LOST

Jon Tweedy's latest weblog entry wholeheartedly recommends watching LOST.

Just for some background - Tweedy's taste in television/movies isn't infallible. He definitely watches a lot of chick flicks, and has been known to on occasion quote Friends. That said, I only saw EuroTrip, which I enjoyed, on his recommendation, and although I don't think Smallville is a great show, exactly, what I've seen of it I've enjoyed, and I certainly wouldn't have watched it had he not talked about it so often.

Now he apparently thinks LOST is the "best show ever!" Maybe it is. What I read about it just now on Wikipedia sounded interesting.

It's not a show I had ever really thought about, honestly. Sort of like "Smallville" that way. I heard the ads, but they never grabbed me, and so I didn't bother.

I'm a kind of TV addict. Not for television in general, mind you, which is on the whole pretty boring. But once I find a program that's good, there's nothing more relaxing or entertaining than watching TV. I get really in to shows I like. Unfortunately, right now there isn't a whole lot on.

I've been watching Eur^eka since it started in the middle of the summer, and while I think the concept has a lot of potential, the execution is a bit disappointing - especially the writing, which has been steadily slipping since the series premier. The series revolves around life in a secret/classified government town inhabited exclusively by government scientists and their families. It's a great premise - sort of a Twin Peaks in hyper nerd mode. But it suffers from a couple of problems - chief among them being that it's clear that the writers never sat down and had the big conversation that David Lynch and Mark Frost had when they created Twin Peaks. (Supposedly, Frost and Lynch spent all day one day imagining the history of the town. I'm a firm believer that planning out that kind of background detail, whether or not it figures directly in the final product, is essential in creating a believable fictional universe. It is so rarely done, which is why the payoff is so great when people take the time. Twin Peaks is easily in the top five best shows ever aired.) The characters don't mesh well. There aren't enough little details thrown at you to give a convincing picture of small town life. For another, the characters aren't convincingly quirky. They're quirky, to be sure, but not convincingly so. It's hard to make a character that's truly weird and also believable. Hell, it's hard just to make up a weird character without seeming gimmicky at all. And Eur^eka fails miserably on this count. But most importantly, the writers just haven't been coming up with very good episodes. In fact, one of the most recent involved a theme that was very much of the Cold War - the countdown for a stray missile starting and the only person who can stop it is an eccentric who doesn't communicate well. (Gee, where have I heard that one before???) Probably it's a show that should have been made in the 80s, an opinon I also have of Bablyon 5.

But I'm way digressing. The point is just that, aside from Eur^eka, I haven't been watching much TV lately. And since Eur^eka is starting to seriously disappoint, and I have no real expectations that the New Battlestar is going to be able to pull itself out of the hole it dug into midway through season 2 - LOST might just be a good place to look for something weekly to watch. (I don't share Noah's enthusaism for The Ultimate Fighter, though I do enjoy watching the fights!)

OK, Mr. Tweedy, I'll give it a try. I don't have a Netflix subscription for nuthun, after all!