Topic: Rate the last TV show you've seen

[Stogi]

It's funny. My telecom AI loved this show and couldn't help but talk about it during our discussions. And I couldn't help making fun of him for it.

He rated it above Soprano's. Now I haven't seen lost, save for a few minutes, but I've seen quite a bit of the Soprano's and that comment blew my mind.

[Morari]

I've never watched Lost, and have come to the conclusion, based on reactions people had to it, that it's not worth it to me to attempt to do so, despite it being on Netflix.

Lost exists to make dumb people feel smart. It's convoluted to the point of being ridiculous. Of course, it stands to reason that anything that got as much attention as it did during it's run is going to be lackluster one way or another.

I think the world must be coming to an end: we actually agree on something.   

There's more where that came from. You never want to just talk anymore though.

As I recall, we both like romantic walks on the beach...

[BlackNMild2k1]

I've never watched Lost, and have come to the conclusion, based on reactions people had to it, that it's not worth it to me to attempt to do so, despite it being on Netflix.

Lost exists to make dumb people feel smart. It's convoluted to the point of being ridiculous. Of course, it stands to reason that anything that got as much attention as it did during it's run is going to be lackluster one way or another.

I think the world must be coming to an end: we actually agree on something.   

There's more where that came from. You never want to just talk anymore though.

As I recall, we both like romantic walks on the beach...

OMG!!! THIS WHOLE TIME YOU 2 HAVE JUST BEEN FLIRTING WITH EACH OTHER!!!???

[NWR_insanolord]

Actually, that would explain a lot...

[MaryJane]

Yeah it would, because Lost was great and stupid people couldn't figure it out. Not saying you guys are stupid, but how does confusing a stupid person make them feel smart?

I was a Lost hater (because like which ever of the lovers mentioned, I thought its popularity meant I wouldn't like it) until I was at a friend's house and too 'lazy' to tell him to change the channel. I don't even remember what episode it was (I would if I saw it again) but it blew my mind, and I was hooked. The show was nothing like I thought it was, and absolutely incredible. Though I will say that my friends who watched the show missed some intricacies and I missed some as well, so that was always great.

[Plugabugz]

NOOZ!

Both Futurama AND Fringe has been renewed

[BlackNMild2k1]

Fringe made the cut!?

That's good, I've been meaning to play catch up on that series, restarting from the very first episode.

[SixthAngel]

Yeah it would, because Lost was great and stupid people couldn't figure it out. Not saying you guys are stupid, but how does confusing a stupid person make them feel smart?

I was a Lost hater (because like which ever of the lovers mentioned, I thought its popularity meant I wouldn't like it) until I was at a friend's house and too 'lazy' to tell him to change the channel. I don't even remember what episode it was (I would if I saw it again) but it blew my mind, and I was hooked. The show was nothing like I thought it was, and absolutely incredible. Though I will say that my friends who watched the show missed some intricacies and I missed some as well, so that was always great.

I really enjoyed Lost as well.  There aren't enough serials out there and all the attempts to recapture the magic of Lost have all fallen flat on their face (Flashforward and The Event).  I really wanted to like these other shows because having series long or season long stories just makes them much more rewarding and gives the characters and events time to really develop.  I gave Heroes a shot but it turned horrible after the first season (it was made to be one season originally) and I tried Prison Break but it was a later season and the all the main characters were trying to break out of a second prison they purposely entered in Mexico or something. It made me lose all interest.  When Prison Break was airing it was huge here in China too.  The guy who played Michael Scoffield is still on all kinds of billboards.

I think a lot of the non-popularity based hate for Lost comes from the fact that everyone in the tail end was killed because of DUI's and real life circumstances.  It made quite a few things change and made one of the seasons weaker than the others.

[nickmitch]

I didn't like Flash Forward or The Event. I felt both shows were trying way too hard, especially The Event. Every week witht he latter was a cock tease and then a poor attempt at hype because no matter what happened, it wasn't "The Event." I couldn't even watch it long enough to care if anyone actually said what the event was or if it even happened. My friends liked Flash Forward, but I couldn't get in to it. It started off feeling pretentious and didn't stop feeling that way. Twists in the plot seemed to hurt the overall story than enhance it.

In any case, I'm gonna stick it out with Lost. I have my reservations and doubts, but I had those before and now I'm pretty hooked in to the story. I'll keep posting my thoughts on each season.

[NWR_insanolord]

Yeah it would, because Lost was great and stupid people couldn't figure it out. Not saying you guys are stupid, but how does confusing a stupid person make them feel smart?

