Tag Archives: tv

Lost

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Lost ends on Sunday night, and I simultaneously can’t wait for the finale and don’t want the show to end. I’ve remained adamantly spoiler-free as to plot and guest stars, and I plan to keep it that way, but I’m really, really excited to see what happens.

I’ve loved the show for six years, but I’ve really immersed myself in it this season. While watching season six, I’ve also rewatched the first five seasons in order — all 103 episodes. I finished my rewatch a couple of weeks ago. (It helps that I work from home a few days a week; I’ve been able to knock one episode off during lunch and another one right after work, plus a few more at other times.)

It was a terrific experience. I hadn’t seen most of the episodes since they first aired; it was especially fun to rewatch season two, with the hatch and the button. And it was neat to watch earlier episodes knowing how things would later turn out. There were some interesting insights: for example, Jacob was first mentioned a lot earlier in the series than I’d remembered. And the convoluted timeline of the last few seasons was easier to follow the second time around: because I rewatched the episodes during such a compressed time period, it was easier to remember what was happening and keep the bigger picture in my head.

I was also shocked to realize how much of Lost I’d forgotten. There were a few scenes I literally couldn’t remember at all. Um, Juliet got branded on her lower back? (Part of the meandering season three.)

One thing I’ve paid more attention to the second time around has been the music. I’ve always loved Michael Giacchino’s beautiful score; Lost is rare in that it uses a full orchestra to record its score, rather than a synthesizer. But I never realized how complex that score is: there are so many different recurring themes for characters and plot situations. (One of my favorites is the mournful version of Ben’s theme, which is first heard during the Purge and recurs at various Ben-moments during the series.) I was thrilled to see that Alex Ross had a profile of Giacchino and his Lost scoring techniques in a recent New Yorker. Unfortunately, the full article isn’t online, but if you’re a fan of the music, you should find it and read it.

People like Lost for different reasons. They might like it because they want answers to the mysteries, or because they love the metaphysical issues it brings up, or because they love the characters, or because they like the cool way the narrative plays around with time, or because they like sci-fi or fantasy or adventure shows. This is a show with millions of fans, and clearly not everyone is going to like it for the same reasons.

For me, it has never been just about the mysteries. Although that has been a huge part of the fun, a show has to have more going for it than just a mystery. There’s a reason Lost succeeded while similar shows haven’t. For me, that reason is the characters. I’ve never been a big fan of Star Trek or Stargate-type shows because they’re usually less about character and more about techy sci-fi stuff. But I really enjoyed Battlestar Galactica, because it was about great characters and a greater mythology as much as it was a space opera. Lots of people were dissatisfied with how that show ended, because they didn’t like how the mythology came together, but I enjoyed it, because the character arcs mostly ended in satisfying ways.

What I learned from shows like The X-Files and Alias is that mystery serials will almost never be resolved satisfactorily. As Lost meandered through its third season and the mysteries only expanded, it seemed like the writers didn’t know where they were going. It was only after season three, when they gave themselves an end date, that things began to tighten up and the show got better again. (Shorter seasons also helped.)

But based on my previous experience with these types of shows, I’ve tried not to get my hopes too high for satisfying answers to all of Lost‘s mysteries. What I really care about are the characters. Jack has evolved from an arrogant skeptic into an almost mystical believer. Sawyer has changed from a reprobate into a more caring, loving person. Ben has been transformed from a scary, powerful man into a sad, sympathetic guy who has lost everything he had.

I’d really like to see a satisfying ending to everything on Sunday night. But if the mysteries don’t get fully resolved, I’ll be okay. As long as the characters all get satisfying endings, I’ll be happy.

God, I can’t wait.

Angie

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Today I stumbled upon the opening credits of a sitcom I’d never seen before: the short-lived Angie, from 1979-1980, on ABC. It was a romantic sitcom starring Donna Pescow, an actress I’d previously associated with 1970s reruns of The Match Game (but who’s apparently better known for Saturday Night Fever), and Robert Hays, later of Airplane and the Starman TV series. It started out as a ratings hit, but it apparently crashed and burned after the lead characters got married in the second-season premiere.

Still, I love this theme song — it’s so 1970s and cheesy and tuneful! It’s by Maureen McGovern and apparently became a brief pop hit and now I can’t get it out of my head. And how about that whole come-into-the-circle-and-pose-and-smile thing? That’s so Love Boat! Awesome. (I’ve always wondered how the actors know where to stand so that they’re inside the circle. How does that work?)

Even better, here’s the full song:

“The View” Taping

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Matt and I had a cool experience this morning — we were in the live audience for The View.

We used to watch the show back when Rosie O’Donnell was on, and then we watched it occasionally when Whoopi Goldberg and Sherri Shepherd joined, so it seemed like a cool thing to try to get tickets for. We’d signed up online for tickets a long time ago — maybe a year ago or more? And then a couple of weeks ago, we suddenly got two tickets in the mail for this morning’s live show.

We got to the studio around 8:45 in the morning, and they started letting us into the building about 20 minutes later. After showing our tickets and going through security, we had to wait in a holding area for an hour, until about 10:30 (that was the slowest, most boring part of the morning). Then they took us up to the studio in a small elevator.

I’ve been to a couple of TV show tapings before (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), and I’ve seen TV studios a couple of other times in the past, and it’s always such a weird experience when you first walk into one, especially one you’ve seen before on TV. It’s so bright and shiny and chilly and simultaneously real and artificial.

The audience seemed to be about 95 percent female. We counted only a handful of men, and the few we counted seemed to be there with their wives. We seemed to be the only male couple, although there were one or two guys in the audience who might have been on our team.

We got to sit in the middle of the center section, third row, although there was a smaller section in the very front of the audience, so we were some distance from the stage area. A warmup comedian came out and trained us in applauding loudly and enthusiastically. And then at 11 a.m., the show began, and out came Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, Whoopi, and Sherri. Elisabeth Hasselbeck is out this week, which didn’t bother me; I was just psyched that Barbara Walters was there, since she only does two or three shows a week. She’s a television legend and it was cool to see her in person.

The sound in a TV studio is different than in a theater — it’s so crisp and clear, but sterile, with no reverberation. When the hosts were talking, we could hear them perfectly through their mikes. It was almost like watching them on TV. And since a camera was blocking my view of Sherri Shepherd, there were a few times when I did actually glance at the TV monitors above our heads.

Unfortunately, there were no celebrity guests. It was mainly a Day of Hot Topics, although the final segment did have non-celebrity guests: a family who had a daughter with a red blood cell deficiency and who then had another kid who was then able to donate some of his blood and cure her. Everyone in the audience got a copy of a new book about the family, The Match, on the way out. This is not a topic that really interests me, but, hey, free book, I guess.

At the end, we got our free book as well as a free tote bag filled with several bags of pita chips from a food company.

TV tapings are always fun. It was neat to think that what we were seeing live in person was simultaneously being seen on TV all over the Eastern and Central time zones. Women watching at home all over America, in Kansas, in Florida, in North Carolina, in Ohio… and later in New Mexico, and Idaho, and California, and Hawaii… in small towns and suburbs and cities far, far away from us.

TV is so cool!