Lost: Keys to What's Really Going On

Lost Genres and Coincidences: Keys to What's Really Going On

-Written in the middle of Season 2, first posted near the end of Season 3, with updates through the finale of the series-

by Paul Levinson

We live in a golden age of genres. Crime, science fiction, romance in books. Much the same in movies, but add in comedy and drama. Television has all of the above, along with specialties like soap operas and hospital shows. Genres determine where books are shelved in bookstores, where and how wide movies open, at what times shows appear on television. Genres have rules which their plot lines must follow. Audiences expect them, and can become sorely disappointed when the rules are bent or broken. A mystery fan is likely to find no joy in the revelation that a murdered body in a room locked from the inside was in fact beamed in from outer space. Genres do not mix easily.

Yet Lost has become extraordinarily successful by mixing all kinds of genres, and breaking just about every rule and expectation.

To begin with, a castaway story is a great way to weave different genres into a narrative. A doctor, a con-man, a woman fleeing from the cops, a rock musician on the rocks. Each has a different back story. Chaucer made use of this in Canterbury Tales, and it has been a staple of story-telling ever since.

But Lost goes much further. Not only do the characters have different back stories, but the fundamental mechanisms and rules of these stories are very different. And in the most intriguing genre-blending of all, these back stories are becoming increasingly interrelated. Even though -- as the stories of people who presumably just happened to be seated together on a plane, as the stories of people who presumably first met each other as they boarded the fateful flight -- these back stories should have no connection at all.

A Fistful of Genres

Lost presents and develops for its own ends some of the classic genres of television:

The doc: The doctor TV-show more particularly - the brooding, handsome, dark-haired surgeon goes back at least as far as Ben Casey in the first half of the 1960s, and has continued more or less non-stop ever since. The surgeons in Grey's Anatomy are a current example. Jack could have easily stepped out of that show onto Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 until we learn that he had an earlier encounter in the stadium with Desmond of Dharma.

The con-man: Sawyer's not all that different from Maverick, though the late-1950s cardsharp was more of a gambler than an outright swindler, had a more obvious heart of gold, and none of Sawyer's rage. But the two have the same easy, irresistible charm, and look at the world in the same way: kids in the candy store of marks for the taking. Yeah, Sawyer's a classic con-man but what was he doing having a one-night stand with the woman who drew Hurley's lottery numbers? And what was Kate's mother doing serving coffee to Sawyer in that diner?

The Fugitive: Kate's of course our Richard Kimble, even though (so far) there is no one-armed man in Lost. But Kate's not guilty nonetheless, in any rational, decent court of opinion: the man she torched, who preyed on her mother and her, deserved to die. Her back story is one of the richest in the show - young love with a "Tell Laura I Love Her" tragic ending, abusive father, the law is after her. Kate's story could have been a great TV show, all on its own. But what's her loving stepfather doing back in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf War with Sayid?

Hey, hey, we're the Monkees: Well, Charlie and Driveshaft are not quite - they're more like Eddie and the Cruisers (movie not TV series) gone wrong - but his story still works in the genre of rock 'n' roll groups and their back stories on television, ranging from The Partridge Family on one end to, well, Driveshaft on Lost on the other. There was always more to these band stories than met the eye (and ear). The Monkees, the Partridge Family, even the cartoon Archies all had big hit records off of their shows, out in the real world, continuing a meta tradition, a breaking of the reality/fiction boundary, that went back to the 1950s with Ricky Nelson. "You All Everybody" has yet to make such an impact in the real world of music but it could, as far as I'm concerned. Like Kate's story, Charlie's could easily support its own series. On Lost, though, we find some disturbing details - such as, what was the number 815 doing as the copy machine model Charlie was trying to sell when the band was not playing?

The Lost omnibus has several other passengers whose back stories sit comfortably in classic TV genres, until we're shown some incredible, inexplicable intersection between their and some other character's life. Locke is Ironside, until he inexplicably recovers his legs after the crash. But that bit of magic, faith-healing, mind over matter - a trait shared by Walt, who sees a polar bear in a comic book before the bear makes its appearance on the island - is by no means the most incredible facet of Locke in Lost. In our world, people do occasionally stand up and walk again, for no clear medical reason, after being confined to a wheel chair. But nowhere in our world would Locke and Hurley end up having the same boss, in two unrelated businesses, and then end up on the same plane that crashed -- well, perhaps that one coincidence could have happened, but not on the plane that also carried Jack and Shannon, whose father Jack chose not to operate on, and instead saved Sarah, which meant death for Shannon's father.

What's really going on in Lost?

Continuum of Coincidence

Not all coincidences are the same. Let's see if we can find some categories of coincidence, or inexplicable intertwining of characters (and events) in Lost:

Barely if at all coincidence: Jack and Ana Lucia having a drink at the airport in Australia before the plane takes off is barely a coincidence at all. Neither, really, is Sawyer and Jack's father drinking together at a bar in Australia, though that's certainly more of an unusual coincidence than Jack and Ana Lucia. But in the context of Lost, Australia is just a bigger plane. Meetings of previously unconnected characters Down Under may be unlikely, but certainly not inexplicable, and nowhere close to impossible by any rational standards. These are interesting, important encounters, not mainsprings of the show.[*PS8]

Inexplicable, incredible coincidences of which the characters are unaware: Most of the extraordinarily unlikely encounters mentioned above fall into this category. Sayid meeting Kate's stepfather in Baghdad in the Gulf War. Kate's mother serving Sawyer coffee. Jack not operating on Shannon's father.[*PS6]

These coincidences have at least three things in common.

