Was LOST even a good show?
hey guy welcome back to the same room i've always filmed in so i think it's pretty obvious by now that my favorite thing to do on this channel is talk about the most relevant topics that are on the forefront of everyone's minds which is why today i will be defending the hell out of a show that came out 17 years ago not you joey that would be an impossible task this video is about lost for a couple years in the mid-2000s lost was the biggest cultural phenomenon in america everyone was talking about it all the late night shows were doing bits about it and it was widely considered to be must-see television until a lot of people started to turn on it its reputation eventually shifted to being a show that's too convoluted and the writers are just making [ __ ] up as they go along why is there a polar bear here the island is hot you know things like that and when the show ended in 2010 it didn't quite leave behind the impact that at one point it seemed destined to now when most people talk about loss the popular opinion is that it was a really promising show that just went off the rails that was the opinion that i adopted myself and just kind of accepted as fact because i was a kid when i watched it and that's what kids do and then recently amanda and i were looking for something to watch so she put the pilot of lost on as a joke and then we watched the second episode and the third episode and two months later we'd watched the entire series cried dozens of times and now it's one of our favorite shows ever we got the dvds i have this book i bought the soundtrack on vinyl what is happening to me it actually made me kind of frustrated to watch this near masterpiece of a show and think about how much i had been discrediting it over the years lost helped pave the way for a complete shift in our approach to television and it's been largely cast aside nowadays it's super common for shows to feel like a series of short movies with high budgets and these big ensemble casts but lost was doing this on abc the same network that was premiering wife swap this is not what tv was like in 2004 primetime dramas were simple and formulaic they were filmed on cheap looking sets and made to be easy for people to tune in to any random episode without missing a beat lost was different it was heavily serialized it was intense and it started right away you watched the chaotic first few minutes of the pilot episode and then the initial music kicks in as the opening credits roll and it's like wait a minute this was on television you could just watch this show for free apart from just the writing and production quality though one of the things that stood out the most to me upon re-watch was the music i forgot how fantastic the soundtrack was so many of the moments in the show can be triumphant or heart-wrenching on their own but then you combine that with these beautiful strings this big booming orchestra that comes in and crescendos over a scene and you go from thinking this is a pretty good show to oh my god i'm already crying and it's the third episode after a few episodes i had to look up who the composer was and i found out it was someone named michael jacquino interesting i i've never heard of him before let's see what else he's done oh just some of my favorite movie soundtracks of all time the incredibles ratatouille up [ __ ] speed racer i never realized that the same person was responsible for so much music that i grew up loving which is why now before i even get into the show itself i want to do a quick sidebar just about him when it comes to world building in a fictional universe the soundtrack can be so vital in establishing a transformative atmosphere there's a reason john williams is generally considered to be the gold standard of movie composers and that's because the music becomes so iconic that just hearing it can make you feel like you're there whether it's harry potter star wars the line to the jurassic park ride at universal studios the music is what creates the world like yeah darth vader looks pretty cool but how much less intimidating would he be if he wasn't always accompanied by one of the most menacing theme songs ever made but if i were to nitpick one thing about john williams which i guess is what i'm doing now it would be that a lot of his compositions sound very similar there are songs in et that sound like they could have been in indiana jones it sound like they could have been in jaws and so on and so forth but what i've really grown to admire about michael jacquino is how much his instrumentation varies based on the tone of the project he's working on so for example the incredible soundtrack has a heavier focus on these deep brass instruments most of the time we're just sarah's color stuff this movie the whole brass all the french horns trombone stupids everything are so out front and this like little sweeping percussion that you wouldn't hear in any of his other work the movie is about a family of retired mid-century superheroes so it's a stylistic choice to have the music invoke this vintage cartoon vibe which makes the songs sound nostalgic even if you've never seen the movie before on the other hand you have something like inside out a movie that takes place mostly inside someone's brain so the music is fittingly more ethereal and then you've got ratatouille which is very french but if you want to talk about someone adapting their style to fit the project they're working on lost is the perfect example because they literally used pieces of the plane wreck to create certain sounds in the music i wanted to kind of set up a very different sound for this show i just didn't want it to be okay i'm scoring another show and it's going to have that sound to it we want stuff that's like bizarre so what we did was we shipped home sections of the airplane we used that on the show and in the percussion booth the guy plays the airplane pieces this is a show that takes place on a mysterious island with supernatural and even horror elements which the music accompanies perfectly listen to something like this and then replace that with just standard like epic stock music it's a completely different vibe now instead of pissing my pants and cowering in fear i'm just rolling my eyes at something so generic loss can be an extremely unsettling show and i think so much of that intensity can be attributed to the sounds that they compose but that's not even my favorite thing about the soundtrack each of the main characters in lost has a theme song that's centered around a specific melody which michael is able to reuse in different contexts somehow changing the emotion attached to it every time arguably the most famous song he's ever composed was in the opening sequence of the movie up which he won an oscar for as most of you probably know this is a beautiful yet heartbreaking scene with a beautiful yet heartbreaking song carried by one simple melody twelve seconds later there were several scenes throughout the course of lost where you knew what was coming you were already in an emotionally vulnerable place and so you're like come on please don't play the song oh my god not again and just when