teevee

I’ve said before how much I love TV. I love TV. I think TV gets a bad rap it really doesn’t deserve. I grew up in a house where the set was on all the time, one more voice in a cacophony of chatter, and it didn’t stunt my creativity or make me suddenly obese or keep me from playing outside. Instead it served as background noise, part of the landscape of home:  Jeopardy while my mom made dinner, a weekly ER date with my sister and dad. In high school I’d get home from a good night or a bad one and find my parents watching old movies on Turner, on PBS, shifting to make room for me, my head on someone’s shoulder. I got to college and started watching a crap ton of Law and Order for the same reason I started going to Barnes and Noble all the time–it made me less screamingly, achingly homesick. It made me feel less alone.

I’d argue too that all the watching helped me as a writer, developed my ear for the way people talk: the rhythm of good dialogue, how to build a believable world. Sierra tells me David Foster Wallace opined that writers are attracted to TV because of their tendency toward voyeurism; while that’s part of it for sure (I am the stare-iest of starers), I’d say that mostly we’re drawn to it because we love a good story. Or, frankly, a bad one.

Of course, an inevitable consequence of watching TV all the time is you start to get really, really impatient with TV. “That guy totally did it,” I tell Tom with confidence ten minutes into any crime procedural. “Ugh, now, watch, that chick just left her purse on the desk and she’s going to have to come back for it in a minute and she’ll see the guy she likes making out with that other–see? I told you.” There is very little left that surprises me in serial storytelling, no secret pregnancy or drug cartel or extraterrestrial activity I cannot anticipate.

That’s why, when Jackie told me last summer that I needed to start watching Lost immediately, I put her off for as long as I possibly could. “It’s going to blow your mind,” she promised. I laughed in her pretty face, sincerely doubting my ability to be wowed by, of all things, a one-hour drama on ABC about a plane crash and some polar bears.

To quote Jerry Orbach in Dirty Dancing (which is, coincidentally, available for viewing on cable almost any night of the week): “When I’m wrong, I say I’m wrong.”

Lost, for all its flaws and weirdnesses, is probably  one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever watched on television. Besides being visually gorgeous and packed chock full of characters I want to cuddle on my couch (and whose faces I want to smash together, Barbie and Ken style), it’s TV for writer-types, meticulous and intricate and completely un-call-able. I never have any idea what’s going to happen next–and I always know. It’s terrifying and refreshing, to be surprised this way–to be so blissfully engaged. I want to tell everyone I know about it. I want to evangelize to the whole world: watch this, seriously. It is so effing cool.

Lost starts its final season tonight, and in my house we are all aflail. Oh yes, I brought Tom down with me this time–and I’m not going to lie, watching with him is one of my favorite things about watching. I  love the idea that we are starting TV traditions of our very own, popcorn and a blanket and “Previously, on Lost…”

Happy Tuesday. You know where I’ll be.