TV Show Title: Lost

Network & Time: ABC @ 8pm EST

Timeslot Ranking: #1

Stars (Out of 10): 10

One Word Summary: Brilliant

"Lost (TV)" Review:

TV shows weren't meant to come in threes. Imagine watching reruns of Happy Days and Happy Days: NY or Chicago Hope and Miami Hope. TV has become that ridiculous, it's a medium dominated by mediocrity and imitation. Case in point: Survivor is currently finishing off its ninth season. How many CSIs or Law & Orders do television viewers realistically need, and does every network really need an Apprentice spin-off?

This past summer, ABC relentlessly marketed their new show Lost. An expensive and action packed adventure from network favorite J.J. Abrams (Alias), Lost had already garnered critical acclaim as the best new show of the season, yet rarely does such acclaim guarantee commercial success. Despite eventually winning the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, last year Arrested Development averaged only 6.2 million viewers a week ranking it as the 132 most (or in this case, very little) watched show of the season. Fox decided to renew Arrested Development for a second season in any case, but the stigma separating critical approval and a large viewership remains.

Lost is a high-concept show about a commercial airline jet that crashes onto a remote tropical island. Although a beautiful landscape, the island holds many mysteries: a polar bear misfit for the climate, a 16 year-old plea for help being broadcast from the island, a "monster" that no one's seen, and a tendency towards the supernatural. Without any realistic hope of being found, the 48 survivors (14 of whom make up the show's large cast) dig in for the long haul. Focusing both on the their lives on the island, and in each episode on one of the their lives before the crash, Lost will eventually reveal that the characters were in some way linked before boarding the plane, and that it wasn't blind luck but fate that brought them together.

Matthew Fox plays Jack, a spinal surgeon and the natural leader of the "survivors." Canadian newcomer Evangeline Lilly is leading lady Kate, Jack's love interest and a woman with a criminal past. The rest of the large cast includes: Republican Guard officer and communications expert Sayid, the savage and despised Sawyer, drug withdrawn rocker Charlie, the previously paralyzed Locke and the eight-month pregnant Claire.

Lost is the most innovative and original show on television; each episode is packed with so much action and so much planning. The plot's twists and turns leave viewers asking, "How'd they think of this," week after week. On the Dec. 12 episode, Claire realizes her unerring psychic knowingly sent her on the doomed airplane to ensure that she didn't give her baby up for adoption (if she did, terrible things would happen), and the other castaways become aware that they're not alone, and that someone else on the island is living among them.

The episodes are filmed beautifully, as if they're each an individual movie, but each episode is brilliantly linked to the next making the six days until the next Wednesday more hellish than even being trapped on an island.

Lost is a new breed of network drama; usually shows of this quality and this price are reserved for cable channels like HBO. And while networks once hesitated to launch series, like Lost, that must be watched in sequence to be understood, the recent success of 24 and similar shows on DVD has allowed networks to recoup some of the costs they'll lose from syndication.

ABC took a huge risk with Lost. It's two-hour, two-part pilot cost approximately $10 million, making it one of the most expensive pilots ever, plus it featured graphic violence (a person being sucked through the engine of an airplane) that would surely scare off some viewers. Still, in its debut Lost attracted a record-setting 18.7 million viewers.

Lost is both completely original and appropriately familiar. It's Cast Away plus the dialogue, Gilligan's Island minus the laugh track, Survivor minus the reality and Lord of the Flies minus the killing. It's 60 minutes of quality television that has critics swooning and fans begging for more.