MagneticMediaFed

88 MPH

First, a bit of housekeeping: as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much these days. This is almost exclusively due to the fact that I am in the process of moving from New York City to Nashville, Tennessee, and frankly haven’t had time to watch much television (aside from Lost and The Wire), let alone formulate thoughts on said television and then actually type those thoughts out and click “publish.” This pattern of non-activity will likely continue for the next two or three weeks as I get situated in my new city. Feel free to track my progress on my personal site, as I set-up shop.

OK. With that out of the way, how great has Lost been these past five weeks? SPOILERS: It’s been really great. More on the “why” after the jump…

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Picture via Doug Mills/New York Times

First: sorry for the untimeliness in this post, but I’ve been busy working on the site’s redesign which you may or may not have noticed. Moving on.

FOX’s broadcast of Super Bowl XLII (that’s “42″ for those that don’t read Roman) was the second highest rated television program of all time coming in behind the finale for M*A*S*H. The game was seen by an estimated 97.5 million people (M*A*S*H reached 106 million people, though at a time when most people only had access to a handful of channels). I find this to be more or less astounding. Much of what contemporary culture is based on is the notion that there are very few things rallied around by everyone, and the steady decline in network television ratings is perhaps biggest example of this (followed closely by the lack of America’s appetite to consume large quantities of popular music). To see a singular event grab such a large percentage of our collective attention spans speaks highly about the event itself as well as providing a bit of reassurance to the networks that people will turn out en mass if there’s something actually worth checking out. But what is the subtext of these numbers? Do they suggest that the solution to the network’s audience migration problem lies solely in their ability to deliver something worth seeing (because there is a lot of television worth seeing that most audiences could care less about)? Or should we read into this that the magic lies in the very scarcity of the event itself? After all, what are the odds of getting a Super Bowl where the actual game was that good? More after the jump…

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I wanna go back!

I suppose in about eight weeks I could proven severely wrong. I suppose this could be true. For as a season that was designed to tell a very specific story over a very specific number of episodes (16), it is quite likely that I and all the rest of the beach-based sci-fi nerdalati could riot in the streets for leaving us hanging with the inevitable faux-finale. Yes, we will gather together with torches and SPF 60 and mobile devices that allow us to maintain contact with our favorite gadget blogs and will whine and complain about the writers, the AMTPT, ABC, Cuse and Lindelof and the rest of the cast and why they couldn’t just cross the damn line and maybe squeeze out a nineth episode — something, anything to prolong the misery that is being denied what is rightfully ours.

But right now, today, as American’s quickly find worthy substitutes for televised entertainments in the face of a strike that has rendered much of the entire medium culturally irrelevant, LOST is the big winner. I’ll tell you why after the jump…

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