It would have been more fun to say Lost Lost, but it didn’t. It’s been at least a decade since I’ve watched any TV series with regularity, but since I followed at least a couple this past year — Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk, and Lost, which I finished watching on DVD this weekend — I tuned in the Emmy Awards last night to if anyone won from those shows. (No, William Shatner performing the old Star Trek theme was not a draw.)
What’s striking about the win of Lost as best dramatic series is that… I think this is the first time that the dramatic series Emmy Award Winner has been even remotely SF or fantasy. (I’m still dubious about Lost’s credentials here, but I’m hopeful.) A glance through the Emmy database http://www.emmys.org/awards/awardsearch.php (select drama series under category) shows recent winners The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Practice… etc etc.. Northern Exposure? Did that have supernatural elements? (I never saw it). Way back in the ’60s, Mission: Impossible won a couple times, and though not SF, it had its outre elements, in a James Bond sort of way. It won the same two years the original Star Trek was nominated; more recent nominated series with SF flavors include The X-Files, Quantum Leap, ST TNG, Twin Peaks, and Beauty and the Beast. But none of them won.
I haven’t looked at any of the Lost fan sites, with their endless speculation about the meaning of the monster, the Others, and the hatch, but I think it would be cool if the hatch revealed that the whole island was in fact a ship…
UPDATE early evening — Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For Your, has this interesting post about the attraction of the series.
The genius of Lost is that its mysteries are fractal: at every scale — from the macro to the micro — the series delivers a consistent payload of confusion. There are the biographical riddles: why was the beautiful Kate accompanied by a federal marshal on the flight? There are geographic riddles (“why have the rescue teams missed the island, and why does it appear to have a history of attracting castaways?”) and historical ones (“why has that SOS signal been playing for so many years?”) And then there are existential riddles: are these people even alive at all? Perhaps there were no survivors, and these characters are just ghosts haunting an island of lost souls. Or does Abrams have up his sleeve an elaborate homage to The Island Of Dr. Moreau?
