Lost: Continually Jumping the Shark

Ever since the writers of "Happy Days" had Fonzie jump over a shark while he was waterskiing, the term "jump the shark" has been a tagline for all TV shows that make some poor plot, writing or casting decisions that directly affect the quality and ratings of a show. Another famous "jump the shark" technique is the "add a kid," where a character has a baby and then a short time later the kid is magically aged several years. My personal favorite JTS move is the "instantly evil" writing technique, where a character makes one false move and is from then on written as a mustache twirling villain. Most shows that start to use these tactics and many other JTS techniques, fall to the fate of cancellation shortly after the network realizes the show is losing viewers because the writers lost their minds. This formula used to be tried and true, you could set your watch by shows trying to gain viewers using wacky techniques and then quickly getting the axe. Until now.

Now ABC's huge hit show "Lost" employs very bizarre plots and writing techniques, doing things like introducing Polar Bears into tropical environments and creating huge conspiracy theories that often confuse the viewer. Lost has jumped the shark quite a few times (in my opinion) and it still maintains a huge audience of very dedicated fans. Fans that spend hours of every day (not just Wednesday nights) dedicated to researching and analyzing and discussing this show. No one ran away in horror when in the season 2 finale 3 characters in a sail boat discovered a large, cartoonish looking three toed statue. What? I could have sworn it looked like it was a foot that could belong to Homer Simpson. Strange, definitely a JTS moment, right? You would think so, but Lost's viewership and devoted fans disagree.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a pretty avid "Lost" viewer myself. I've never missed an episode and I've been know to talk about it a lot at work and even visit a message board or two and listen to podcasts about the show. That's avid, and slightly obsessive and yet I can't help but marvel at the strange plot twists that are very JTS and yet this show thrives instead of flounders.

Wacky "Jump the Shark" moments in Lost (not in chronological order):
1) The interconnectedness of each character. Anna Lucia and Sawyer knew Jack's dad. Libby and Desmond met before the island, Sayid's lady love gets her house inspected by Locke, etc. This technique isn't working for the new show "Six Degrees," I tried to watch that show but the hokey ways they connected the characters felt very JTS to me, yet it works for Lost.

2) The perpetually doomed guy. Sometimes the character that can never have anything good happen to them becomes a JTS tactic because the bad things that continue to happen just get worse and worse to the point where it becomes completely unbelievable. Locke is the perpetually doomed guy in Lost as this past Wednesday's episode attests. I must admit that I am a little frustrated with the stupidity of Locke and how gullible he still is, but I'm still watching!

3) The very evil bad guys. The Others are the very evil bad guys, they are hell bent on controlling the Losties and controlling all of their actions on the island and so far their intentions are unknown but they seem like they are up to no good. The close-ups of Henry Gale/ Ben Linus are so overdone and obvious, he's always giving the evil eye. Yet instead of being mustache-twirling evil, he's google-eyed evil and it seems to work. We hate him, don't know why and continue to listen to what he has to say. But now with the introduction of the cages, torture and fish biscuits, the evilness of The Others is being heightened and still they haven't jumped the shark.

4) The stupidly stubborn guy. This is the character that gets an idea in his head and each of the plot points involving him move in a cyclical pattern because stubborn guy keeps on getting stuck on the same issues over and over and over again. It's frustrating to watch and the over usage of such a character usually results in frustrated viewers leaving the show. Jack Shepard is Lost's stubborn guy, and man is he stubborn. He obsesses about being in control and people betraying him, and each story line involving him revolves around those issues. We're frustrated watching him because we know his actions will result in nothing good, yet it's still compelling.

5) Convoluted conspiracies. The Dharma Initiative, the hatch, the numbers, the power of the island, miraculous healing, all the characters did something bad, made a bad decision that seems to be the reason they are on the island. The idea that every detail of the plot is based on there being a Big Bad vibe that is out there plaguing our Losties seems like a quick fix. It's probably what had a lot of Lost devotees theorizing that the characters were actually in purgatory and not in a physical place. There are a million and one theories out there generated by fans on the internet and the creators of the show never answer very many questions as the plot unfolds. Actually the plot never unfolds it just uncrumples only to get crumpled up again!

There are many others things about Lost that seem too outlandish to actually work in the mainstream and yet they do work. It's an interesting phenomenon.

Verdict: Don those waterskis and jump the shark along with Fonzie because Lost is definitely worth watching and getting confounded by.

Review: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

As an avid viewer of writer/creator Aaron Sorkin's previous television show, "The West Wing," I was looking forward to his new show "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip." In addition to the talented "walk and talk" writing of Sorkin, I also must admit that I've had a huge girlish crush on Matthew Perry since he sported floppy hair, sweater vests and made snarky jokes on "Friends." West Wing alums Bradley Whitford and Timothy Busfield just added to the appeal. I also have enjoyed Amanda Peet and Steven Weber in their previous gigs, so it was props all the way around for good casting and hopefully good writing... then I watched it. And I was underwhelmed. Something just didn't seem right.

Don't get me wrong, I like it, it's just floundering a little bit in my opinion. Sorkin has the habit of making all of his characters very whip smart. I like that, thanks for not dumbing it down for America, we don't all have the reading level of third graders. But I also like my characters to be flawed. My huge problem with the show is that the characters have a tendency to be so sure of their intelligence that each scrape that they get in there seems to be no real fear involved in the situation. Even though for a brief moment they act scared and anxious, that quickly dissolves into this very evident and in my opinion "unrealistic" confidence. For example, Amanda Peet's character Jordan McDeere is thrown into a huge controversy on her very first day on the job as NBS president and she flips straight into her bright eyed, bushy tailed, extremely confident self immediately.

Actually, Amanda Peet has been driving me nuts in this show. I loved her in "Igby Goes Down," and even though I didn't like the movie, I thought she did great in "Something's Gotta Give." However, in this show she looks the same and does the same thing in each scene: her mouth is always parted in an expression of toothy expectation and her eyes are bright and wide open, as if she's holding her eyelids open with super glue. I just can't stand her performance here. And how I wanted to like her, I really did but I just couldn't convince myself that she was this character. Perhaps it is the character, somehow I think the show would be better, tighter more finely constructed if that character was completely written out off the show. Amanda Peet does well with realism, with conflict and consequence when the stakes seem real. In this show the stakes don't seem real, at least not for her character. If she were out of the picture that would give Stephen Weber more to do and I think he would do a good job with it. Just as long as they didn't write his character as being too stressed out and tightly wound.

The good points about the show: The chemistry between Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford is good and keeps the energy of the show going. Matthew Perry does a really great job of carrying Sorkin's dialogue and putting his own spin on the delivery of it. I'm so excited to see that Stephen Weber has branched out of the womanizing parts and into something a little different. And as a "West Wing" fan I get excited seeing all of the background actors from "Wing" showing their faces here too. I'm not sure how I feel about the central relationship drama between Perry's character and Harriet played by Sarah Paulson. I think I could begin to care about that relationship and the tug of war between the two hearts if the story line continues on the path it's going.

But something just doesn't hit me correctly with this show yet. I will give it time. I'll keep watching because it is fun to watch something that has some humor and style and wit to it, instead of the dumbed down drama and amped up humor of other shows. I'm just waiting for the realism to reach this show. It feels very much like a "show" and not a touch of it feels real to me. The characters feel like they just stepped off the page and don't have any blood coursing through their veins.

Verdict: Watch it. Even though I'm struggling with some of the characters and performances (Amanda Peet close your mouth in at least one scene, please!) I do recommend this show because no one writes like Sorkin on TV and Matthew Perry is having a good time with this part.