The premise at first sounded like a reverse-engineered "Survivor": A planeload of people crash on a deserted island and we all watch their struggle to stay alive and get along. But this was a fictional show--an actual TV drama.
You see, reality TV hasn't yet stooped to purposely crashing planes to insert people into contrived situations for voyeurs to watch. So they hired actors and writers for this one.
And while I thought the idea of a new TV drama was refreshingly different when I first heard about it last fall, I wasn't interested enough to actually watch. A serious "Gilligan" or fictionalized "Survivor" just didn't seem that compelling.
And so I foolishly skipped the first 8 or 9 episodes of "Lost."
Thankfully, good reviews from friends (and a lack of pretty much anything else worth watching) led me to finally check it out. And I'm glad I did.
Because "Lost" is a lot more than "Gilligan" or "Survivor." It's the most compelling, thoughtful and human thing I've seen on television since "Buffy" left Sunnydale.
And "Buffy" is one of the reasons "Lost" is so good. Former "Vampire Slayer" producer David Fury on the staff of the new show. In fact, it's got a good pedigree all around.
Paul Dini, producer of the wonderful animated "Batman" series of the early 1990s is a sometimes writer.
And the exec producer is J.J. Abrams, creator of "Alias," which was a favorite of mine up until the series went terribly awry a couple seasons back. They dumbed things down to attract new viewers and lost the old. The creators lost the plot.
"Lost," on the other hand, is anything but disoriented. Each new episode is a treat--well-focused, compelling, surprising and original.
That's largely because the characters are so well drawn. They're interesting people, all 14 of them (the program has a huge ensemble cast). Even the pretty ones who you initially discount as window dressing--on hand to boost the ratings and look appealing on the beach.
And the ones who aren't pretty? Man. These are some of the best characters I've seen on a TV program in years.
Hurley the fat guy, played wonderfully by Jorge Garcia, is a kind, loving guy with much more depth than he lets on. Thankfully, the show's creators don't play him strictly for laughs. He comes across as a very real, interesting, person. Not a caricature.
And Terry O'Quinn is fascinating as Locke. Initially he came on all "Rambo" but-- as we learn in his backstory--he's really a Walter Mitty type: a salesguy for a box-manufacturing company who dreams of adventure. In the series, he's taken on a near-shaman role, teaching the other survivors how to survive, showing them that being stranded is an opportunity for them to reshape their lives--recreate who they are.
And he oughtta know. As we learn, Locke used a wheelchair before the plane crashlanded. On the island, he can walk. Alone among the survivors, he views the island as a magical, giving place.
Others view it more as menacing. Two of the survivors were kidnapped by a mysterious stranger--not a person who was on the plane. We don't know where he came from. Wild boars and--more strangely yet--a polar bear, have attacked the surviving passengers. And there's something bigger, more threatening yet--something big and unseen that makes lots of noise and chases people through the jungles. Other strangeness includes a mysterious French woman, on the island before the passengers crashed and what seems to be a metal hatchway into the ground. Nobody's managed to open it yet.
These are the mysteries that people talk about at work Thursday mornings and on the message boards. All sorts of theories abound: The surivors are really all dead. They're in Heaven or Purgatory or Hell. They're in another dimension. Or quinea pigs in a government study project. Or...who knows.
And I'm not in a terrible hurry to find out. I'm wary of shows that string viewers along with mysteries like this. Either they cough things up too quickly and the answers are disappointing. Or they wait so long that, by the time we learn what's going on, nobody cares anymore. "Twin Peaks" and "X-Files," which promised big revelations but never quite paid off, should be cautionary tales for the "Lost" creative crew.
But what if the big reveal is that there is no reveal? These people are stuck on an island and that's it. All the strings of clues are just random coincidences. The door in the ground lead nowhere.
What we see is what we get: Some really interesting characters learning to live in a new way. After all, we're all surrounded by mysteries all the time right here in civilization. We're trying to figure out how to act, how to get along. Perhaps "Lost" is more about us than we realize.
"Lost" airs tonight on ABC. It's a rerun.
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