Out of the WGA Strike, is LOST the big winner?
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…
For those of you playing the home game, you might have noticed that MagneticMediaFed hasn’t had a whole hell of a lot to say over the past several weeks. This is partly due to the strike effectively obliterating new, interesting content from anywhere on the dial (with a few notable exceptions), but more significantly because the strike has unintentionally illustrated the sad reality that life, in fact, goes on and that a lot of what I was watching wasn’t particularly good to begin with. Why was I so insistent on keeping up with so many shows that merely created the illusion of quality programming.
On the other hand, there is some really great stuff airing right now, but I just can’t bring myself to watch it. I’m sure In Treatment is delightful, and HBO is doing everything in its power to make it easy for you to tune in, but I can’t do it. It seems so pointless. This even goes for returning shows that I enjoy watching. I have three episodes of No Reservations on my DVR waiting to be consumed. But I have no drive. Basically my entire TV diet has been reduced to late night talk shows and The Wire. That is until tonight when we were finally given a new episode of LOST after eight long months of nothingness and a fall jam-packed with completely forgetful premieres. What I find especially intriguing is that LOST, last season’s left-for-dead long-running series that did everything in its power to drive away fans and potential new viewers through ill conceived story arcs, inexcusable hiatuses and way too much mopey-Jack, has somehow managed to be THE buzz-show of 2008. Granted, I’m not walking the streets talking to Joe-Longshoreman about what he wants to watch on television, but simply amongst the people I see on a regular basis, LOST is the one show people seem genuinely excited about, and it has the writer’s strike to thank.
If the lack of programming has illustrated anything amongst the countries television watchers, it seems to be that the one thing they crave is something familiar. How else can we explain the (at least momentary) success of American Gladiators amongst a sea of mid-season “replacements” that have yet to leave any significant cultural mark on the populous. Cue: LOST. Unlike everything else on television right now, Lost wasn’t “saved” as strike filler. Since the unbelievably awesome May finale, the series was scheduled to come back the first week of February 2008. That it only got bumped up a week is pretty damn impressive given the spectrum’s dire straights.
So things were already going in the their favor. Their great finale left a positive taste in everyone’s mouth and coupled with the eventual DVD release and seemingly endless wait until the next new episode, proved to be the perfect combination to get the dire-hards talking up the show. It also provided enough time for a few new people to jump on-board, something that couldn’t really happen over the past two seasons with the spread-out run and longer seasons. If the DVD comes out at the end of August and new episodes get underway at the beginning of October you aren’t going to convince anyone. But this, the slow burn, was perfect.
But now, coupled with a complete lack of programming, LOST had suddenly gone from “one time popular super-series, now liked by some” to “intriguing one time popular super-series attempting to win back its original audience.” Before Thursday’s premiere it seriously felt like one of the few remaining times left in contemporary television culture where viewers looked forward to a specific televised airing. Sure I was going to record the episode, but I chose to watch it live… yes, ABC, with commercials.
What I find most fascinating is that LOST feels like its robbing all of American Idol’s cultural relevancy. Honestly, who is talking about Idol? Granted the ratings will likely tell another story altogether, but just because people are watching those singing idiots doesn’t mean it has the same currency it had three years ago. Idol is selling us something we’ve already experienced. As a people we more often than not desire the familiar, but we at least want to be tricked into thinking what we’re seeing is new. This is why the “colon” is perhaps the greatest innovation in television programming this decade Law and Order COLON SVU, CSI COLON Miami). The brilliance of LOST is that it’s still the same damn show with the same stack of seemingly unanswerable questions, but now, NOW, the framework has been so greatly expanded with the inclusion of flash-forwards, watching the show feels fresh. It feels the way it did season one, because we are now getting stories we didn’t even know we had the option of seeing in the first place.
So as the writers try to broker a deal in time for the Oscars, we die-hard LOST fans should at the very least tip our hats in their general direction. It wasn’t planned, hell I think Cuse and Lindelof actually would have preferred to postpone the entire season, but suddenly LOST matters, and that makes me really, really happy because when it comes to water-cooler talk, you can beat it.
And now, an extremely quick run through of some highlights from episode 401 “The Beginning of the End”
- Is that… yes it is! Cedric Motherf**king Daniels!
- “I’m one of the Oceanic Six!” That was awesome.
- When Jack held the gun at Locke… and then fired it! That was pretty badass.
- I should probably check the tape, but I need to get to bed so I’ll just say Ben said something beautifully understated and hilarious in response to which group he was going to go with while being covered in blood.
- How long do you suppose it’ll take before “the six” actually leave the island? Think it’ll happen this season? SUBQUESTION: when the strike ends and we eventually get the back-eight, will that still be considered season 4?
Tags: Lost, WGA Strike
February 1st, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Love that Weezer link! Oh and Lost was pretty good too.