Never watched and episode, never intend to.
In fact, anything with such devoted legions of die-hard fans is generally something I’m going to hate… which is part of the reason I hardly watch TV anymore. It’s aimed at 16 year olds, and I’m sick of it.
I also hate shows that carry over from week to week in any more than a tangential sense, which probably doesn’t help either…
Well, at least you have a good, balanced reason not to watch : Other people like it !!! Boohoohoo !! :rolleyes:
and burning your dog!
my father watched most of season one too and he said, what he thought was most stupid was how unaffected the people where about all the things that took place on the island, especially when it came to those monsters
Is they?
-Joe
Now you meanies leave minotaurus alone. He’s simply trying to help you by exposing what Lost really is: a television show. :eek: The horror.
Seriously minotaurus, what you described in the op is just about like every other television show out there.
Personally, I like it because I dig the writing. I like the use of flashbacks to flesh out the characters. I find it entertaining. It’s clear you don’t, so why waste time thinking about it. Stick to things you like. Avoid those you do not. Works wonders for the digestion, unless of course you don’t like digestion. Then you’ve got problems.
I pretty much dislike the show. Specifically, after every episode I say to myself “why did I just watch that?”
Because I am expecting something to happen. After all, the teasing has to go somewhere shirley. And I still keep coming back for more. There must be some sort of hypnotic suggestion in there somewhere… In the UK we’re only a few episodes into season 2. My puzzlement was fed again by episode 3 last night as I still ask myself why. I think I shall restrict my viewing until after I have asked my SO whether it was worth watching.
Dude, it’s just rude to laugh in front of someone’s back.
IMO, it is going somewhere. It’s just taking its sweet time to get there.
And don’t call me Shirley.
TV has a history of fucking us over with this kind of show- The Pretender*, John Doe, Joan of Arcadia, Wonderfalls, etc- they give us a mystery, the show is canceled, and then they never reveal the mystery. Lost will someday be canceled, and they will leave us with unresolved mysteries.
*Pretender went on for quite some time, and some mysteries *were * revealed, but even two (?) special made-for-TV movies still left plenty of secrets unrevealed.
I am starting to think we need a law- “Make a show with mysteries, and all the secrets must be written down and sealed in a mayonaise jar, to be opened and revealed after the show is canceled”.
Well, one person’s “shortcomings” is another’s entertainment. If you go into the show thinking that it’s a bunch of real-world people who happen to be on a plane that crashes into an island, and the story is about them trying to survive and/or get rescued, well then of course you’re going to hate “Lost.” I would have been monumentally bored by such a show. What I love about the “Lost” is the smoke monsters, odd coincidences, polar bears, magic numbers, secret hatches, intersecting backstories, exploding Ardts, crazy French ladies, shadowy corporations, omnicient Others, dads rising from the dead, imaginary friends, backwards-talking teenagers (oop, I mean ten year olds), hallucinatory horses, diaper-wearing rock stars, Jesus sticks, and boat…BOAT! The more convoluted it gets, the more I think with glee, “how the hell are the writers gonna get themselves out of THIS one?!”
Additionally, I’m quite happy that in S2 Kate has learned to keep her clothes on. :rolleyes:
As for “realistic” shows like “Law & Order” and “CSI” and “The Wire” and any of the other eleventy-dozen police/medical proceurals on TV - some of those are good shows, but generally they bore the shit out of me. Still, I’m not gonna call up my mom and declare that her obsession with L&OSVU means she’s an idiot who’s being duped by wealthy Network honchos.
…of course, she loves “Lost,” too.
Count me among the fans; I don’t have cable & the only two shows I watch each week are Lost and the Simpsons.
And yeah, the constant influx of new mysteries could be annoying to some people; you could always just go watch a sitcom where everything’s tied up nicely every half-hour. Lost ain’t perfect but it’s provacative.
You do realize that not watching something because other people do is the exact same as watching something because other people do, right?
SO WHAT?? I just don’t share this obsession with “solving mysteries.” If you spend an entire season just enduring what’s going on so you can get the answers, then you’re not watching the show. You’re better off watching something that wraps up nicely at the end of each episode. “Lost” is clearly not - and has never been - for someone who wants their questions answered at regular intervals, in complete sentences.
Much of the fun of “Lost” is talking with fellow obsessives about the episodes and trying to work out WTF? Sure, the twists and turns and inconsistencies can be maddening, but they’re also part of the fun! Some of the theories fans have come up with are likely far more detailed and fascinating than what the writers originally envisioned. If anyone watched “Nip/Tuck,” the big question of season 3 was “Who is The Carver?” Wasn’t the speculation about it more fun than the “reveal?”
You’re missing the point of creativity, here. This show has an unprecedented interactivity with fans. I love that the writers might very well get inspired by something they read on message boards and make changes to their script. I love that they allow the characters to develop in ways they probably did not anticipate from the beginning. The show is the ride, not the destination. If that drives you crazy, then don’t watch. Otherwise, buckle up and enjoy.
You forgot the mother-of-all shows in that category: The X-Files. With John Doe, at least the producers had the grace to reveal the answer to the most basic question, i.e. where/how John got all that knowledge.
