Last night was the end of a 5 year saga for my wife and I. The end of the television show Lost.
Yeah, it was on 6 years, but we didn’t get into it until after the first season had ended and we got to watch season 1 on DVD.
Anyway, we were nuts about the show. We watched most of seasons 2-6 live, but the DVR had to back us up on occasion. Once I had to figure out a way to view the most recent episode while we were in France.
But it’s all over now.
I’m not done processing the finale… Part of me thinks it’s fitting. Part of me feels like the very ending was a little too reminiscent of Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven. BTW, Albom has some wicked, scary ears. It freaks the wife out more than the smoke monster.
As far as the series coming to a self-imposed end? I think that is one of the better parts of this whole saga. There was a target date long ago to wind everything up as the writers and producers saw fit… Not some season ending cliffhanger that we had to make sure the show was picked up.
What’s often forgotten is that three specific things took an already interested core of viewers and turned them into long term fans and ravenous consumers of anything Lost related.
- Explosion of online communities around the series
- Direct contact with those involved in production via podcasts and internet based media
- Off season programs to further back story and keep interest in the series
Lots of other shows have tried to utilize the same strategies, but few do it well enough to succeed partially or as a whole. They saw the benefit of new media. I knew that they tried to monetize some content by delivering it to Verizon customers, but I couldn’t get it to work when I had a Verizon phone, so I wrote that stuff off.
But there was so much genius in how this show was produced. I know there’s stuff out there I didn’t see, and I hope I’ll get more into it when I take it upon myself to re-watch the series at some point in the not-too distant future.
Anyway, I’m sure I’ll post at some point about more thoughts about the series finale or the series in general. I know that I will own the complete series on glorious Blu-Ray, and I hope it so full of extras that I can’t get through them all in a decade.