I was a Lost hater (because like which ever of the lovers mentioned, I thought its popularity meant I wouldn't like it) until I was at a friend's house and too 'lazy' to tell him to change the channel. I don't even remember what episode it was (I would if I saw it again) but it blew my mind, and I was hooked. The show was nothing like I thought it was, and absolutely incredible. Though I will say that my friends who watched the show missed some intricacies and I missed some as well, so that was always great.

I really enjoyed Lost as well.  There aren't enough serials out there and all the attempts to recapture the magic of Lost have all fallen flat on their face (Flashforward and The Event).  I really wanted to like these other shows because having series long or season long stories just makes them much more rewarding and gives the characters and events time to really develop.  I gave Heroes a shot but it turned horrible after the first season (it was made to be one season originally) and I tried Prison Break but it was a later season and the all the main characters were trying to break out of a second prison they purposely entered in Mexico or something. It made me lose all interest.  When Prison Break was airing it was huge here in China too.  The guy who played Michael Scoffield is still on all kinds of billboards.

I think a lot of the non-popularity based hate for Lost comes from the fact that everyone in the tail end was killed because of DUI's and real life circumstances.  It made quite a few things change and made one of the seasons weaker than the others.

You really need to watch more cable shows. Serialized shows are the norm there, and there are a lot of really good ones.

[SixthAngel]

I didn't like Flash Forward or The Event. I felt both shows were trying way too hard, especially The Event. Every week witht he latter was a cock tease and then a poor attempt at hype because no matter what happened, it wasn't "The Event." I couldn't even watch it long enough to care if anyone actually said what the event was or if it even happened. My friends liked Flash Forward, but I couldn't get in to it. It started off feeling pretentious and didn't stop feeling that way. Twists in the plot seemed to hurt the overall story than enhance it.

In any case, I'm gonna stick it out with Lost. I have my reservations and doubts, but I had those before and now I'm pretty hooked in to the story. I'll keep posting my thoughts on each season.

I didn't like those shows either and dropped both of them.  After Lost I wanted to watch another show but they didn't cut it, not at all.
I suggest you stick it out with Lost, its worth it.

Can you recommend some serials insanolord?  I would prefer ones that have a continuous story with few "monster/case of the week" type episodes but its okay if the overall story is good.  Ones that I have recently watched are Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, True Blood, and Rome.

[NWR_insanolord]

Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead are the two big ones that are on right now, but I'm also liking Boardwalk Empire. It's a little slow to get going but it's a fascinating premise (alcohol bootleggers during prohibition) and Steve Buscemi's great in anything.

Going into the back catalog, if you haven't watched The Wire yet, that's what you should start with. I've only finished three of the five seasons, but I'm already comfortable calling it without a doubt the best police drama I've ever seen. Each season follows one major case where the characters try to take down a drug kingpin or organized crime leader. No show I've seen has done nearly at well at crafting deep, complex characters, all in shades of gray, and manages to take a somewhat controversial stand about the state of crime in this country without forcing it on you.

[SixthAngel]

Boardwalk Empire sounds interesting.  I've seen some things about it but nothing really led me to believe it was about bootleggers which seems pretty cool.

[oohhboy]

Fringe is great. It's melted cheese on a block of Cheese. Last episode I saw had a goofy 1980's opening.

Never bothered with Flash Forward and The Event. You could tell the entire thing was a cock tease by committee. Both were focus on this one thing and they had to string you along. If this was fishing, even the fish would be pissed off at how poor the bait was.

Prison Break is retarded. Granted season one worked, but it was always going to be a one season show. I groaned as each episode had them breaking out or into something or get thrown into another prison for a season. Then they raised the stakes from bank robbery to Presidential BS watchamathingy.

Lost was never a good show. Especially when you could guess(Later confirmed) that the writers had no fucking idea what they were doing. Problems and mysteries were being thrown into the show with no intention or ability to ever resolve. Nothing good comes from watching Lost.

No Ordinary Family working nicely. It's not sliced bread, but it's kicking the corpse that was Heros at it's peak, mocking it with it's coherency. The daughter is really starting to piss me off though and I wonder if they are taking cues from Family guy making her a Meg. Nice to look at, but has a more repulsive personality than villians your suppose to hate/dislike.

