I admit I'm clueless when it comes to pop TV. Despite being a Home Theater enthusiast, TV technician and gadget junkie it’s my curmudgeonly opinion that 99.9% of television programming is junk. But every once in awhile you find decent quality shows and if they broadcast in HD, as Jack Bauer would say; “I’m on it!”
In my quest to find quality HD programming my PVR has kissed a lot of frogs. Last night at (Wed) at 8pm emanating from ABC my PVR picked up a show called “Lost”, the episode was called “The Journey” I’m still not sure what I think about it. The video quality on my 720P monitor was magnificent. A lot of shows that broadcast in HD don’t do such a good job for whatever reason, you get grainy muted colors. Thankfully this isn’t the case with Lost.
The premise of Lost is a commercial jet has crashed down on a tropical island leaving 48 survivors. The island on which the survivors find themselves isn’t the deserted tropical paradise as it first appears. Instead the island holds mystery and is a sort of character unto itself. It’s a great premise, I love a good mystery. Brilliant video, bright tropical skies, deep blue ocean and mysterious shadowy rain forest looked great in HD, this is enough to hold my interest long enough to give this one a chance. But it’s the characters that really make or break any show. Too many TV shows populate their characters with supermodels, I’m not against looking at pretty women, but one perfectly sculpted puffy lipped blonde after another only holds superficial interest and reminds me this is a product of some Hollywood fantasy. My opinion of the show was tipping steadily toward “superficial Hollywood fair” when it seemed a characters chances for surviving the first few minutes of this episode was directly proportionate to their rating on some adolescent babe-o-meter. Dashing would-be leading men and model looking blondes drew my cynical ire as the mature and overweight where quickly decimated. But as the show progressed I noticed Merry from Lord of the Rings (Dominic Monaghan) and this big unshaven fat guy named Hurley (Jorge Garcia). Any script that employs out of work Hobbits and lets someone like Hurley survive can’t be all bad. So I kept watching.
Rule #1: The beautiful people survive.
It must be said that the episode I watched was a sort of “catch up” for new viewers (I think). I believe since the second season is upon us this was just a brush up of season one compressed into a single episode. I sure hope so. I thought it was some modern hyper-directorial style. The whole show played out like a music video trying to tell a story. It was annoying to catch disjointed sentences, timelines out of place as the story seemed to press forward in a forced march. But it was strangely addictive so I kept watching. I believe the idea is that next week the season begins in earnest so hopefully it allows for a little more character development. I might be tempted to PVR it again. But it’s got one BIG strike against it; it’s a TV show! My membership to curmudgeonly old man club requires I don’t accept TV as a valid form of entertainment so it’ll have to be awfully good to hold my interest. As the episodes unfold do they bother to develop the characters? Do we care whether any of them survive? There are a couple of interesting points about this show that could potentially hold some interest. One of the “hot chicks” turned out to be pregnant and had her baby already. One of the heroic guys turns out to be an Iraqi and former soldier in Saddam’s elite guard. The Iraqi character Naveen is an interesting twist considering current America politics. And Merry the Hobbit (the Dominic Monaghan character) is a rock musician another potentially interesting character. There was one scene where a text tattoo on Merry’s arm was exposed and it read: “Living is easy with eyes closed”. This is a lyric from a Beatles song that finishes “Misunderstanding’s all you see.” Could this be a subtle message articulating plot points? Now that’s interesting!
Special thanks to Lost-TV.com for being a well designed site that got me straight on the 411.