Look, it’s a well established fact that the Somethingcast has a loved/hate relationship with Lost. It’s the sort of sad kind of relationship you read about in the first half of tawdry romances when things are so beautiful… the fair buxom maiden meets the constantly oily broad shouldered man and they make sweet love on an island where a plane crashed in one of the greatest television openers of all time. Then the pair reveal their history piece by piece, the mysteries getting ever thicker. The questions ever deeper…
…and then it’s revealed that the hunky man actually was the same bloated corpse of a guess you had in the first season and he wastes three seasons of his life plodding over garbage like how he got his tattoo.
Yes, I know this metaphor fell apart two paragraphs ago. Yes, I am also aware we are the buxom maiden in this.
The point is – Lost invited a lot of copycats. Shows that were built around a solitary mystery or weird happening that we have revealed excessively small detail at a time. And yet.. for some reason.. I watch them thinking that they will be different and the reveals will justify the incomprehensible journey. The fact is, once a show like that goes longer than a season, if the mysteries were amazing in the first half, the only way to keep your attention once you have the answer is to create mysteriouser mysteries. And yet… I watch.
Here’s a few shows I’ve given at least one season and the show I’m currently engaged with and looking forward to the moment it lets me down.
Persons Unknown – 2010 – Starring Alan ‘Cameron, Ferris Bueller’s Friend’ Ruck and a young Chadwick Boseman, a handful of people wake up in a weird hotel filled with puzzles only to escape and find out they are in an almost empty 1950s town except for all the weird people with weird puzzles run by a weird corporation called ‘The Program’. It ends with them “escaping” … but they only wake up in a weird hotel. Weird. Not really.
I-Land – 2019 – A shockingly recent entry into the ‘We Learned Nothing From Lost’ novel of failed television shows, a bunch of people wake up on an island with amnesia and are assholes to each other until they find out that they’re in virtual reality prison for some reason. You’ll ask ‘..but why..’ a lot, but since it had a 3% Rotten Tomatoes rating, you’ll never find out the answer.
The Wilds – 2020 – Even more recently, a bunch of women get stranded on an island due to a plane crash and say ‘fuck’ a lot. Oh, and also there’s a secret experiment by a mysterious overseer and we learn all about how they’re interconnected through flashbacks. Were they even trying!?
And now, The Manifest – 2018 – The elevator pitch here is ‘Ok, what if we have a Lost show, but the plane doesn’t crash’. Instead, the passengers jump five years ahead in time and have to deal with the world as a mysterious magical, mystical, scientific, religious, historical voice (no, seriously, all of those) tells them to do things to fix the world. There are also flashbacks and logic jumps so mind boggling, I don’t know how I’m in the middle of Season 3 and the last part of the show got picked up by Netflix.
Maybe one day I’ll talk about the ones that don’t suck. Sound off on your favorites and thanks for enjoying my pain.