i thought i couldn't like this guy's work anymore i was listening to the song that plays during spoiler alert boone's funeral it's not a huge spoiler he dies pretty early on just watch the show but i was listening to the song that plays during boone's funeral and then i looked at spotify and realized it's called booneral holy [ __ ] where a lot of network tv shows have soundtracks that seem like they're straight from a stock music website michael jacquino took what the writers gave to lost and used it to orchestrate songs that invoke even more emotion out of the material i know it's kind of weird to start my review with the music but honestly if it wasn't as good as it was i probably wouldn't even be making this video in the first place so the music definitely added depth to the characters but the casting itself is another reason why i love the show so much i love that almost no one in this show was an established actor at the time i feel like it's so much easier to invest in a world when it's not like oh and there's matt damon pretending to be a doctor oh what's that his name is robert in this no it's [ __ ] it's matt i'm not gonna call him robert when i watched lost it reminded me of something bo burnham said once on pete holm's podcast no one would see a movie if there wasn't this idea of a movie star but it's completely antithetical of the art i want to show up and watch a movie like i don't know these people i don't see right i only see the characters to me matthew fox just is jack when i see jorge garcia and anything else my brain says hey it's hurley wait shouldn't you be on the island part of the fun of the first couple seasons of lost is that you don't know anything about these people and it slowly gets unraveled over time but in the beginning it truly is just a group of strangers trapped in the same predicament you don't know what any of the individual actors are capable of so you don't have any expectations until you see it happen the writers do a great job of building out the world early on too by devoting each episode to an individual character by flashing back and forth between what's happening on the island and a thematically similar event from earlier in their lives it helps fill in the blanks of who these characters are by showing instead of telling and what is slowly revealed is that each person is not exactly who you assume them to be on the surface in fact they're all kind of lost in their own ways right thank you thank you i am the first person to say that i think the reason that lost was so good is the same reason that it wasn't fully appreciated for what it was and that's because it was about a decade ahead of its time i think it would have been a much larger part of the pop culture conversation if it had been made by netflix like 10 years later the seasons would have been more concise so you wouldn't have had a situation where you get to season three and you've run out of flashbacks to do they'd be given more flexibility to end the show when they felt it was time to they could have had one of the characters say the f word i mean let's be honest the two most unrealistic things about the show are that they crashed a plane on an island and none of them say [ __ ] or [ __ ] and also they're all wearing jeans the whole time you can't wear jeans on the beach i'd rather die but if they had the creative freedom that's been given to netflix and hbo shows in the years since i think the audience that ultimately turned on it would have been more forgiving of the somewhat bizarre twist what i'm saying is lost walked so stranger things could run it's kind of unfathomable that the show is as successful as it was in spite of all that in spite of dealing with a network that wanted them to stretch it out to at minimum 10 seasons there were all these compelling mysteries and so we were saying we want to have this stuff answered by the end of season one and this stuff answered by the end of season two and then and then the show basically ends after about three years that was the initial pitch but they were just like do you understand how hard it is to make a show that people want to watch and people like the show so why would we end it you don't do that you don't end shows that people are watching and wanted to do to lost what they've done to grey's anatomy which i assume will just go on forever hey man people keep going to the hospital someone's got to treat them i think for the most part the lost writers did a masterful job of balancing having to add new characters and plot lines while still developing the existing ones some of the characters added in later seasons ended up being my personal favorites of the entire series i think they managed to create a thoroughly compelling story from start to finish even if it did get a little too complex for a while so because of what abc forced them to have to do i don't blame people for falling off the lost wagon at the time i certainly did i had never finished the show until this year i think it was somewhere during season five when i was like guys i appreciate what you're trying to do here with all this time travel stuff but i'm in middle school now um i can't be taking notes in order to wrap my head around this show i'm just trying to play runescape and get my first kiss maybe at the same time but i think it makes sense why so many people struggled to keep tuning into lost in the later seasons this is a show that 100 needs to be binged that needs to be consumed in quick succession if you want to stay fully invested in what's going on and that just wasn't possible with the way it was released there were so many times when an important plot seed would get planted but then not brought up again until four episodes later and that's fine if you just watched that episode yesterday but in 2006 that could mean a month and a half of real time passing where you're expected to retain that knowledge i couldn't tell you what key information i saw in a show last month i don't even remember how i started the sentence it's almost as if the creators knew that lost could be more appreciated as time went on because they made a couple important decisions to help future proof the show for one they somehow convinced abc to spend an unheard of amount of money on the pilot more money than had ever been spent on a pilot before just think for a moment how insane it is for a major network to green light so much money for a completely unknown ip it's not like they were making like the spider-man show it's a show about a plane crash with a cast full of unknown actors it's so crazy in fact that it actually got the executive who approved the money fire you'd think they would have hired him back once they realized how popular the show became but i guess the bridge had already been burned why did the pilot have to cost so much money though well mostly because they had to figure out how to ship a commercial airplane to a beach in hawaii sure they probably could have cgi'd it but given how impactful that first impression of an on-fire airplane crashed on a beach is i don't think they could have done it any differently maybe now you could pull that off with cgi but special effects in 