(1) There is no way, in any rational universe, they could have occurred. Certainly not all of them. This means that, if the flashbacked stories are truthful depictions of what actually happened (more on this later), they must provide a key to what is actually happening in Lost. A trite purgatory scenario - the characters all died in the plane crash (or in some other way, or other ways), and are now congregated in a place in which all time and place, all past, present, and future, is mixed into one - could certainly account for such coincidences. But I refuse to believe Lost would stoop to such a solution.

(2) The majority of these coincidences, at least so far, seem to have happened to Jack and Kate[*PS4] (individually, not together). On the one hand, they are in the running for the two most central characters on the show (certainly Kate is the leading woman), so it's not all that surprising that the majority of inexplicable intertwinings would happen to them. On the other hand these concentrations of coincidence may have some deeper, larger meaning.

(3) The characters on this level of coincidence are not aware they happened -- that is, Sawyer doesn't know he was served by Kate's mother, Jack doesn't know that the patient who was not the beneficiary of his medical expertise was Shannon's father, etc. This facet of these coincidences is a significant motivator or lack of motivator for the affected characters on the island. They do not know the depth of the paradox and affront to conventional reality in which they are embroiled. The Others, the monsters, the wild animals - to the extent they are not directly tied to the back story coincidences - do not hold a candle to the sheer, attractive insanity of the coincidences. And while all the characters on the island know about The Others and the monsters, very few know about the inexplicable encounters in their own previous lives.

Inexplicable, incredible coincidences of which the characters are indeed aware: I can think of only two on the show. (Sawyer realizing he had met Jack's father would be an example of a character being aware but of a minor, not a mind-bending, coincidence.)[*PS2] Hurley and the numbers, off and on the island, would be one. Jack and Desmond would be two. Let's look more carefully at each.

(1) Hurley's numbers: They brought Hurley incredible bad luck before he got to the island - they of course brought him the money that bought the ticket to the plane that crashed but that's just a conventional magic story (another TV chestnut, going back, in happier days, to Bewitched). Not conventional in the slightest is Hurley discovering these numbers on the hatch, inside of which they must be typed into a computer to keep the hatch, island, whatever from doing who-knows-what, if anything.[*PS7] So far, he has kept this awful knowledge to himself, presumably interpreting it as just a ratcheting up of the awful curse under which he has fallen. But this knowledge separates Hurley from the rest of the castaways, and must play a crucial role in the resolution of the story - not just Hurley's, everyone's.[*PS1]

(2) Jack and Desmond: Locke believes in the need to enter the numbers into the Dharma computer; Jack does not. This is likely meaningful, insofar as Jack knows something even more inexplicable than anyone else on the island about Dharma, seeing as how Jack had met Desmond on the steps of the stadium in one of Jack's back stories - in fact, in the same episode as Jack sees Desmond again in the hatch, and Kate and Locke meet Desmond presumably for the first time. This incident is significantly different from all the other coincidences in at least two additional ways. (a) Jack sees Desmond, in the present, on the island, after the two have met in Jack's back story. This is unlike, for example, Sayid, who, having met Kate on the island, could have been dreaming that he met her stepfather in Baghdad; or Jack, who having met Shannon on the island, could have been dreaming that he decided not to operate on her father. In other words, where these and the other back stories are vulnerable to being interpreted as dreams (leaving aside the question of how Sayid would have known what Kate's stepfather looked like - but he could have dreamed a younger version of Kate in the photograph Kate's stepfather had in his hand - or how Jack could have known what Shannon's father looked like), Jack's encounter with Desmond is not. It cannot be any kind of dream. How, after all, could anyone dream up a person, or a relation to a person, they have not yet met? It could only be some kind of crazy - and very meaningful to the story - premonition. A premonition in which we clearly see someone we have not yet met. (b) Jack recognizes Desmond in the hatch, and says "You!" It is not clear if Kate heard this; Locke did, asks Jack what is going on, and Jack says he doesn't want to talk about it. So apparently Jack has not yet told anyone about his earlier encounter in the stadium with Desmond.[*PS3] Just as Hurley has not confided in anyone about the full meaning - to the extent that he knows it - of the numbers. But, unlike Hurley and the numbers, Jack has shouted a very important clue, which Locke or even Kate could pick up on at any time. This puts this coincidence in a category of its own in unraveling the mystery of Lost.[*PS5]

The above three categories of coincidences in Lost are rough cuts. There are subtleties in some of the inexplicable intersections which fit into none of the categories. For example, in what we might call a reciprocal coincidence category, we have Sayid's face appearing on the television screen in Kate's stepfather's office when she is visiting him, years after the two met in Iraq with Kate's stepfather taking out Kate's photograph. These kinds of coincidences deepen the texture and meaning of the show. The incredible lattice they weave is the greatest genre of all. And yet...

Relying as the incredible coincidences do on the back stories of the characters, we have to consider one other possibility regarding Lost and its genres:

Are the Flashbacks Lies?

Alfred Hitchcock -- a master of mystery, usually explicable, sometimes not, if ever there was one -- remarked to Francois Truffaut in their famous 1966 interview book (Hitchcock, by Francois Truffaut): "I did one thing in a picture I never should have done; I put in a flashback that was a lie." Truffaut replies, "Yes, and the French critics were particularly critical of that."

Hitchcock is talking about his 1950 movie, Stage Fright, in which Jane Wyman plays a character who remembers a sequence of events in a flashback that is a fabrication. As Truffaut points out, she's not actually lying - the villain has actually lied to her, and she is remembering his lie, as if it were truth. But the effect on many audiences was the same: they felt they were being lied to, not by the bad guy, but by the guy who made the movie.

