Lost Premiere: Gripping But Way Too Short

Posted on October 5, 2006

J.J. Abrams discussed the season three of Lost with the press in a conference call to journalists this week.

"The beautiful thing about Lost is that there's very little that Lost isn't," he said. "Meaning you tune in every week, and you don't know who you're going to be focusing upon. You certainly don't know where you're going to be in the world and what the situation is going to be in that world. And that's part of the beauty of it. I think that what you could say Lost isn't, obviously, is that it's not a puzzle before it's a character piece. It's not a science fiction series before it's a character drama. ... To some degree, it's almost an anthology, in that every week you don't know where you're going to be and who you're going to see and what's going to happen in those flashbacks."
Abrams speculated that the demise of last year's crop of science-fiction-themed series was due to a lack of focus on character. "I feel like the reason why shows like Threshold or Surface [or] Invasion and those shows, all of which I'm sure had great promise, but they all kind of happened in response to something that I feel like wasn't really about the genre at all," he said. "The genre sort of is secondary. [Lost] is all about what really makes Locke tick. And what has Jin gone through that we don't quite understand in terms of making sense of his behavior, and things like that. The flashbacks are not serving shock value. They're serving character and their history. So to me, the fun of the whole show is that it's all about who the people are."

We loved the premiere episode, even though our beloved Jack just suffered and suffered and suffered. Creepiest moment: the breakfast on the beach with Henry Gale (now known as Ben) and Kate. Funniest moment: the Others arguing about Stephen King's The Stand during their suburban book club meeting. But we really didn't like the fact that there were so many lengthy commercial breaks and that the premiere was only an hour long.

And what's the deal with the show airing only six episodes this fall before going on hiatus until spring? It's frustrating and annoying. We'll still watch, but our patience with the slowest produced show on television is growing thin.

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