lost

I believe I’m mostly caught up on the two network shows I follow: BattleStar Galactica and Lost. The former is having a gangbusters third season, the latter losing its edge.

It’s not an easy thing to make a good network serial drama. The form demands you have 25 episodes or so, each 45 minutes long and broken up by commercials. That’s a lot of chapters to fill. Network executives mess with the work in progress trying to tease out better ratings, and they’re usually not looking at making a great piece of culture, just how to get more eyeballs next sweeps.

The people who work for HBO have a much easier time of it: 12 one-hour episodes with no commercials and you pretty much get to make the whole thing. Input from the parent company comes in the off-season and you’ve got an entity that sees the long-game of DVD sales as a big part of their margin, so they want a quality product.

That being said, it’s instructive to watch what happens as one show ripens and another deteriorates.

Well, I lost a post I wrote about Lost somewhere in the last couple of days. Bummer.

Anyway, I caught up on the first three episodes, and I like it so far. It’s unrealistic, but that’s sort of the point; the show is interesting to me because it’s about allegory and psychology and mystery. There’s danger in that kind of narrative unraveling as things get “explained,” but so far so good (e.g. w/the bear cages).

Also, loved the (highly unrealistic) shout out to the HC in Locke’s dope-plantation flashback. Also also liking the new strong female leads among the others (including Trixie from Deadwood!).

Yeah, my other post was a little more substantive. What are ya gonna do?