This series looked like it was over-average interesting when it first aired, oh-so many years ago. A lot of my friends and other people I know started watching and raving about how good ‘Lost’ was, and I thought to myself that I’d better see what all the fuss is about.

But I never did. Till now.

The reason behind that is the same that sent me running away from watching ‘Prison Break’ in the first place: Popularity. And I don’t mean whether it was popular within its genre or target-group, I mean the ‘universal’ sort of popularity that affects people of all demographics to the same extent. Shows that accomplishes that feat are more often than not things I normally enjoy. ‘Home & Away’? ‘Beverly Hills’? ‘Desperate Housewives’? No thanks, sir, I think I’ll stick with nerdy shows that the masses keep well clear off.

But ‘Lost’, despite its continuing smash-hit status, was never a show that I could entirely rule out as a possible exception from my illogical rule. Here’s a show about a plane full of passengers crashing on a an island somewhere in the Pacific, which does seem very Robinson Crusoe-esque on the surface, but with the twist of having a supernatural element stuffed in somewhere between the coconuts and palm trees. Or at least it has the semblance of something supernatural to me, but hey - I’m biased when it comes down to such things.

Every episode in ‘Lost’ is about the life on the island, but it’s also built up around a ‘Person of the Week’ where we delve further into the background story of a passenger; who he/she was, why the person ended up on the plane et cetera, et cetera. I thought this approach worked well for the most part, though it could’ve easily have benefited from mixing up the recipe from time to time. A couple episodes were downright uninteresting and some episodes that fell a bit flat due to a poorer subject or if the history didn’t have much to add to the continuing plot of the season.

Because there is a plot here, or at the very least a general idea of where things are going. There were parts of the season where I felt that the writers weren’t exactly sure if they were taking the right way through the narrative jungle, but the show usually didn’t take too long in finding the right path again. The ‘finding of the right path’ was usually very well co-ordinate with the American Season Syndrome (i.e. that a show begins with a bang, episodes 1-4, slacks off in the middle, episodes 5-8, and picks up again towards the end of the first half, episodes 9-11. Rewind and repeat for equivalent episodes in the second half of the season). Thankfully though, the yay-worthy bits were much stronger than the less-interesting bits were weak, so it was nearly all good.

My favourite episode of the season is a tie between episode 4 “Walkabout” and episode 9 “Solitary”, both of which were written by the masterful David Fury (who was one of the main reasons I decided to give ‘Lost’ a shot), but the pilot and the season finale were also of a very high quality.

There is much more I could say about this show; I could express my fears and hopes for the upcoming seasons (Methinks it’s going down…), or I could comment on the acting (generally good), but I think you’ve caught my drift by now. I like ‘Lost’. I could’ve liked it more, and wouldn’t have minded a bit more information on the supernatural side of the show, but I guess I’ll have to watch and see… But as far as American mainstream shows go, ‘Lost’ is definitely something to check out.

8.0 /10 (weak)