Hitchcock lamented, why can't we put a lie in a flashback? He certainly has a point. It's just narrative convention that says flashbacks are by and large recollections of what really happened to a character.

This convention has been stretched a few times since the 1950s, in movies like Fight Club, in which the lead character is deranged, or in any number of science fiction stories like Philip K. Dick's (who knows, maybe he was influenced in the 1950s by Stage Fright), in which the essence of the story is the manipulation of memories in ways of which their possessors are unaware.

This points, then, to a completely different kind of explanation for the mixing of genres and inexplicable coincidences in Lost. Both the genres and the coincidences are dependent upon the flashbacks. But what if the flashbacks are lies?

Any one of the characters could of course be lying to him or herself. Nothing even implausible about that. But interlocking flashbacks' reciprocal coincidences, like Sayid's and Kate's stepfather's, reduce the odds of people lying to themselves, as does the mere fact that so many characters are having implausible flashbacks which are lies. Unless something on the island is causing that to happen.

Dharma could certainly be the cause of that, in ways we cannot yet understand. Or perhaps the island itself - no purgatory, no island of lost dreams or souls, just a nasty meta-narrative island of lost truth in flashbacks.

In the end, even if Dharma or the island is causing the flashbacks to be fabricated, we are still left with the question of why they intersect in such bizarre ways. One answer to that is that the island may itself be a kind of novelist, a saucer on the water or embodied Chaucer of the Pacific, which not only causes the characters to fabricate their flashbacks, but weave them together in a way which makes one astonishingly intriguing story.

And this means that, whatever the ultimate explanation of genre blending and coincidence in Lost, it has achieved a level of story-telling like no other in television.

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updates:

*PS 1: Libby's presence as a patient in Hurley's mental institution, revealed in the 4/5/06 episode, is an example of a coincidence of which Hurley might have been aware - he thinks Libby looks familiar when he first meets her on the island. This episode also adds fuel to the interpretation of the flashbacks as dreams or daydreams the characters are having on the island: the flashback of Libby in the institution appears in Hurley's story after the two have very significantly interacted on the island. Desmond's appearance in Jack's flashback before the two meet on the island thus remains unique, as of 4/5/06.  Note added April 15, 2010:  See also PS 12 below, and the Hurley-Libby intersection in Lost 6.12.

*PS 2: But Ana Lucia's brief unknowing encounter with Sawyer in the 5/3/06 episode as he was about to enter the bar in Australia where he would have a drink with Jack's father - not to mention Ana Lucia's long flashback encounter with Jack's father in that episode - would certainly be another example of a coincidence that defies any kind of rational explanation. Meanwhile, Ana Lucia's death in this episode, after she overcomes her cardinal flaw (a propensity to kill people who hurt her) is another piece of evidence in support of the unfortunate Purgatory explanation for everything that's going on in Lost.  Note added May 22, 2007:  Eko in Season 2 is of course aware of his brother Yemi having crashed earlier on the island - this would be an example of an inexplicable coincidence (Eko's crashing on the same remote island as did his brother) of which one of the parties, Eko, is all too aware.

*PS 3: Desmond figures in two other inexplicable coincidences - unlikely to the point of being all but impossible - in the superb finale to Season 2 on 5/24/06. (a) Libby gives Desmond the boat he will use to sail around the world. (b) Kelvin - the person Desmond takes over from in the hatch - turns out to be none than the CIA guy who recruited Sayid back in Iraq in the first Gulf War. And, actually, there may be a third coincidence involving Desmond, which could be significant: (c) How did Desmond's former girlfriend know that magnetic disturbances play a significant role on the island? Presumably, she was just searching for him, after he had failed to return from his around-the-world race. Is her rich father, whose company sponsored the race, also involved in Dharma? (Maybe this facet will turn out not to be a coincidence at all, in the third season.)

*PS 4: As of April 25, 2007: Jack also is crucial to the major inexplicable coincidence in the flashbacks in the 3rd season, so far: Jack's father is Claire's father. Kate figures in another, less crucial coincidence: she is helped by a woman whom Saywer swindled. (Locke's father showing up in the island could be another coincidence, but that remains to be seen.) And on May 2, 2007: Locke's father is indeed the centerpiece of what may be the crucial coincidence of all: he is also the con-man responsible for the deaths of Sawyer's parents - the guy Sawyer was looking to kill in Australia. And on May 16, 2007: Charlie saves Sayid's true love Nadia back in England, long before the 815 Flight, in the "Greatest Hits" epusode. (Nadia also figures in an inexplicable coincidence with Locke in an earlier episode.) And added on May 23, 2007: The Season 3 finale brilliantly pivoted from flashbacks to flashforwards - as I predicted last week. Will be interesting to see how the inexplicable coincidences play out in the stories of some of the characters after they leave the island (and try to rescue those who are still there)...

*PS 5: I believe the 5th episode of the 4th season - which aired in the U.S. on 28 February 2008 - provided an explanation for the Desmond-Jack meeting on the steps, prior to Jack crashing on the island. Desmond gets the power of time travel - or, his consciousness can travel to the past and the future - after he goes through an electromagnetic field in a helicopter leaving the island. Although Jack has no role in this part of the episode, clearly Desmond's power to communicate between future and past versions of himself could have given him knowledge of Jack, before either got to the island, which led Desmond to seek out Jack on the steps in the 1st episode of the 2nd season. Whether it explains the other inexplicable coincidences in the flashbacks remains to be seen - at least one of the characters in the flashback would need to have Desmond's powers - but that's certainly possible, given that these powers stem, to some extent, from travel to and from the island. See Lost 4.5: Desmond 1 and Desmond 2 for more...

