I really hated that show. I liked Lost… for a while. My guess on Lost is that the fans guessed what was going on, so the showrunners changed it around.
Just out of interest, how far did you get?
The first season there’s definitely bits I understand people dropping out. The main characters are not likeable people (and it’s deliberate as part of the show), and like Lost, it has an episode which is good and keeps you going (both times episode 4, but the priest episode is a recurring thing in each season), and even after that the second season just goes absolutely sideways from the first season, and has a bunch of very different things in it, including what I reckon as one of the best ending of an episode in any show, and a lot of people love the episode after that.
It got rated number 1 in Rolling Stones top shows of the decade 10-20, and if you watched all of it and hated it, I’d like to know why for curiosity reasons (not for defending it, just to know). If you dropped out, I’d be interested to know when…
Yep, more than halfway thru the first. Why would i watch ALL of it if the first season was that bad? I am not a masochist.
Ah ok, well, you missed something special, and it changed a lot in the following seasons. But it’s a place where a couple of people I know also stopped.
The reality with LOST is that they didn’t have a plan at all, so they showrunners had to sit down and think of a plan about mid-way.
The trouble is that they insisted they had a plan from very early on too. And promoted the show on that too. And they might have had to think of a plan, but having watched show the show to the end, I couldn’t tell you what the plan was except.
Oh some time travel crap, and that smoke thing, yeah, some sort of god, and, and, they’re all dead or will be and we won’t make it completely clear which. Chump’s rusty bucket anyone?
Lost looked interesting at the time, but husband didn’t want to watch it, so we passed. I’m always so glad!
Lost was absolutely amazing for a few years, as a television-watching experience to be shared with others. I remember so many conversations with friends speculating about what was going on, and the cliffhangers when you had to wait a week (or a few months) to find out what would happen next were expertly crafted. And it was also one of the first shows to integrate with the internet, with associated secret Dharma websites and shit like that, which was new and very cool at the time.
And yes, it absolutely went off the rails as others have described, but those first few years were definitely something special, and I’m glad I watched it at the time.
I wonder if most couples are like this. We might be outliers. I watch what I like on my iPad, she watches what she likes on hers. We rarely watch the same things.
I think it is one of the best shows of all time and I’m including the entire run, even the finale.
We’re finally getting around to watching the second half of the final season of Yellowstone. Since Costner left in a huff, I thought the show might suffer, but I actually think it’s better without what passes for acting by him these days.
We have two TVs, because we rarely watch anything together. Even when we’re watching the same thing, we’re in different rooms.
Hey, it works for us.
The tragic thing about it is that this was ultimately useless because there wasn’t really any “what was going on” to speculate about. We were all trying to find the meaning behind things that had no meaning, and the underlying mystery in a narrative that had no underlying mystery.
It’s tragic because creating an underlying mystery probably would have been the single easiest bit of the production process.
Periodic check-in…
Finished Supernatural for the second time, one episode a night for most of the year. Liked it even more this time, appreciating the recurring motifs, and as it was the first time, the overly-meta episodes were my faves. Top episode ever is the one where a high school is mounting a musical based on the brothers’ adventures. I still wish that Sam had ended up marrying Eileen Leahy in the finale, though. And it’s more obvious than ever the diving line between final-season episodes shot before the COVID lockdown and when they started up again.
On to season 2 of Enterprise, which, some hinky CGI aside, I like a lot so far more than the first season, which TBH I didn’t hate.
Did a start-to-finish rewatch of Letterkenny. First time seeing the last three seasons as I’d cancelled Crave a while back. It kind of petered out towards the end, I thought (another COVID casualty?). Immediately watched all three seasons of Shoresy immediately afterwards, and I’m convinced it’s one of the most quotable shows around. I salute any Canadian middle-school teachers whose students watched it and are now unleashing Shoresy-level insults on each other in class. I like it much more than the original show; fully fleshed-out characters, real stakes, and the writing is tons better. Jared Keeso is really one of this country’s comedy icons; apparently he actually had a tooth removed for the role, which is a crazy level of commitment.
Speaking of Keeso, I started the English version of the Montreal cop show 19-2, in which he stars, along with a handful of actors who would show up in his other shows later on. It’s pretty good, and makes me nostalgic for living in the city. That said, I’d like to see the original French version; the notion of an entirely English police station in La Belle Province strikes me as unrealistic, though any native Quebeckers, feel free to tell me they’re out there.
Started Euphoria. Made it like ten minutes in. Pass. I’m sure it’s good, I just can’t be bothered.
Agatha All Along is typical Marvel television fare, ie: confusing as hell and I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to invest in it in case the characters never appear in the MCU again. I absolutely love Kathryn Hahn, though. She has a screen presence that’s just magnetic, and I hope she starts getting huge roles after this.
Finished the 2nd and final season of Not Dead Yet. (A paper’s obit writer sees the dead people she’s writing about).
They added Brad Garrett to the cast. He is such a curious actor. I generally like him despite his voice being so “flat” emotionally. He’s good here.
Like with the first season, the best part is the guest dead people. E.g., this season had Marla Gibbs whose IRL daughter is a regular on the show. Wendie Malick also did a good turn.
It was clear the writer’s were struggling. Some episodes only had the dead person of the week on very briefly and not integrated into the storyline. Here and there things were just falling apart. The aforementioned Gibbs daughter didn’t even appear in some episodes because the character is not that good for anything.
But the last two episodes were really nice 'cause of the Garrett storyline.
This season also had one of the best one-liners I’ve heard in a while. “You smell like a Portland bookstore.”
Okay enough series overall but nothing all that great. More of a time-filler than anything else.
There seems enough of them to a genre of “shows which failed but were once good”
Lost - Season 3 onwards, avoid
Game of thrones - Season 5 onwards gets more and wrong, and just ends wrong.
Dexter - Pretty much same as GOT, “hero” went from clever to an idiot and final season was a hate watch, and 360’d on the final episode to double down on the bad.
Battlestar Galactica (reboot) - Went to hell once the five were revealed.
How I met your mother - While the finale was much reviled, it went downhill as such things often do, when they all got hooked up and the whole wedding final season was the last straw anyway.
Most of theses shows were excellent at once point, and (while some might argue against in their own opinion). they suffer from a lot of hate after a point.
I’d say a common thing here is blaming the ending, when the show had often long gone to seed before that. Anyway, this is while slightly on topic, probably drawing to an end. In general on the SD boards you’ll find both someone who loves and someone who hates pretty much all shows.
I remember having lots of fun discussing Lost here on the SDMB, with threads devoted to each episode and many posts speculating on what was going on.
And regarding the lack of direction in the show, I read someplace (perhaps in one of those threads) that the showrunners had a solid plan for a two-season run but when the show became really popular, the network wanted it to last a lot longer, so those original plans went out the window.
And because of the success of Lost there have been many drama series since then with ongoing story lines that were intended to play out over the series’ runs. But many of these series have been cancelled after one or two seasons, so we never get closure. And that lack of closure discourages me from wanting to start watching one of these series, which contributes to their inability to keep producing new episodes.
I kind of miss episodic series like Law & Order with no season-long or series-long story arcs.
This.
I’m not sure it’s good. I thought it was pretty trashy and filled with terrible people.
I think they had one, but when the fans guessed it they dropped it.
Yep & yep.