A New Way to Find “Lost”
By James Lileks

Gather round, younguns, and listen to how it was before everyone with two dimes t’ rub together had a dinner plate up on the roof chatterin’ away at some satellite. We had three channels. Then PBS came along, and we still had three channels, ’cause no one watched it, nothin’ but guys prancin’ around in tights. By gum, when a show ended in those days it died for good. And there dang sure warn’t no programs that kept you waitin’ fer days and weeks to find out what happened. And…”

 

Thanks, Gramps, I’ll take it from here.

 

He has a point; it was different in the old days. TV episodes did not leave you hanging all summer. Now even a series about Zen moss gardeners will have a cliffhanger. So what happens when you miss an episode?

 

Consider “Lost”—last year’s big hit. It’s “Gilligan’s Island” meets “Twilight Zone” on “The Forbidden Planet,” and it was a hit for a reason: It’s very, very good, a far cry from the three-channel days. Every show was a cliffhanger. And the dogmas that rule most network drivel are mercifully absent. No hip kids with a quiver full of withering putdowns to make the grown-ups feel lame. No disease-of-the-week. No law firm boardroom shouting matches. Just 40 people marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash, with nothing but their wits, limited supplies, and enough dramatic archetypes to ensure three seasons’ worth of plots. Plus a monster—a dark beast of the Id that thrashes and clanks through the foliage when the plot flags.

 

If “Lost” was just a show about focus-group-approved beautiful people playing “Survivor” for real, it would have been gone in seven episodes. But it had something else. It had flashbacks which provided a steel, concrete, and plastic world to play off the smothering foliage. It had characters whose personalities guaranteed endless combinations. The hero was Jack, the overdrive doctor who takes charge: unqualified good guy, better than you. There was “X-File” veteran Terry O’Quinn as the parapalegic Special-Ops type who got his legs back when the plane went down: he was good, but spooky scary good. We had Sawyer, the self-loathing grifter with a skill for making everyone hate him almost as much as he hates himself: doubleplus bad and darkly charismatic. Of course we had Kate, the hot tousled-hair outlaw. Also Hurley, the millionaire fat guy who may have cursed everyone because he used haunted numbers to win the lottery. And a former Republican Guard torture expert from Tikrit. Plus one of the hobbits from The Lord of the Rings.

 

All this and more—including the nagging doubt that this is really happening at all. Perhaps “Lost” will be revealed in the series finale as a script written on hotel stationery by a TV scribe passing time on a Mexican vacation.

 

These are the reasons “Lost” won the 2005 Emmy for best dramatic picture, and why millions watched. Viewers who drew in their breath at the end of Season One did not exhale until the show resumed in September.

 

But what if you missed the season premiere? What if the night “Lost” returned, a dark storm rolled overhead and scrambled the signal to that fancy dish on your roof? That’s what happened to me, and I’m sure Gramps was laughing.

 

The picture quality was gauzy, and half of the screen was occupied by what looked like a tornado. I figured that having missed the season premiere I would be forever behind the curve of the show’s complex plotting. The storm made me consider skipping the show for a year and waiting for the entire season to show up at Target on a $40 DVD. But that would mean having to avoid articles and neighbors that gave away secrets.

 

Then I wondered: why can’t I just buy this episode now, like a magazine?

 

As if reading my mind, Apple and ABC announced at the end of October that, henceforth, people would be able to buy the newest episodes of “Lost” (and several other shows) the day after they broadcast, through the iTunes store. That’s for watching on an iPod, not a big screen. But a wall has been breached, and TV viewers are about to break free of the tyranny of the network schedule.

 

Now that’s something you’ll be able to tell your grandkids about.

 

 

James Lileks is TAE’s TV columnist.