*PS 6: Episode 11 of Season 4 - aired in the U.S. on 8 May 2008 - called our attention to a coincidence which had already been established in the first Ben flashback episode (Episode 20 of Season 3): Ben's and Locke's mothers have the same name, Emily. As of Episode 11, Season 4 on the island, neither man seems aware of this coincidence. I would say it's certainly not as extraordinary as some of the other coincidences - such as Jack and Desmond meeting on the steps of the stadium - but it does raise some interesting possibilities. Indeed, the appearance of Richard Alpbert as Locke's possible father in this episode made me think that Richard could be Locke's father as well, and the two Emilys are the same. (I know they were played by different actresses, and that Ben's mother died after Ben was born and Locke's mother was alive when Locke was an adult.... But with the immortal Richard involved, who knows what's possible. At very least, he might have some reason for impregnating women named Emily - or, even less extraordinary, for keeping an eye on women named Emily who bear sons who become leaders on the island, and develop some strange powers.)

*PS 7: The 12th episode of the 4th Season - first broadcast in the U.S. on 15 May 2008 - brought us Hurley's numbers again, this time on the odometer of the red car his father repaired for him, in the flashforward back in civilization. So the numbers are not only all over the island, in the signal that brought Rousseau there (and Hurley, indirectly, by winning him the lottery after they were conveyed to him indirectly by someone who heard them in the transmission), but the numbers continue to play to Hurley in the flashforwards. I was glad to see that. My guess is we'll continue to be teased by the numbers, until their supremely inexplicable multiple appearances are explained in the end.

*PS 8: As an example of an even less unusual coincidence that is just a nice coincidence, with likely no deeper explanatory power: In the 1st episode of Season 5 - first broadcast in the U.S. on 21 January 2009 - we see Kate's car (with Aaron) entering a parking lot just as Hurley's car (with Sayed) is leaving. Since we already know that all four of these characters are in L.A. at this time, there is nothing inexplicable or extraordinary about this scene.

*PS 9: Jacob's visits to Kate, Sawyer, Locke, Jack, Sun & Jin, Sayid, Hurley in the two-hour finale (Episodes 16 & 17) of Season 5 (May 13, 2009 in the U.S.) provides a means by which these characters were connected to one another prior to their boarding Flight 815, and thus a possible explanation for the inexplicable coincidences: Jacob could have set them in motion.

*PS 10:  Ethan showing up as Claire's doctor in the Los Angeles (no plane crash) 2007 hospital is an example of the first prominent inexplicable coincidence in Season 6.  In this case, some difference between the Los Angeles and island realities could explain Ethan's presence in Los Angeles, but what is the likelihood that he would be Claire's doctor?  See Lost 6.3: Kate and Claire, Tenacious Details, and Dr. Arzt's Arse for more.

*PS 11:  Season 6 teems with more inexplicable intersections in alternate reality Los Angeles:  In 6.4, Locke meets Hurley in a parking lot; Hurley gives Lock a job at a temp agency owned by Hurley; where Locke's boss is Rose; Locke gets a job as a substitute teacher in a high school, where Ben is a history teacher; see Lost 6.4: Better LA, Wilder Island, Some Partial at Last for more.  In 6.5, Jack runs into Dogen at a music competition; see Lost 6.5: Jack's Family and Prester John's Speculum for more.  In 6.6, Sayid and Jack pass each other in a hospital corridor with neither being aware of the other (not such an inexplicable intersection, since Sayid is in the hospital to see his brother, hurt by loan sharks); Sayid later confronts and kills the loan shark enforcer, who is Keamy (pursuing his punishing trade across two realities, and a pretty strong coincidence); and Sayid discovers that Keamy had a prisoner, Jin (who, after all, in our original reality, was an enforcer his father-in-law's syndicate); see Lost 6.6: Sayid the Assassin in Both Realities for more.  In 6.7, Ben the history teacher not only intersects again with Locke the substitute, but is a colleague of Dr. Arzst (a science teacher), and a faculty adviser for Alex Rousseau;  see Lost 6.7: A Better Ben in Both Realities for more.  In 6.8, Sawyer using his name James Ford as a cop is partnered with Miles, has a one-night stand with Charlotte, encounters Charlie's brother trying to bail Charlie out of jail, and runs into Kate in an alley; see Lost 6:8: The Third Team for more.  In 6.10, Mikhail makes an appearance as an associate of the nefarious Keamy in LA; see Lost 6.10: Cloudy Sun for more.