[broodwars]

Indeed, Lost is such a writing catastrophe.  The writers spend the first 3-4 seasons just throwing in layers of "mysteries" without any idea how they planned on "explaining" them, padded by constant flashbacks to potentially more interesting shows.  Naturally, in the last season the writers suddenly realized the reckoning had come and they actually had to start explaining the crap they had haphazardly thrown in, and as expected what few things they did explain weren't the least bit satisfactory.  In fact, the writing is so shoddy that the writers and their fans had to start claiming that the show was about "the journey" and "the characters", and that it was "never about the mysteries".  Well, I call B.S. on that when the show leaned on them so heavily in the earlier seasons and used those "mysteries" to drag the show along.  Maybe I could buy that excuse if the characters were compelling and I actually cared about their fate, but they weren't and I don't (outside maybe a couple like Hurly, Jin, and Sun).  And that ending...wow, what a cop-out.  When your ending can basically be summed up by THIS and THIS (spoilers, naturally), that's pitiful.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Watch The Shield

[MaryJane]

@oohhboy, broodwars

A lot of shows and serial books are written with an overarching story and then as they progress new things are introduced without any particular finality so that as the series is ending they have meat to fill the bare bones of it. The original mysteries of Lost were used to create the atmosphere of the island. At first, it didn't matter so much who 'the others' were, why there was polar bear, what the black smoke was, the where Dharma Initiative came from and went to, or how the island worked and brought the plane down, all that mattered was that the island was mysterious and a bunch of strangers were trapped on it.

What I believe did happen was that the end approached the writers too quickly, and they had more filler than they had time for. And any story's ending can be explained differently than the one chosen by its creators.


Flashforward would have been better if it stuck to the books it was based off of because the Flashforward event in the book actually had the people jump further into the future (I forget how long exactly, but the main character saw himself as old man with a bad back and a different wife). As you can imagine was a lot more disconcerting because people freaked out about their old age, had no idea when they were going to die, and could both more readily and less accurately predict the stock market and other things because of the large gap. It would have also helped saved the show from the pettiness that brought it down.

I was going to watch Prison Break but I found out that it was renewed for a second season before I started, and I lost interest because I thought it was just going to be a mini-series. Here's something I don't understand though, when there's a hot chick on a show and the show is stupid, it fails, but when it's a 'hot' guy, the show will be as successful as he stays relevant.

I still like No Ordinary Family, but the villains are bringing it down a little imho.

[BlackNMild2k1]

Show that everyone should add to your must watch list:
The Wire
The Shield
Supernatural
Spartacus
Breaking Bad
Boardwalk Empire
Mad Men

Those are all hour long shows that I would recommend and have reviewed somewhere in this thread.

[Plugabugz]

The reason why The Event, Flashforward and Stargate Universe all failed: They all came after Lost.

No show can "out-Lost" Lost now. That door is closed. I have a friend who watched Lost religiously but i can't even get him to watch the pilot of SGU, even with the description "Grey's Anatomy on a spaceship", or Doctor Who with the description "a 900 year old time travelling alien who flies around in his spaceship phone box".

[oohhboy]

How does that explain people who didn't watch Lost or watched some of it, causing said people to scream "This is BS"?.

The Event, Flash Forward had literally the entire show riding on what happened in the pilot. If you didn't take the bait and it was terrible bait, nothing else mattered. Given how much Astro turfing was going on with those two shows, the endless ADs, online adverts, overblown trailers, you could taste the desperation. Those shows were doomed, just like V was.

I think the problem with SGU was mostly to do with the audience and bad timing. Fans have had over a decade of continuous Stargate and Atlantis showed that it needed to rest. To avoid that problem they shifted the tone of the series, alienating their core audience, leaving the show with no natural base to jump off on. Being Stargate, not Lost, there is almost, always a payoff, so the comparisons between them are poor at best.

Lost had 6 bloody seasons to come up with an ending, which they failed. Dollhouse, canned mid season 2 managed to come up with an abrupt, yet workable ending. BSG FUBARed their ending, they even reveled they had no bloody idea what they were doing last season. Lost's writers incompetence far better and a far more simple explanation than oh ****, we need an ending. Writing for Lost would go something like this - Is it mysterious? If YES, shoot it! If NO, GOTO 10. Nowhere in there did they ever consider how they would answer their own problems. The only thing Lost convincingly achieved was shooting on a tropical island without leaving the sound stage. Quite frankly one Lost is one Lost too many, I hope a show like this never shows up ever again.

The reason why The Event, Flashforward and Stargate Universe all failed: They all came after Lost.

No show can "out-Lost" Lost now. That door is closed. I have a friend who watched Lost religiously but i can't even get him to watch the pilot of SGU, even with the description "Grey's Anatomy on a spaceship", or Doctor Who with the description "a 900 year old time travelling alien who flies around in his spaceship phone box".

Who the hell came up with Grey's Anatomy on a spaceship? Labeling anything Grey's is a terrible thing to do. I mean, GREY'S?!.

