Back To The Island: A New Series About Lost 20 Years Later
Introduction
As someone who began this column writing exclusively about TV and for who it still occupies at least three-quarters of his time, I’ve always had immense respect for the men and woman who have devoted their lives to writing about this medium. I’ve paid tribute to many of them in the past such as Alan Sepinwall and Nikki Stafford and there are countless others out there who do great work to this day.
And as someone who has done rewatches and episode guides for his own personal column I have enormous respect for those who have done so over the years. Sepinwall and Stafford have been my north stars for that work over the past twenty years: Stafford for everything from Buffy to Sherlock; Sepinwall for more highbrow shows such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men and his most recent book on Better Call Saul. As someone who has more than once stayed up all night reading an episode guide he’s just bought, I am always in awe of what they do and on occasion have tried my best to emulate them.
This brings me to the foundation of this column. While it hasn’t been a de facto subject for my blog proper I have always been the biggest fan of Lost to the point that I wrote two separate episode guides that I published at my blog. The first, written while the show was still airing, bears the mark of a young neophyte who still takes television personally and frankly draws too much influence from the work of Nikki Stafford, who broke ground on the subject with her Finding Lost books while the show was airing. The second written over the past two years was done mostly by rewatching old VHS recordings of the series done almost entirely when the series was originally airing on ABC. It attempted to look at the show, with distance and several years of experience to look at the show from two perspectives: in the context of how groundbreaking Lost was in the context of what television was like during this period and also to see the flaws that were apparent in the show after several rewatches and comparison to other to television shows that I’ve seen in all the years since.
Around the time I was finishing the final touches on that rewatch I became aware of a new book that seemed very much to be paralleling what I was working on: Lost: Back to the Island. The writers are Emily St. James and Noel Murray.
Both have impeccable credentials as critics: both of them served as TV editor for The A.V Club and have written for the New York Times and Vanity Fair. St. James has more credibility with me on two fronts. Under their previous name (she apparently transitioned sometime in the past few years so I’ll withhold it out of respect) she was one of the co-writers of the brilliant Monster of The Week: A Critical Guide to The X-Files. Those of you who have read my column know that I am an enormous fan of that series and I had bought and devoured that volume multiple times well before I began writing about it here. More significant to me St. James is currently writing for Yellowjackets and fans of this column know just how much I love that particular series. (One week and counting until Season 3!!)
It was a given the moment I heard of it that I was going to purchase this book and read it from cover to cover as quickly as possible. At the same time I had concerns. The first was proprietary. I hope that someday to publish the collection of reviews I wrote in book form at some point and St. James and Murray had beaten me to the punch. This didn’t come as a shock, though, considering that the 20th anniversary of the series premiere was fast approaching when I decided to begin my attempt I figured it was inevitable that at least one episode guide would come out by that point. Still I was afraid of duplication in my material.
The second concern was more personal. While I was writing my episode guide Burn It Down: Power, Complicity and a Call For Change in Hollywood had been published by Maureen Ryan. A ‘behind the scenes’ look about TV in Hollywood, it dealt with the toxic atmosphere and abuses in TV shows during this era. I wrote a longer article about it when it came out so I will refrain from relitigating my issues with Ryan and the issues she raised. That being said, after several rewatches I had become aware of patterns I couldn’t ignore about the treatment of many of the minority characters on the show and while I chose to mostly set them aside in my rewatch, I was slightly afraid St. James and Murray would use their guide to grind an axe against a show I will always love.
After reading the book, I have concluded that first while there are inevitably some parallels I am basically covering new material and also that while the writers don’t ignore the behind the scenes problems, they by and large don’t let them get in the way of reviewing the series objectively. That is a relief to me because that is what I consider the standard of what a critic should do. And it means I can add this volume among my always growing library of these kinds of works with the possibility of reviewing it later on.
But I also think this is an opportunity for me to do something I haven’t really done that much on my own column: engage in debate about a TV show based on the publications of other critics who I respect. This is not for lack of material but a lack of time on my part: so many great shows, not enough hours in the day. More to the point a lot of my blogs are about current shows rather than past ones with some exception. However having rewatched Lost more often than any series save Homicide or The X-Files I do feel qualified to engage in passionate debate on certain aspects of the show.
This series will be an attempt to engage in my own opinions about key takeaways of my own opinions after multiple rewatches and how they compare and contrast with some of the ideas posed not just by Back to the Island but that Nikki Stafford has written about in the Finding Lost series. By and large I won’t be pulling material that I’ve previously written in both my episode guides but rather arguing for larger themes that I gather from the series as a whole. And while I personally think that there has to be an expiration on spoiler alerts (especially after fifteen years since the show ended) if you haven’t seen Lost you might want to tread lightly as I’m going to be spilling quite a few secrets.
With that in mind, let’s head back to the island — and beyond.