*PS 12:  The intersections in alternate LA begin to become so prominent and significant to the unfolding story in  6.11 that they deserve their own footnote:  In 6.11, we're treated to a veritable feast of intersections, as Desmond runs into Hurley (at the airport), Claire (airport), Minkowski (airport), Widmore (whom Desmond works for, as Widmore's right-hand man), Charlie, Jack, Eloise (who is Widmore's wife), Daniel, and (of course) Penny;  and these intersections are at last more than hit-and-run pieces of amazement - they're finally beginning to propel the central story, which after 6.11 entails Desmond getting each of the characters in alternate-LA reality to recall the lives of their original selves on the island.  I see this as part of the merging or reunification of the two realities; see Lost 6.11: Reunion of Two Realities Begins.   In 6.12,  Desmond goes to see Hurley, to encourage Hurley to see Libby again (Hurley and Libby had met earlier in a restaurant); Desmond later drives up to Ben and Locke's school, and deliberately drives into Locke in his wheelchair; we also see Marvin Candle introducing Hurley at an awards ceremony.   The Libby-Hurley intersection in 6.12 is the first to explicitly connect to one of the great inexplicable coincidences in flashbacks in earlier seasons - Hurley and Libby in a mental institution, prior to their meeting on the island, in Season 2 - and suggests that this inexplicable coincidence in the flashback, and perhaps all of the others, relate to the parallel Los Angeles/island realities of Season 6.   Dr. Brooks appears in both Season 2 and 6 episodes with Hurley and Libby, as the doctor from the mental institution in which Hurley and Libby are variously patients.   See Lost 6.12:  Libby and Hurley and Cross-Reality Communication for more; see also PS 1 above.   In 6.13, Sun (shot several episodes ago) recognizes Locke (hit by Desmond in 6.12) as they're brought into the hospital on stretchers at the same time.   The intensity of the experience makes Sun recall her knowing Locke from her life in island reality.   Also in better alternate LA reality, officer Sawyer is enjoying his questioning of Kate.  He and partner Miles go off to nab Sayid - for the Keamy et al shootings - which they do.  Sayid says goodbye to Nadja.   Meanwhile, Des intercepts Claire before she goes to the adoption agency, and steers her to his lawyer's office - the lawyer being Elana.   Turns out this is actually a meeting to read Christian's will, so Jack shows up, too.  But he's called away, back to the hospital, to operate on Locke, the sight of whom may or may not put Jack back in touch with his island reality.  So we have one, maybe two, alternate LA intersections in 6.13 triggering recollections of the island reality; see Lost 6.13: Make Up, Break  Up, Everything Is Shake-up for more.   In 6.14, our people in better alternate LA reality begin to realize the oddity of running into people who were on the 815 flight.  Bernard, who intersects with Jack, says it's "pretty weird,"  and Jack's beginning to wonder about this, too.   Jack also sees Anthony Cooper (in bad shape, but still better than dead), Helen, and Claire.   And Jack brings Claire a music box that their father Christian left for her, and it plays "Catch a Falling Star" - Claire on the island was singing Catch a Falling Star earlier this season, so this would be a prime example of "leakage" between island and LA realities; see Lost 6.14: Jack's Tears for more.   The intersections in 6.16 mostly revolve around Ben:  he  gets beaten by Desmond, who may want to hit and run Locke in the wheelchair again, all for the purpose of putting these alternate reality people into touch with their true (in my view) island selves.  Then Alex and mother Danielle invite better Ben to dinner, where Danielle tells Ben that Alex almost looks at Ben as a father.  Elsewhere in better LA, Jack has a cut on his neck, an expression of the two realities coming together.   He intersects with Claire, Locke - and tells him "I think you're mistaking coincidence for fate," when Locke brings their intersection on the plane and now in LA to Jack's attention.  But Locke is right.  And with Des as the continuing spark plug of the intersections, we have Desmond in jail with Kate and Sayid, with Sawyer and Miles on hand as cops.  Kate almost sweet talks Sawyer into letting her go, but it's not necessary because Des has bribed Ana Lucia (with Hurley's money) to spring Kate and Sayid, and they all drive away in two cars (not Ana Lucia) as per Desmond's plan; see Penultimate Lost:  Coincidence for Fate for more.

*PS 13:  And in the series finale:  Most of our major characters come together in the church at the end - Sayid and Shannon, Sawyer and Juliet, Hurley and Libby, Desmond and Penny, Locke, Sun and Jin, Charlie and Claire, Rose and Bernard, Jack and Kate, Christian - for these are the people who have been most important to Jack's life on the island.  Alternate LA is revealed as a purgatory, and the church congregation is ready for the next step.   In view of this, the inexplicable coincidences in the flashbacks can now be seen as in some sense connected to Jack's take on his life.  They provided keys to understanding what was really going on in Lost, after all - even though the meaning of these keys did not become clearly visible until the very end.  Q.E.D.   See The End of Lost for more.

Useful links:

The End of Lost:  Preliminary Thoughts: Jack's Story
The End of Lost 2: Further Thoughts: Missed Opportunities

Preliminary Predictions for Lost Finale

also: Lost New Questions (arising from the Season 3 finale): 1. How Far in the Future? ... 2. Who's in the Coffin? ... 3. Who's Kate Waiting For? ... 4. Who Is Naomi's Boss? ... 5. Is Mikhail Immortal? ... 6. What Constitutes Reliable Evidence? ... 7. Are the Flashforwards Desmond's Flashes?

and Lost and Alias: Now Something Else in Common

reviews of some of the Spring 2007 (3rd season, 2nd part) episodes of Lost: Lost ... Recovering ... Desmond Deja Vu ... Lost: Lost ... Lost ... finding itself ... Jack and Locke reverse roles ... Canterbury, Decameron Tale Tonight ... Kate, black smoke, Juliet ... Lost: Back in Business and Balance ... The Woman Who Fell from the Sky ... Words from the Woman Who Fell ... Coincidence is King ... Dharma, Hostiles, and Survivors ... Charlie, Underwater Babes, and Finale Predictions! ... Season 3 Finale: Flashforwards...

