I have ranked the top 68 television shows of the '00s, and will be presenting them, one-by-one, starting with 68 and working down. The rankings are more or less based on the show's popularity, it's cult status, it's critical acclaim, and my personal liking of it, with a heavy dose of arbitrariness added in. If a show was a big enough phenomena, I'll keep it on the list - but if I don't like it, I may drop it some spots. One other caveat - these are primetime shows (I apologize if I put a cable show that wasn't, I thought they were all primetime shows - the main point of this is just that no talk shows, no Colbert and Daily Show that would be on otherwise).

10: Lost

Well, unlike the last post, I have the opposite problem. Rather than having nothing to say, I could write a book about Lost (well, at least a novella) and I need to restrain myself a little and will try to avoid getting too specific, but I will probably make some specific examples of things, so if you haven't seen it (and there might be spoilers of something because you can't talk about the show without it, but they also probably won't make any sense to anyone who hasn't watched, and thus quickly forgotten) just trust me on the general points.

For me, and this may be entirely too harsh, and I understand if you think that - Lost, ultimately, represents disappointment. I reserve my harshest judgments not for the worst shows - there's just not enough to say - they're so obviously not good - the Big Bang Theories, or the relentlessly mediocre Mentalist type shows, or the Ghost Whisperers, or so forth and so on. Rather, I'm toughest and most frustrated with the shows that could be good, that have a lot of really good elements, and yet just screw it all up. Lost, along with Battlestar Galactica are pretty much the textbook examples for me of two shows like this - shows that have all this wonderful potential and do a whole bunch of things really well, just to kind of fritter it away in the end (Heroes would be a sub-standard example of this, but it was almost all potential undelivered - it kind of fell apart after the first half-season).

Sometime early in the airing of the second season, I got swept up in Lost fever, watching the first season in a couple of weeks, and then catching up. I pretty much watched regularly weekly until the fifth season, where I kept falling behind but eventually caught up, until the sixth and final season, which I mostly didn't watch, and read wikipedia summaries, and then just watched the final episode, which I feel bad for, because I knew most likely I was going to dislike it, and I feel like I was biased, but yeah, I did hate it.

I was swept up in my initial Lost viewing, as so many others were - the show had a creative, genuinely interesting and new premise, and created a world of mystery with the story and with the look of the show.

This article is a bit disjointed, but I'm kind of taking a quick chronological (or biographical, I guess) journey through my affair with Lost.

Of course, here's the one thing I never liked straight from almost the beginning, and more and more as the show went on: the flashbacks. They're terrible. Well, first, before I tear them to pieces, let's list the exceptions. First, the flashbacks were okay with me, generally, when they moved the plot, and not the characterization. This refers mostly to flashbacks of other events on the island when someone was away from the group - such as when Claire was taken by the Others, and we see what happened to her. I would also however make an exception if there were flashbacks that yielded really important information to the plot off the island, though I can't think of an example offhand (there are a lot of peripherally relevant things - Hurley winning the lottery with the numbers, Locke's dad coming back later on - but these were mostly unnecessary I felt (subjective analysis, I know) and could have easily been worked around).

Now the problem - they stink. Well, first, the soft problem - personally, I think any benefit of characterization given by the flashbacks was more than made up for by the time they took from on-island activities, and the disjointedness they added to the show, in addition to being a kind of lazy way of avoiding having to create more subtle characterization on the island itself. We want to show that Jack has to be needed? Let's just make up some random off the island story showing that, that's not restrained by what is going on on the island - same thing for whatever else they wanted to show for other characters. The hard way, but the better way, would have been to find situations on the island and craft their personas rather than show this blatant hit-you-over-the-head example off the island and then a subtler example in the same episode on the island so you can say to yourself "oh, I get it - the flashback and the island plot are related!". That's actually not the worst thing about the flashbacks. That's mostly commenting on their laziness and unnecessary-ness. Some of them were, taken in and of themselves, not bad pieces of television, even if I wished they weren't there. But, more and more as the seasons moved forward, a lot of them were just plain bad and served to show the same character flaw again and again. The absolute worst one of all was the flashback in which Jack is on some tropical island, meets a woman, hangs out with her a whole bunch, and then against her wishes insists on getting a tattoo, and then gets asked to leave. This was the worst (I think I remember even reading an interview with Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse where they described this as a low moment for them) - it had absolutely no relevance to anything else in the series and just battered home a point about Jack that if you hadn't gotten from the last eight flashbacks, you're not going to get now, and also, even taken out of context, just as a bit of story-telling it was utterly terrible. There were other bad ones, and to be fair, this is the worst, but you get the point.

The last thing is that by starting this flashback format, they locked themselves in. Even when the flashbacks no longer became helpful (if they were ever helpful), they felt they had to use them in every single episode, instead of just using them when they were needed.

Okay, I think I just spent most of the space I was planning to use writing just about the flashback device, so I'll speed through things rather than have a 4000-word entry.

So let's move quickly through the seasons. First was best - mystery about the island, good characters, for the most part, a lot of different ways they could go. (Cuse and Lindelof say that it should have been obvious they were going the super-duper natural (that's even more super than supernatural) route from always day one with the smoke monster, but I think that's just hindsight talking - they could have gone sci-fi, or they could have kept their limited supernatural in a box, rather than going time travel and so forth). The second season featured some incredibly slow-moving repeated tales of different members of the tail section of the plane (no pun intended, really), and then possibly my favorite episodes of the series (possibly, though not my favorite episode, more on that in a minute), when they had who would turn out to be the super-villain of the show Ben Linus locked in the cage and he tried to convince them of all sorts of things. Of course, this was probably the performance that got Ben Linus promoted to amongst the most important characters of the remainder of the series, a move that was disastrous in my opinion - he became one of these characters (like Syler in heroes, or Baltar in Battlestar Galactica) who lies so often but people keep for some reason believing him over and over again, until it just gets frustrating, tiresome and unbelievable (yeah, he's charismatic, but no one is that charismatic).

All right, skipping forward some more, my favorite character on the show was Desmond, and the best episode was probably his crazy time traveling episode "The Constant" where he has to go back and convince Penny to keep the same phone number so he can call her. Anyway, in terms of how the supernatural elements have anything else to do with the show, yeah, not so much. In terms of just an individual piece of television making though, it's great.

Skipping forward some more (maybe I really should write a series just on Lost), I realized by the last season I really didn't have the desire to watch the show, but I at least tried to keep up with what was going on. The flash-sideways were possibly the worst thing the show ever did even just by themselves, and in addition with the way the Lost creators completely used it as misdirection as what could have been an alternate universe after Juliet blew up the bomb in the '70s (if you're reading this and haven't seen the show, it makes no sense, I know, but for those who have seen the show, it doesn't make that much more sense). Anyway, I'm tired of trying to describe exactly what was bad about things. That whole concept sucked. Just saying.

Yeah, so Lost. It was kind of a big deal. It inspired this Weezer album, after all.