I fought watching LOST for a good long time. I really racked it up to being a bad combination of Survivor and a bad night time soap. Pretty People On An Island. I found this post back from 2006 that in brief explains how I got into it and caught up.
My most recent show-I-fought-but-am-now-hooked-on is the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. That's easily become my favorite show on TV, another in as a friend of mine says is "TV for smart people."
Trivia: Michael Emerson, who plays Ben on LOST was living in my hometown of Jacksonville when I was in high school. I worked with him at Jacksonville Actors Theater and got to watch him do things like A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Christopher Durang's Laughing Wild. He also provided an eery, sinister soundscape to a production of MacBeth we did in the park.
Michael was easily the best actor in town, and was simply brilliant. A fairly gentle, if eccentric, quiet guy - I'd be surprised if he even knew who I was from the rest of the throng of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts students that crowded JAT back in the day, doing whatever task we could just to be involved in a professional show. I had known Michael had moved to New York at one time, but then after years of not hearing anything from him assumed his star had never quite reached the firmament, which was sad to me. Another friend of mine once said when it didn't appear Michael would "make it" - it gave us all very little hope than any of us ever could - Michael was a the best actor we knew.
And it easily took me a few episodes once Ben had been introduced before I even recognized him, but when I did it him me like a ton of bricks.
Needless to say I am extremely stoked to have the show coming back as of tonight.
A thing I always try to impress upon my non-Lostie friends is that the show really is quite clever, and quite smart. The fusion of philosophy, theory, science, literature and sociology can get pretty compelling. Take a look at just the appearances/references of major literary works in the show, it's pretty dense. Of course I don't think you need to know those books to get the show (just looking at ABCs ratings v our literacy rate ...), but they certainly give you some clues as to what's possibly going on or where things may possibly go. In some instances, the show has actually encouraged me to go back and dig something out to try to get a better handle on an aspect of LOST's story.
Haven't managed to get hooked on the show yet? Start from the beginning. That's what DVDs are for. By the time you get caught up you'll likely be waiting with the rest of us for what's going to happen next season.
SUBSCRIBE TO THIS FEED
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
David, you are very lucky to have such a connection to Michael Emerson. I got hooked on "Lost" late, but when Henry Gale appeared, my jaw literally dropped after seeing his performance, and he is a major reason I keep watching, although I think the show is great, too.
I'm not an actor or very familiar with acting, but even I can see he's a genius. And his work in last night's episode was beyond awesome. You have the privilege of saying you knew him when.
Anon - thanks for the comment!
I do consider myself lucky. There are very few claims to fame I can talk about from growing up in Jacksonville. Very few indeed. It seems Michael Emerson has now supplanted Limp Bizkit (thankfully) as the "biggest thing" I knew from my hometown.
Re: Last night's episode. Wow. Just, wow. With Benjamin Linus they may very well be creating the best character on all of TV.
Post a Comment