I predict that Lost will last no more than four seasons. You can see it on this thread already: people are getting frustrated with the pile-on the mysteries with no answers aspect. Sure, again as seen here, there will always be some people that love it more with each new unsolved mystery, but the majority of viewers will get fed up and bored and the ratings will take a slow, inevitable slide into cancellation.
I don’t want to take this thread off on a tangent, but you two are missing the point, at least in my case. I can’t speak for Martini Enfield, but in my somewhat long life, I have learned that, as a general rule, my tastes run differently than the majority. It’s not that because something is popular I “decide” or “refuse” to like it, it’s that experience has shown that the more popular something is, the less likely it is that it will be to my tastes. It’s not true in all cases, of course (I still think 24 is the best show in TV), but where for some people it’s true that as popularity goes up the chance that they’ll like it too goes up, for me it’s that as popularity goes up, the chance that I’ll like it too goes down.
What makes you think there have been “no answers”?
“every question hasn’t been answered” != “no question has been answered”
More people would be getting frustrated if they never answered any questions, and only kept posing more. But more people would also get bored if they just up and answered all the questions right away. What would there be to do next episode?
vaderspal is right – the people who really like the show are there to enjoy the ride. It’s not just about sticking with it because you want “the answers”. If that’s all a person wanted, then they have a simple time-saving option – don’t watch, wait until the end of the show’s run, then look up all the answers after the fact on various spoiler and discussion sites. Hell, I’ve done that very thing on shows I wasn’t really interested in watching, but at least had heard things about and wanted to know the answers to the big “burning questions”, like “Who Shot J.R.?”
This is truly a lot of the fun of it. Seeing all the weird theories that people come up with. Going back and seeing what theories people were saying last season, which are now totally “out there” in terms of what we know. Catching the details that you missed on the first viewing, but somebody else caught.
If a show’s not up your alley, no problem – doesn’t bother me. I like it, though – and I think it’s a fun show. So I’ll keep watching.
I concur – mainly because Damon Lindelof said at the outset that they figured they could come up with enough material to make the story arc they had in mind last three (or possibly four) years, and that he thought it would be a mistake to try to stretch it out beyond that. (Of course, one of the other producers has since said he saw no reason it couldn’t go on for “years,” but I think that the principal creators will have the good sense to nail his tongue to the floor if he makes such a suggestion ever again.)
Yeah, I felt the same way until I was maybe twenty or twenty-one. The idea that David Lynch had something on the cover of TV Guide sickened me. Doughnut-eating plebes were gushing about some stupid night-time soap that he’d made, obviously indicating that he had sold out and started pandering to the unwashed masses. Ugh! Every time you turned around, “Twin Peaks this,” and “Twin Peaks that.” Everyone liked it, therefore it was common and worthless. Q.E.D. Blue Velvet or Eraserhead – only special people could appreciate those.
And then, after the series had ended, a good friend put the entire run in my hands in VHS form. I still turned up my nose – until I watched it and everything I thought I knew about television as a medium changed forever, and I was somehow able to get my fat head out of my ass.
Now, my favourite type of entertainment is the sort that appeals to two different types of people at the same time – and cleverly manages to be different things to different people. My favourite example is Pulp Fiction, which is either a straight-forward orgy of mindless violence, or an incredibly densely-packed meditation on cinema as a form, covering everything from film noir and the French New Wave to the most superficial of pop movies, and containing a rich symbolic vocabulary and fairly subtle philosophical themes. Or both, depending on who’s butt is in the seat.
If Lost appeals to a substantial number of people who aren’t interested in much beyond “Sawer is teh haaaaaaaaaaawt! hes gonna marry KATE jack is a lamer,” it’s no skin off my balls – in fact, I’m grateful for that, because it probably got us to Season Three, so there’ll be plenty more subtext about esoteric buddhism, 18th century political philosophy, and surrealist literature for me and my squinty friends to obsess over. Is one way of relating to the show objectively better than other? No, because it’s entertainment, and I have every confidence that there are plenty of people who are equally entertained by the high-school-level sexual tension in the show as I am by speculating about what a conspicuous glimpse of a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge might mean, or by the sly references to ultra-hip sources like William S. Burroughs or Douglas Adams creeping into the mainstream. If we’re both entertained, that’s all to the good.
Roadfood, I’m usually like you. In order to maximize popularity, many shows try to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that is when they lose me.
I watch Lost, although I’m no fanatic. 24 I love, despite how implausible and impossible it gets. However, I’ve never lasted from one commercial to the next on A.I. or Survivor. For reality, I watch Mythbusters and The Deadliest Catch. I will also, much to my shame, admit to frequently but not fanatically watching Dog, the Bounty Hunter. In my defense, that show is like a train wreck. I want to avert my eyes and not look, but I can’t. My favorite sitcoms were Married…with Children, Get Smart, and Cheers.
Taste is a strange thing. To look down on someone simply because their taste doesn’t match yours just shows one’s own insecurities.
Really? And what was the answer? 