reviews of 4th season: 1. Lost's Back Full Paradoxical Blast 4.1 ... 4.2: Five Flashbacks and Three Rational Explanations ... 4.3: Thirty Minutes and Big Ben ... 4.4: Kate and ... ... 4.5 Desmond 1 and Desmond 2 ... 4.6 The True Nature of Ben ... 4.7 Flash Both Ways ... 4.8 Michael and Alex ... 4.9 Daughters, Rules, and Some Truth about Ben ... 4.10 Almost a Dream Come True ... 4.11 Unlocking Locke ... 4.12 Hurley's Numbers on the Dashboard ... Lost Season 4 Finale: Six or More Thoughts Plus One

and

2. More Thoughts On Lost 4.1: Those Who Went with Hurley and Those Who Stayed with Jack and Two More Points about Lost 4.1

reviews of 5th Season: Lost Returns in 5 Dimensions and 5.3: The Loops, The Bomb ... 5.4: A Saving Skip Back in Time ... 5.5 Two Time Loops and Mind Benders ... 5.6 A Lot of Questions ... 5.7 Bentham and Ben ... 5.8 True Love Ways ... 5.9 Two Times and a Baby ... 5.10 The Impossible Cannot Happen ... 5.11 Clockwork Perfect Time Travel ... 5.12: Ben v. Charles, and Locke' Slave ... 5.13: Lost Meets Star Wars and the Sixth Sense ... The Problem with Baby Aaron and the Return of the Oceanic Six ... 5.14: Eloise, Daniel, and Obsession Trumping Paradox ... 5.15: Moral Compasses in Motion ... Season Five Finale: Jacob and Locke

and The Richard-Locke Compass Time Travel Loop

reviews of 6th Season: Lost Season Six Double Premiere ... Three Questions Arising from the Lost Season Six Premiere: Linkage Between Two Realities,  Dead Bodies Inhabited, Who/What Survived H-Blast? ... Lost 6.3:  Kate and Claire, Tenacious Details, and Dr. Arzt's Arse at the Airport ... Lost 6.4:  Better LA, Wilder Island, Some Partial Answers at Last ... Lost 6.5: Jack's Family and Prester John's Speculum ... Lost 6.6: Sayid the Assassin in Both Realities ... Lost 6.7: A Better Ben in Both Realities ... Lost 6.8: The Third Team ... Lost 6.9: Richard's Story ... Lost 6.10: Cloudy Sun ... Lost 6.11: Reunion of Two Realities Begins ... Lost 6.12: Libby and Hurley and Cross-Reality Communication ... Lost 6.13: Make-Up, Break-Up, Everything is Shake-Up ... Lost 6.14: Jack's Tears ... Lost 6.15: Jacob and Esau/MIB ... Penultimate Lost:  Coincidence for Fate

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"As a genre-bending blend of police procedural and science fiction, The Silk Code delivers on its promises." -- Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

Olbermann's suspension of rationality about 24

I said I would post a review of 24 here once a week, within 24 minutes of the conclusion of each episode. But I just had to come by and respond to the bizarre diatribe Keith Olbermann directed at 24 on his MSNBC Countdown show last night. I had heard about it, but just got a chance to see it.

I have to say that I have rarely seen as ignorant and misleading an analysis of television and propaganda - and I say this as someone who teaches and has published books on this subject. Olbermann claims that the nuclear explosion at the end of Episode 4 of 24, the suicide bombings at the beginning and throughout, and indeed all of 24, is an attempt of Fox to push the Bush administration's agenda of scaring the American people about terrorism.

I'm no friend of the Bush administration, but the absurdity of Olbermann's charge has nothing to do with what the Bush administration wants or does not want of the American people, so I won't even bother to address that issue. Nor do I need to discuss the relationship of Fox News or Fox Entertainment with the Bush administration, because that, too, is irrelevant to the vacuity of Olbermann's claim.

What is relevant is something Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked about in his Biographia Literaria nearly 200 years ago. Exploring how and why people enjoy poetry, Coleridge said it operates on a "willing suspension of disbelief" - that is, people pretend that what they are reading in a poem is real, even though they know full well it is fiction. The genius of Coleridge's insight is that, of course, all media of fiction operate this way.

Does Olbermann really think that, even if Fox were doing the Bush administration's bidding, and this went down to the creators of 24, that the American people would be unable to distinguish this fiction from our reality? Does Olbermann think that any Americans would have derived any enjoyment whatsoever from a nuke going off near Los Angeles, if they thought for a moment that this was likely, or anything other than a remotely possible danger?

Like so many others who speak to us from their media soap boxes, Olbermann is so eager to make provocative points that he leaves common sense and a basic respect for human rationality behind him.

Surely, fiction can be influential - just as a media commentator can. But by and large, as Jefferson and most of our founding fathers saw very clearly, people can separate truth from fiction. We can tell when we're watching a work of fiction, and when a media commentator is stretching to make a ridiculous point - which, if taken at its word, is in effect calling for a de facto censorship of a television program.

This puts Olbermann in the same class of media commentators as those on the fanatical, far right. Congratulations, Keith.

I'm off to teach an evening class - I'll have a podcast up about this later tonight.

Useful links:

Memo to Olbermann: Are You Going after Rome?

Memo II to Olbermann: Did You See Jack Bauer's Concern About Militant VP?

Keith Olbermann, Jack Bauer, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 30-minute podcast

Levinson news clips 3-minute podcast

Biographia Literaria: Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life & Opinions Coleridge's masterpiece

Olbermann's diatribe can't guarantee how long it will be up at this MSNBC site

24 - Season 6 Premiere (First 4 Episodes)

24 Season 6: hrs 3-4: punches and promises

This is part of an ongoing review of the new season of 24 - I'll watch it in real time on Fox TV, and then post a review with 24 minutes of the show's completion. Expect spoilers.

Well, I was talking about punches in the stomach last night, and 24 just delivered two of them, in the last five minutes of Hour 4: Jack killed Curtis, to prevent him from killing Assad, who is cooperating. And ... a nuclear bomb finally went off in Los Angeles, mushroom cloud and all.