Doctor Who has far more history and came well before Lost to be "out lost" if there ever a horrible thing to achieve.

[MaryJane]

Lost had 6 bloody seasons to come up with an ending, which they failed. Dollhouse, canned mid season 2 managed to come up with an abrupt, yet workable ending.

The fact that you actually watched the Dollhouse series finale is worrisome to me... lol (that was a joke)

The Event, Flash Forward had literally the entire show riding on what happened in the pilot. If you didn't take the bait and it was terrible bait, nothing else mattered.

Is it too much to ask that people follow a story from its beginning? Though I will say that the story progression in The Event was terrible and it was too focused on its name, and I already stated my view of Flashforward, but if you're going to grade something, it has to be from its beginning to end. I'm not saying you didn't watch it, but I don't agree with your point.

[Stogi]

Flash Forward's plot was too clever for them to make into a workable plot.

[Plugabugz]

How does that explain people who didn't watch Lost or watched some of it, causing said people to scream "This is BS"?.

The Event, Flash Forward had literally the entire show riding on what happened in the pilot. If you didn't take the bait and it was terrible bait, nothing else mattered. Given how much Astro turfing was going on with those two shows, the endless ADs, online adverts, overblown trailers, you could taste the desperation. Those shows were doomed, just like V was.

I think the problem with SGU was mostly to do with the audience and bad timing. Fans have had over a decade of continuous Stargate and Atlantis showed that it needed to rest. To avoid that problem they shifted the tone of the series, alienating their core audience, leaving the show with no natural base to jump off on. Being Stargate, not Lost, there is almost, always a payoff, so the comparisons between them are poor at best.

Lost had 6 bloody seasons to come up with an ending, which they failed. Dollhouse, canned mid season 2 managed to come up with an abrupt, yet workable ending. BSG FUBARed their ending, they even reveled they had no bloody idea what they were doing last season. Lost's writers incompetence far better and a far more simple explanation than oh ****, we need an ending. Writing for Lost would go something like this - Is it mysterious? If YES, shoot it! If NO, GOTO 10. Nowhere in there did they ever consider how they would answer their own problems. The only thing Lost convincingly achieved was shooting on a tropical island without leaving the sound stage. Quite frankly one Lost is one Lost too many, I hope a show like this never shows up ever again.

The reason why The Event, Flashforward and Stargate Universe all failed: They all came after Lost.

No show can "out-Lost" Lost now. That door is closed. I have a friend who watched Lost religiously but i can't even get him to watch the pilot of SGU, even with the description "Grey's Anatomy on a spaceship", or Doctor Who with the description "a 900 year old time travelling alien who flies around in his spaceship phone box".

Who the hell came up with Grey's Anatomy on a spaceship? Labeling anything Grey's is a terrible thing to do. I mean, GREY'S?!.

Doctor Who has far more history and came well before Lost to be "out lost" if there ever a horrible thing to achieve.

SG1 and SGA was based on the "issue of the week" format with a light overlying arc sprinkled throughout but there was no overrunning arc. SGU switched that to a series arc about Destiny travelling to a specific destination. The exec producers have said that if the show got to Season 5 that the reason why the ship was sent there would be dealt with and would conclude the series there.. That shift was pretty dramatic, and the first 10 episodes was spent setting up the drama, hence why i called it Grey's Anatomy on a spaceship. Put the two together, and combined with 15 seasons of SG1 and SGA everyone just gave up in droves. I called it Grey's Anatomy on a Spaceship because he likes that show and i hoped it would hook him in. Unsurprisingly it didnt.

Doctor Who has 40+ years of history but since the 2005 reboot its generally season arcs so it's not quite the same as Lost in that vein.

Speaking of Lost on a sound stage: it wasn't. Everything except any indoor non-America shots was done in Hawaii and around there. The shots in London were sound stages and CGI. Things like The Exit was on-location.

For those who watched Flash Forward, there was three key eps about the intentions of that show. The first was the pilot , the second was when there was a statement about multiple blackouts (hence indicating season arcs, this being after the production team got a refresh) and the third was when they proclaimed in-show about the endgame in December 2015. As soon as i saw that i thought "Are they seriously going to attempt stretching this for SIX SEASONS?"

[gbuell]

The only thing Lost convincingly achieved was shooting on a tropical island without leaving the sound stage.

Yikes - really hard to take seriously the opinion of someone who gets something so basic wrong.

I'll never understand how someone could so strongly hate a show that they watched for hundreds and hundreds of hours. How could you sit through so much material that you don't enjoy?

[oohhboy]

I didn't, that's why I got it wrong.