Lost in a Television Formula

My first experience with the television show Lost was in a hotel room in le Marais. There were only a few options - CNN and local French channels, one of which was airing Lost, en Francais. I struggled to understand the French, never mind the fact the characters were jumping between the island and their previous lives. I gave up quickly and switched the channel to CNN.

My next experience with Lost was easier linguistically, but just as difficult semantically. My previous knowledge of Lost was that a plane had crashed and the people were trying to survive. And all of a sudden there was an underground room and a set of numbers and some computer thing that had to be reset every 67 minutes or whatever. Je suis perdue, I said and switched the channel.

Well, now I am making a concerted effort to understand this show. I have rented the first season of the show so I can catch up on all the question marks that pop up over my head when I watch new episodes.

I’m not bowled over by the show, in fact, I find some of the writing and acting quite awkward and unnatural at times. And some of the plot lines are so far-fetched as to be tiresome. (Polar bears grabbing pilots out of cockpits and depositing them bloodied, into trees? Was that ever explained?)

However, the show presents an interesting hybrid of television trends: reality shows such as Survivor and crime solving shows such as CSI.

The creators of Lost have taken the premise of a number of very different personalities forced to live together, and combined it with the twists and turns of crime and mystery programmes where the characters (and the viewers) are trying to figure out just what went on. Lost has performed so well in the ratings because the two most popular types of television formulas have been fused into one ratings winner.

What will be interesting to see is the next shift in television popularity: will Survivor-type shows fizzle, followed by Lost? Or will the viewing public tire of the hyperbolic storylines and fanciful characters that permeate this Wednesday night show?

Or, will Simon Cowell create a mega-show which consists of a group of American Idol hopefuls, stranded on an island, competing for resources AND solving a set of complicated mysteries. Britney Spears could guest-star.

And if we ever get to a point where that type of show gets airtime, send me back to that Paris hotel room with 4 channels. I’ll walk out the door and experience my own version of real life.