Why I Love LOST

You’re not supposed to love TV if you’re a prose writer or poet. You’ve been given one line to deliver when the subject comes up at parties, and it is: “Oh, I don’t own a television.” How can you not remember your one line?

I should have known I was screwed when I spent the week leading up to my MFA program watching the Shield season one marathon on FX. (The match card for this is the year after my MFA program, when I went to a weeklong fiction workshop and spent my off-hours reading Watchmen and Y: The Last Man.)

If you do admit to liking any TV, this should be expressed with a minimum of praise, as if someone’s holding your family at gunpoint just out of view. Jonathan Franzen, modern literature’s answer to pine mouth, has said he likes Breaking Bad, but also has a vast, well-known list of all the other things he finds objectionable, thereby implying the obvious: Breaking Bad is lucky to have him.

I like Breaking Bad, too. I love it, in fact. And I love Mad Men, Friday Night Lights, Spaced, The Wire, Enlightened, Battlestar Galactica, Party Down, Bob’s Burgers, Venture Bros., and (yes) The Shield. And then there are the shows that shaped me as a kid: Taxi, WKRP in Cincinnati, Barney Miller, M*A*S*H, The Simpsons (seasons 1-6), Rockford Files, Little House on the Prairie, Eight is Enough, Family.

But the show I love most, deep in my dumb little heart, is Lost. And I don’t mean I loved seasons one and two and then watched with folded arms like everyone else. I loved that goddamn show straight through the finale. I’ve never had a show speak to me as directly and immerse me as fully as Lost, the show about people finding and losing and finding their truest selves while their head stubble stays exactly the right length. For me, there’s never been a more attractive alternate reality.

When Lost first aired, I avoided it like it was a plague made of Carlos Mencia specials. I used to suffer from an insufferable aversion to mass appreciation, and any time a bunch of people around me would say, “Oh my gawd, you HAVE to see this,” I would run the fuck away or at least grumble to myself for the rest of the day. Because why should I like a thing a bunch of other people liked? I don’t subscribe to this dumb notion anymore, but it’s the reason I still haven’t seen Rent, Speed, or Schindler’s List.

One Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me the first two seasons of Lost on DVD. I will not lie to you: my first thought was Did I ever say I liked this show? But looking back, I realized I had, indeed, said I thought it sounded “cool.” And now I owned 49 hours of it. Christmas night I found myself in my room, wife and both kids asleep beside me. The bed was so crowded I had to keep a foot on the floor. I wasn’t sleeping, so I put in disc one.

I watched the first disc (four episodes) and half of the second. By the time I finally went to sleep, I couldn’t see. But no matter, because by now I was watching it, dear reader, with my heart. (Seriously, though, my eyes looked like something out of Ren & Stimpy.) I watched the first two seasons, and then downloaded that weird six-episode beginning to the third season. I drank it all down quickly enough that I was completely caught up by the time Lost resumed regular airdates that January. And then I became a diehard weekly Lost viewer, i.e., one of those “Oh my gawd, you HAVE to see this” people.

A lot of times we don’t know why we like a thing. But I know exactly why Lost grabbed me so thoroughly. The year prior was when I’d started at the MFA program I mentioned earlier. This was a low-residency program, which meant twice a year I’d drive the five or nine hours (depending on the season) to southern Vermont and stay on the tiny, isolated Bennington campus for 10 days. And I’m sure this has changed since the early 2000s, but back then we couldn’t even get cell reception out there.

So for ten days you’re with maybe 80 other people from 8AM to 1 or 2AM, every single day. The long hours plus the compression of packing so many activities and scenarios into ten days makes for an accelerated existence. Communities form within the larger community. One day in and you have friends you didn’t know a day ago. Two days in and you and those friends already have in-jokes and callbacks. Six days in and you’re able to piss each other off. Eight days and you’ve run out of things to say to each other, or you’re wandering off just to get a few minutes alone. Ten days and you’re crying because you can’t believe how much you’re going to miss these people.

And in between days one and ten in this place that represents something you hope to be, you’re very much faced with who you are so far. All the things that’ve piled on to form your identity as an adult — your family, your significant other, you friends, your pets, your job, your house, your community — are not here for you now. (I would never in a million years presume to compare a residency to military deployment, but I would guess it’s similar to time spent away on a movie location, or doing humanitarian work.)

When I started watching Lost, I’d already been to residency twice, and I was a few weeks away from the next trip. It doesn’t take a genius to see why I fell in love with the show about a band of fucked-up people stranded in an isolated place.

But it is more than that. Man cannot live on premise alone, and Lost had all the right things going on with the writing, the acting, the direction. I never had a problem with where the story was or wasn’t going, except of course with Nikki and Paolo, and then maybe in season 5, which in retrospect seems like a lot of “okay, but now we have to get over here!” Even then, I was delighted to trudge along. I never got tired of Charlie’s drug-addiction bullshit, nor of the polar bear cages, nor of Jack’s petulance. I’m the only person I know who was happy to learn of Kate’s marriage to Captain Hammer. Lost found something in me that was absolutely childlike, that place where you’re immersed in a story for an extended period. In that rare state, your embarrassment uptake receptors fail, your cynicism drops to near-fatal levels.

Just the other night I watched an episode of Bob’s Burgers with my kids, the one where Bob is hoping to get a former NFL player to appear in a Superbowl commercial for the burger restaurant. The player showed up — this was, to be clear, a fictional character and a cartoon — and my eleven-year-old son went “Yay!” He was immersed in the show — not just the episode but the ongoing reality of Bob’s Burgers. So a victory for Bob was, in that moment, a thorough victory for my son. (Note: I’ve also seen him do this with books, chanting, “Oh my god, oh my god” during a hairy part in some novel. It’s as adorable as it sounds.) This is how I was with Lost. When season three ended with Jack saying, “Kate, we have to go back!” I nearly cried with excitement and heartache. I’m not kidding.

I haven’t re-watched Lost since the end, and I don’t think I’d want to. I have seen individual episodes here and there — there was a time when you could turn on the TV at 1AM on a Saturday and someone would be showing Lost — and they seem to hold up for me. But I’d hate to test it as a whole. Or rather, why test it? To prove it’s not as good as I’d thought? To prove to myself that I must have been some kind of idiot? Boy, that’d sure show me!

There are people who hector co-creator Damon Lindelof on Twitter with complaints or snide jokes about the finale, and those people should set themselves on fire. Seriously: if your first thought when you go into a social space (which Twitter certainly is) is to tell someone the thing they made is shitty, then every day you forestall self-immolation is a new crime against the rest of us.

But I’d also like Damon Lindelof to stop with the self-effacing “ha ha, I’m the guy who ruined Lost” shtick. You and Carlton Cuse and that other guy made a thing I think is fantastic, Lindelof. You don’t know me, but trust me: That’s worth a thousand of those Twitter goons. Own it. Be proud of it. And don’t worry that you’ll never make something like Lost again, because you probably won’t. Just as I’ll probably never feel that way about a show again. The thing to remember, Lindelof, is that we had it in the first place, and now we can both go and do other things.

Hey, I also write about television for Previously.TV. Here’s a list of my doings there.