engines) leaves a HECK of a lot more physical damage to the surrounding area than what we see in "Lost". But that would be expensive to design and would spoil the beauty of the scenery.

Maybe I'm nitpicking. Maybe my expectations are too high. But details and verisimilitude are important. If the network wants me to invest a significant amount of time in that show, then they should invest more time and effort into paying attention to details. A cool premise will carry a show only so far. The premise and plot don't have to be absolutely realistic, but the everyday elements of the natural world (Laws of Physics, patterns of human behavior in desperate situations, etc) should be grounded in reality, even within the context of a fantasy show. Otherwise, this might as well be "Gilligan's Island" or a Saturday morning cartoon. I said that already, but it bears repeating.

By the way, at the beginning of the pilot episode where Matthew Fox's character "Jack" awakens in a field of tall grass that completely surrounds him, how did he know which way to run? How did the dog get out of the carrier he was presumably in? Isn't it convenient that their luggage arrived with them and intact when the rest of the plane was essentially blown to bits? How come a grown man got sucked into the engine but nothing else nearby of considerably lighter weight even rustled in the suction breeze? And why does J.J. Abrams seem to think that using one of the most overused cliches in drama (having a young pregnant woman go into labor or have labor pains at the most inopportune moment) does NOT look downright silly? He did it here, and he did it again in his "Star Trek" movie. It's old and tired and it should be beneath him. But apparently it's not. Maybe the pregnancy has a dramatic payoff later in the season, maybe it doesn't. That's not the point. The point is that it is an overused cliche and stock character to suffer through while we're waiting to see IF there is a payoff. Maybe some of these questions get addressed YEARS later in future seasons, but those are bad elements to hinge a plot line on. It's like asking someone to listen to a singer's 11 terrible CD's because the last track on the 12th one is supposed to be good enough to make up for the rest.

I just don't get it. I don't see how so many people are so enamored of this show. It is a cool premise executed in the laziest way imaginable.

If "Lost" was the first and only dramatic series I'd ever seen, I'd probably think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But the bar has been set very high recently by shows like "The Wire", for example, and now any other show that doesn't even attempt to match it for quality just looks all the worse for not trying. Not that "Lost" and "The Wire" are the same type of show. That's for damn sure. But "The Wire" has shown how great episodic drama can be. It is character-driven, not gimmick-driven. "Lost" is, first and foremost, gimmick-driven. Americans love "gimmick TV". No surprise that this show has become successful. Even the fans who complain that the show moves too slowly and that nothing really ever happens still rave about the show as if it were the best thing ever on TV. They give it an unconditional pass. That's too bad.

I somehow made it almost all the way through Season One of this show. I was hoping to enjoy it, but I just couldn't see past all the weaknesses and laziness in the directing, writing, logic, and production design. This show was a soap opera gone "high-concept", that's all. When a soap opera aspires to be greater than it is, when it tries to reach the heights of great drama or a great thriller, it usually just comes off looking silly. That's "Lost" in a nutshell.

I have no desire to see any future seasons and I can't recommend this show to any of my friends who insist on a minimum standard of literary or narrative excellence. This show has often been compared to "Lord of the Flies". Hardly. "LOTF" explored man's dark and primitive nature. "Lost" is too superficial to tackle that theme with any seriousness.

The show is abysmally bad.

Did you know that the idea for this show was dreamed up by a network exec at ABC? He thought the premise would make for a cool series, so he hired various folks to write it for him. The series was greenlit on the basis of the concept alone. Too bad the so-called "creative talent" behind the show couldn't make it work any better than they did.

This show was about as big a mistake as a trouble married couple deciding to have a baby to "save their marriage".


The ONLY thing Season 1 is good for is as a drinking game. Every time you see a scene where someone in either the foreground or background is folding clothes from a piece of luggage, drink a shot. Actually, it might even help you enjoy the show more. I'd probably have to be drunk to watch more of this crapfest anyway.


This show in some ways disappoints me the same way the Star Wars prequel "The Phantom Menace" did. As in "Phantom Menace", "Lost" doesn't have nearly enough plot to sustain its running time. As a result, the show's flaws take center stage when there is nothing else interesting going on on-screen. Watching this show, you can never forget you are listening to scripted dialogue. There is almost nothing natural about their conversations. Every word sounds like it is being spoken for dramatic effect.

.... You know what? It makes my head hurt to even discuss this show. I'm still not sure if I genuinely hate the show or if I merely resent the writers and directors for being so lazy and for paying so little attention to the small moments. This show is FULL of small moments. When they are weak and silly, it paints the whole show with that brush.

This show might have worked better as a 2-hour TV movie. It would have been narratively tighter and more effective, maybe like one of the better "Twilight Zone" episodes. But it is stretched too thin and can't sustain itself on a moment-to-moment basis without resorting to trying to squeeze a high amount dramatic tension from very minor events. It just looks silly. What a waste of a good premise.

Funny thing is, this first season won an Emmy for Best Dramatic Series and then in subsequent seasons was criticized for being slow and boring. I thought Season One was about as slow and boring as a show could get. I can't really imagine how unbearable the subsequent seasons must have been.

Like anyone else, I've been either disinterested in or disappointed by any number of shows over the years. In those cases, I'd just shrug my shoulders and never tune into them again. But "Lost" is the first show I've absolutely resented for being as poor as it is, and I will NEVER understand why people are/were so fascinated by it.

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I hear they are making "Lost" action figures now. You wind them up, set them down, and they sit there for three seasons before doing anything.

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