We have seen Jack kill a good guy before on behalf of a greater cause, but Curtis was more than a good guy. He was a brother in arms. And the fact that this happened so early in the day - rather than near or at the end - suggests that this will by no means be the worst ethical quandary Jack will find himself in. 24 continues to ply that seemingly straightforward but always difficult utilitarian principle that the good of the many must outweigh the good of the few.

And then the atom bomb. Sooner or later, we had to see one actually explode in Los Angeles. No story line can continually threaten us with that, and never follow through - not if it wants to maintain its credibility.

And 24 is, if nothing else and by no means perfect in this respect, credible like no other show in television history in following through with its implications and punches.

I'm glad I have a week to catch my breath.

No I'm not, I'd watch the whole rest of the season right now if I could... even though I said above that I intended to watch it in real time...

See you here same time, next week.

Listen to a podcast of this review: Levinson news clips

Rome Returns: Episode 1: Powerful Complement to Shakespeare

I'll be reviewing each episode of the second season of Rome on HBO. I'll try to resist giving away anything about the fictitious elements, and the rest, as they say, is history...

Rome returned to HBO tonight. The first hour was as vivid and powerful as the best shows last season, perfect in its portrayal of political conniving and jockeying in the aftermath of Caesar's murder, and appropriately grim in the fictional account of Vorenus and the destruction of his family.

First let me mention what I missed. No "friends, Romans, and countrymen" oration by Mark Antony, just as there was no "et tu, Brutus" from Caesar last year. The reason, no doubt, is that that's all Shakespeare, not history, and HBO's Rome is sticking to whatever more or less accepted history we know, plus its own - excellent - embellishments. Still, Shakespeare has become close enough to a real history, an expected history, that I missed the oration - and especially so given the fine performance that James Purefoy gives as Antony. You can practically feel him itching to give the great speech. (This is also due to the fine writing - what we do hear this Antony say in Rome.)

I also missed seeing more of Atia, played ever temptingly by Polly Walker.

But Max Pirkis as young Octavian commanded every scene he was in, and David Bamber was infuriatingly deceitful as Cicero (though, as an admirer of the real Cicero's writing, I'm hoping that the sliminess of this Cicero is artistic license.)

And the story of Lucius Vorenus, played just right by Kevin McKidd, was heart-rending. If the creators of HBO's Rome left behind the inventions of Shakespeare, they're offering a gripping story of the underside of Rome that we haven't quite seen before.

All wrapped up in a package of marvelous opening credits, with a libretto delivered by news reader Ian McNeice that makes me wish we had a little more of that - and less news anchor and newspaper - in our own world...


3-minute podcast of this review

Rome - The Complete First Season


Rome: Music From the HBO Series

I, Claudius 1977 BBC-HBO series

my latest novel: The Plot to Save Socrates

24 Season 6: hrs 1-2: Thought and Adrenalin

This will be an ongoing review of the new season of 24 - I'll watch it in real time on Fox TV, and then post a review with 24 minutes of the show's completion. Expect spoilers.

I don't think any beginning could be as good as last year's 24 opener, in which President David Palmer and Michelle were killed.

This season's beginning didn't quite have that punch, but it made up for it with excellent characterization of Jack, released from two years of torture in a Chinese prison.

We've seen Jack coming back from the dead before - from heroin addiction, the loss of his wife, and equally traumatic interludes. But this resurrection was handled with more subtlety than usual. Jack's feeling that he just can't do it anymore - just can't operate as an effective CTU agent - is just brewing below the surface, in a way that doesn't quite impair Jack's capacity to save the hour...

There are some powerful plot twists along with this. David Palmer's brother Wayne is now President, Buchanan and Karen are married, the terrorist our government is after is really trying to bring peace...

One aspect I wasn't too thrilled with: the Arab family next door in the suburbs, who may or may not be terrorist. We've seen this before.

But a superb two-hour start, nonetheless - which I would rate as at very least a close second to last year's, and in some ways, because of its replacement of some of the punches in the stomach with subtlety, perhaps even as good.

High praise from me, because I think 24 is one of the best shows now, and to have ever been, on television.

Listen to a podcast of this review: Levinson news clips

What On Earth Are They Doing to Poor Pluto?

Not the newest story in the world, but, hey, things move slowly in astronomical time, right?

I'll be doing a podcast tomorrow on the demotion of Pluto to dwarf-planet status - happened this past summer. Michael Burstein, head of the Pluto Is A Planet organization, will be my guest.

Here's the background, in case you were on vacation this summer:

Pluto was discovered and named as a planet in our solar system in 1930. This past August, the International Astronomical Union voted that it wasn't really a planet. A variety of controversial reasons were brought into play: Pluto's moon is about as big as Pluto (ok - so make it a double planet - why strip it of planetary status?); Pluto's not that big in any case, so if Pluto's a planet, we might have to say a big asteroid or two is also a planet (ok - so what would be the problem in expanding our solar system to 12 planets?); well, you get the picture.

This might seem a bit arcane, but I think it actually gets at the problem of experts I discussed last week in my post about Digg: Who decides what is news? Who decides what is a planet? Who decides if a dog is really the same species as a wolf?

The IAU vote was apparently rife with political infighting. So while we might want to place our faith in experts, a vote by a group of wrangling scientists somehow seems not the way to go with this. I suppose that's an improvement over past procedures, in which new discoveries were named by monarchs, or on their behalves, but maybe in this our age of easy computer access a better way of proceeding would be discuss it for a year or so - that is, everyone discuss it - and then put it to a vote of the world.