2004 looked awful in fact that's one of the only things that hasn't aged well about the show is some of the special effects but as long as they're not trying to computer animate a submarine the show generally looks really good it doesn't look like something that was filmed two decades ago and that's because of another conscious decision made by the creators to shoot lost on 35 millimeter film which was the less convenient and more expensive alternative but another way of future proofing the show because of technological reasons that i'm too stupid to fully understand let alone explain film can be almost endlessly upscaled which is how you can have movies from like the 70s remastered to look practically brand new had they instead shot lost digitally in 480p that's just the resolution it would be forever there's nothing you can do about it in fact the more you stretch it out the worse it's gonna look well okay drew so if the show was so good and so popular why did people turn on it without a doubt the biggest contention that people have with lost is the way it ended but a lot of that contention is predicated on a belief that is untrue because of the somewhat vague nature of the finale coupled with abc's decision to show an empty island during its credits a lot of people came to the conclusion that everyone must have been dead the entire time that they all actually died in the plane crash in the pilot episode and the island was some kind of afterlife purgatory if that was the ending i would be upset too because that would undermine everything that happened on the island it would mean that all of the people who died over the course of the show didn't actually die because they had already died so it retroactively removes the gravity of their death because it didn't matter all of the stakes of what had happened on the island would have been reduced to nothing because turns out it wasn't real it was all just some shared fantasy that is not what the ending was the writers have said adamantly that that's not what the ending was frankly i'm surprised so many people thought that that's what the ending meant because that idea is verbally refuted by one of the characters in the finale i have to fight the urge to go into more detail because one of my hopes with this show is that people who have never seen it will watch it for the first time and if that's the case i don't want to spoil the ending i know i spoiled the boon thing earlier but again it's minor all right in the grand scheme of things not a big deal i think what a lot of people ultimately wanted out of lost was a scooby-doo style ending where they rip the mask off someone and go mr jenkins you heard the island the whole time and then he gives a 40-minute powerpoint presentation covering every single plot point from all six seasons instead you have to accept that in spite of all the mysteries and the science fiction elements what the show was ultimately about was the characters on the island and the ending of the show is a reminder of the journey they went on how they grew as people and how coming together on the island was the most important part of all their lives even though the only thing they wanted to do when they were there was get the [ __ ] off of it i thought it was an emotionally satisfying ending even if it wasn't necessarily the ending that i expected but i'm also surprised how many people view the show as being super open-ended like there's this long list of unanswered questions there really aren't i had always looked back on lost as this like meandering improv scene where people just keep adding more and more stuff instead of focusing on what was already established but to me each of the six seasons had its own theme and answers most of its own questions while still maintaining forward momentum i would say if anything the show over explained itself sometimes there was an entire episode in season three devoted to the origin of jack's tattoos no one asked for that a lot of seasons five and six explore like the deep history of the island where it came from the first people to live there and it's like okay that's interesting i guess but i didn't really need to know all that some of the things that were explained in season six sounded like dialogue from a kingdom hearts game and that's not good because i'm you no i'm me but filler episodes aside the first three seasons of lost are pretty much perfect in my opinion and with a little bit of tweaking i could see how the season three finale could have just been the end of the show but it kept going because abc demanded that it would and ultimately i'm glad it did i've never seen a show with an ending quite like loss it was a left turn for sure it's the kind of thing that if you were just to describe to someone what happened it would sound ridiculous but for some reason i think it worked because those two things are what lost always was it's funny i think if the show had ended after three seasons with everyone just getting off the island there would be far less criticism about all the unanswered mysteries people would just be like well that place was pretty weird huh glad they're all home safe now but instead the show made audiences stay invested for six years the final season was heavily marketed as something that it ultimately wasn't and that's where i think a lot of the bad taste in people's mouths came in the time for questions why is my name written down on this is over that's where abc and the creators themselves [ __ ] up the most it's only now that we're over a decade removed from that with expectations fully subsided that i think lost can be appreciated for what it was instead of detested for what it wasn't this show was not always perfect there were moments that made me roll my eyes there were conflicts that could have been easily resolved had two people just spoken to each other there were some really disappointing character arcs but in a world where so much media is unoriginal where it seems like every movie is a sequel and every show is a spin-off lost was one of a kind there was nothing else like it on tv and in the years since very few shows have come close to accomplishing what they did certainly none under the same circumstances it was bold it was unique and it was ahead of its time so what'd you think true this is a web design class and you wrote an entire report about the show lost well i don't need to learn about web design why not because i can just use squarespace go on squarespace is an 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of useless then huh yeah pretty much to get started with a 14 day free trial head to squarespace.com and when you're ready to launch use my promo code drew for 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain as long as that domain is not tootfart.com because i already own that one damn it sorry thank you so much for watching today's video since you made it all the way to the end congratulations i am awarding you with 10 gooden bucks redeemable at any firehouse sub but again that's it thank you so much for watching you can get your parking validated at the front desk um and then you can go home so drive safe bye
2021-10-03 07:55
