Getting ‘LOST’: Review of Season 1 on DVD
New TV shows tend to follow a year or two behind their US telecasts here in Asia. (I’m based in Mumbai, India, but the English-language channels are mostly telecast by satellite from Hong Kong.) They have a small but loyal following, and when I say ‘small’, I mean that in Indian or Asian terms. In India, for instance, an Indian show (in Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, or any of several dozen other Indian languages) would have to get several tens of million viewers in order to justify an extension from year to year, and the biggest successes have garnered audiences in the hundreds of millions!
On the other hand, an English-language series that gets even a few million viewers would be considered successful, provided it gets the ‘upwardly mobile’ segment of viewership that’s capable of buying the expensive consumer goods that have the big advertising and sponsorship bucks backing them. The most successful Indian show right now, for instance, is Kaun Banega Crorepati (a ‘crore’ is ten million), the official Indian avatar of the international Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.
The first season of the ABC TV Series LOST recently began telecast on the Star TV Network, the local arm of Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Television empire. Desperate Housewives is about halfway through its first season here. But those of us in the know prefer to watch our American TV shows on DVD. That way, we can get them sooner and have the pleasure of enjoying them uninterrupted. Best of all, with a plethora of independent DVD rental libraries to choose from, and rentals as low as $2 a day per DVD, it’s cheap too.
Because of this substantial market–and one of the fastest growing in the world–Asia often gets DVDs the very day they’re released, and sometimes, as in the case of LOST: Season 1, a couple of weeks before their US release. Don’t ask me how. All I can tell you is they’re 100% legally issued DVDs, and I guess that the trade here sees no reason to coordinate the release date with the US marketing machinery. Also, all DVD players here are multi-region, so we can play DVDs released anywhere in the world.
(We also have the happy choice of getting both US and UK editions of new books in stores, and we get them in mass market paperback at least six months ahead of their western publication – they’re called “special international editions”. And hey, you can buy brand-new DVDs here officially for around $10 each, often half or one-third of their US prices. Sort of like every store offering Wal-mart prices!)
But hey, you don’t want to know all that stuff, do you? You want to know what the TV show under review is really like. Or, if you’ve seen it on ABC or its affiliates Stateside, you want to know if the DVD is worth your money.
Oh, hell, yeah.
Getting LOST: Season 1 on DVD is probably one of the best Buttnumbathons you can indulge in this second-half of 2005. (And a ‘buttnumbathon’ by the way, is my word for the experience of watching an entire season of a TV series on DVD at one go, or, as in the case of LOST, over a single weekend.)
The first thing LOST does is prove Steven Soderberg right. Soderberg, speaking at the Venice Film Festival last week, trashed reality TV shows roundly, insisting that fictional TV or cinematic drama ‘does reality’ far far better than these so-called ‘reality’ shows. And since they’re scripted too, the ‘reality’ tag is a misnomer.
LOST is everything that Survivor isn’t, never was, and never will be.
It’s exciting, thrilling, involving, insightful, and a terrific roller coaster of a ride.
It’s realistic in the things that matter: its portrayal of real people with real problems, conflicts, and relationships.
And it’s fun in the ways that those phony reality shows just can’t be: Because LOST isn’t afraid to mix genres boldly and enticingly.
On one hand, it’s a classic Stephen King set-up. A bunch of interesting, problem-racked, easily identifiable, quintessential American characters are ripped out of their normal world and thrown into a bizarre situation out of some lost Twilight Zone episode, then put through a rollercoaster ride of wierdness where mere survival is the least of their problems.
On the other hand, it’s a soap opera, but about a bunch of airplane crash survivors, set on a desert island somewhere in the Pacific–or is it the South China Sea? With all the attendant story development that you might expect to follow that initial set-up.
And on the third hand–hey, I’m from India, we believe in people who have more than two hands!–it’s a parable about America today. A group of people with unique qualities, addicted to the very things that are the source of their greatest weakness and destruction–intoxicants, material possessions, free will, democracy…and automatic weapons. And they’re stuck out there in a hostile world, far from home (or, in a sense, at home, but with the world outside suddenly turned hostile), surrounded by enemies that they can’t for the life of them figure out how they pissed off! Sound familiar?
Or that’s how I saw it.
If you want the nitty gritty, here it is. A plane on its way from Australia to LA (via Singapore, I think) crashes mysteriously (the reason is never explained) and breaks into three parts in mid air. The central section of the fuselage lands on the beach of a desert island, with 48 survivors. The story of the first season is entirely occupied with how these survivors attempt to survive, about how some succeed and some fail (yes, major characters die, so deal with it, this isn’t Gilligan’s Island), and then about how they try to secure the basic necessities of life: fresh water, a regular food supply, a shelter from the monsoon storms. And finally, once they’ve got reasonably full bellies and a warm fire blazing, it’s about how they try to get off the island and get back to civilization.
The actors are all relatively unknown faces, with the best-known probably being Dominic Monaghan, who plays Merry, one of the Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings films. Although here in India, we sent up a cheer when we saw Naveen Andrews playing one of the major characters–billed first, because the billing is alphabetical. There are 14 regular characters, with the rest providing background mostly but sometimes swimming into focus before fading back into the jungle again. And they’re a regular mixed-bag of nuts: A former Republican Guard from the Iraqi army, a Korean couple who speak no English (or so it seems at first), an African-American with his 10-year old son and his pet dog (yup, the dog survives), a surgeon (whew, what would they have done without good old doc, a regular cowboy with an overbearing Texan accent and a powerful resemblance to Viggo Mortensen, an Australian woman who’s 8 months pregnant, a Hispanic youth who’s won about $150 million in the lottery, a tough balding military-looking dude who appears to have boarded the flight in a wheelchair and is now able to walk without the aid of said device…and one of the most endearing characters in the entire show, a gutsy, feisty, midwestern American woman who just happened to be travelling shackled and handcuffed in the company of an US Marshall.
The actors are fantastic, each one memorable from the very first five minutes. Whatever you do, don’t miss the first twenty minutes of the Pilot Episode, where the closest thing to a ‘hero’, Dr. Jack, does his amazing ‘let’s-save-everybody’ thing and we see the immediate aftermath of the crash in the only sustained sequence of the series.
For those of us who are fans of Alias, and less likely, Felicity, the name J.J. Abrams is hot news. The creator-writer-producer (and director of a few episodes) of Alias displays his virtuosity here on LOST yet again, coming up with flawless writing, fascinating characters, slickly executed storytelling and a plotline as intriguing as anything Stephen King ever wrote. He solves one of the biggest limitations of the series by brilliantly resurrecting that old chestnut of filmed storytelling, and reinventing it–flashback.
After all, think about it: how the dickens do you shoot an entire series on a desert island and still keep it looking interesting and fresh with every episode? Simple, you use a point-of-view based mode of storytelling, following each of the major protagonists for several minutes at a time (and later, through entire episodes of their own) and keep jumping between the here-and-now reality of life on the island to flashbacks that do much, much more than just give us backstory. Slowly, over the course of the season, these flashbacks actually give us hints to the reason why these people are all together, here on this island, why they crashed, why they survived (while the rest of the passengers and crew died), and why they fell on this particular island, with its mysterious roving monsters in the dark, its polar bears–yes, polar bears on a South Pacific island–and strong evidence of other inhabitants.
I won’t give away any of the real plot points, let alone tell you how the first season ends (do they get off the island? do they find out what the island’s secret is?), but I will bring up one major complaint. The season finale episode, double-length though it is, views more like a mid-season episode than an season-ending. For one thing, it leaves you on a cliffhanger too great and yet too simple to justify waiting a whole year to resolve. For another, it doesn’t answer enough of the questions raised earlier to provided any sense of closure, however limited.
That gripe apart, LOST is some of the best damn drama you’ll likely to see on DVD in the last few months of this year. And a must-watch.
Coming to the DVD extras. There is some stuff here. There’s commentary by executive producers J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Bryan Burk on the pilot, and commentary by other EPs and featured actors on three other episodes.
Here’s a list of the other DVD extras:
The Genesis of Lost
Designing a Disaster
Before They Were Lost: personal stories and audition tapes
Welcome to Oahu: The Making of the Pilot
The Art of Matthew Fox
Lost@ComiCon
Lost: On Location
On Set with Jimmy Kimmel
Backstage with Driveshaft
The Lost Flashbacks: Claire at the Airport, Sayid at the Airport
13 deleted scenes
Bloopers from the set
Salute to Lost at the Museum of Television and Radio’s 22nd Annual Paley Festival
The best of the pick, of course, is “Before They Were Lost”. Because, believe you me, by the time you’re a couple of episodes in, you’ll fall in love with some, if not all, of the characters on LOST. And by the time you’re done with Season 1, you’ll be left with a hole in your heart which no other TV show is likely to fill. Because this is probably the best darn ensemble cast you’ve seen in a long while (a category in which I’m predicting right here and now LOST is going to win big at the Emmys). And some of the featured actors are truly star-material. So you want to take them home and live with them.
But you can’t. And so, the first season DVD ends, leaving you with that hole where you heart used to be, and a hankering to be on that desert island, far away from the problems of *this* world, with that wonderful group of people…
Feeling, in short, more than a little bit…Lost.