Let science explain, people decide. (Hmm... almost sounds like a familiar cable news slogan, there...)

But this isn't a dispute about a medical procedure, or application of a new technology of transportation. It's a debate about definitions. Why not let humanity decide?

Useful links:

Is Pluto a Planet?: A Historical Journey through the Solar System good historical background

http://www.plutoisaplanet.org/ lots of info, including details on Feb 4, Save Pluto Day

listen to the podcast

Not Snakes, The Chronology Protection Case, On A Plane - To Antarctica

No, not snakes on a plane- maybe better (I hope) - but I thought I'd to tell you this true little story...

At about 6:10 pm on Monday , I logged on to Podcast Pickle - a nice board etc for podcasters - and saw a note: Broadcasting Your Podcast at the South Pole...

The gist: This is the busy, populated season in Antarctica - meaning, about 4000 people live there, many scientists, from 27 different countries. But the Internet connection is slow (hmm... I wonder if they have the same provider I do, a little north of NYC...) But the Internet in parts of Antarctica is not much good for transmitting even just audio material.

So - an organization called Polar Radio was arranging to send some CDs down to Antarctica - on a plane leaving Cape Town, South Africa on January 11. Any CDs of any podcasts, music, anything would be gratefully received.

It was now about 6:14pm in New York, give or take a few seconds, and the date was January 8. I call UPS. Yep, they ship to Cape Town. A CD can get to Cape Town by January 11 - they can't guarantee the exact time. They do offer that I would have to get the package into their system by 6:30pm... or in 14 minutes...

It's now 6:16pm. I don't have time to make CD copies of my podcasts - I almost don't have time for anything. But I make a copy of my radioplay - The Chronology Protection Case - the one performed live at the Museum of TV and Radio in NYC in September 2002, nominated for an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America, etc. (Yeah, I always have a copy handy, you never know when a Hollywood producer may come calling...)

It's past 6:21 now, but I scribble a note, feverishly put the CD in a UPS package ... and I get it into their hands by 6:30!

But now part 2 of the fun begins. I see, by tracking, that my package makes it to Germany, pretty fast. But there it sits - a long day - why? - until it gets put on a plane to Cape Town.

I get confirmation of delivery: January 11, 11:48am, local Cape Town time. But did it make the plane? (de plane, de plane...)

And late last night, I got a thank you e-mail: the CD arrived just in time. (Que scene from Casablanca ... someone runs up to Rick with a package by the plane...)

And so ... I'm very happy about this. I'm not quite sure why. Well, yes am I am. Antarctica, I think, is about the closest you can get to being on another planet on this Earth. So my Chronology Protection Case will soon be heard in Antarctica. And, then ... who knows ... maybe next year, the Space Station, next decade Mars, then 'round Alpha Centauri ... the cosmic is the limit-

Wait a minute - I hope, in my rush, that I put the right CD into that package ... no, I'm sure I did... seriously... I think ... no, I'm sure...

Useful links:

Polar Radio: http://www.radioqualia.net


The Chronology Protection Case radio play: http://odeo.com/audio/4008363/view (hey, it's free) - or look for the little player about half-way down on the panel on the right

Digg and Wikipedia: Further Adventures in Gate-Opening

The latest stop in my world-wide-web tour of new media without gatekeepers brings me to . . . Digg.com - where readers not editors decide what is in the headlines, what makes the front page - because there are no editors.

First, the basics: You, anyone, can become a user or participant on Digg, as easily as you can on MySpace, gmail, Yahoo, and the rest. Once you have an account on Digg, you can submit a story - that is, list on Digg an already existing story, from some online venue, any online venue, a blog, a newspaper online, whatever, as long as it has a URL. (But not MySpace - at least not today - as I'll explain below.) Most of the stories are about some aspect of news - entertainment, business, tech, etc - and Digg also has listings for videos and podcasts.

But listing is just the beginning, and by no means the most revolutionary aspect of Digg. Because once listed, a story can be "dugg" by any other members of Digg - who also have the option of "burying" a story (which also can be just ignored, too). The more net diggs a story has, the higher it gets in the rankings. And the highest ranked stories make the front page, where they can be seen and ranked by everyone who logs on to Digg.

Newly entered stories get put in a high profile upcoming category, where they'll sink or swim - get buried or get too few diggs to make the front page, which of course happens to most stories.

Users also can comment on stories, and these comments can themselves be dugg or buried (but buried comments are still viewable - requiring just a click to come back from the grave).

Now, if this system seems Wikipedian to you, I'd agree. What Wiki is to encyclopedias, Digg is to news media - in both cases, the reader has replaced the expert editor. The aggregate of humanity, rather than the professional few, are calling the shots. There are some differences. Wiki is even more open to the unidentified masses - anyone can edit on Wikipedia, you don't need an account. And, of course, befitting an encyclopedia, the best articles live forever in equi-accessibility on Wiki - which also doesn't put new articles up for a vote, unless someone sees a problem with them. On Digg, articles sooner or later fall in the listings, out of sight and out of mind of most readers.

But the similarities are impressive, considering that Digg and Wiki are, after all, two very different systems. Digg, like Wiki, is constantly embroiled in the struggle between Light and Darkness - between vandals and builders - that is also the daily tableau on Wikipedia. A Digg vandal, for example, would be someone who puts up links to the same bogus article, with cleverly different URLs. Or a vandal with a couple of hundred friends on Digg can make a lame article very popular. People who want to "game" the system have lots of opportunities.

And, just as Wikipedians can sometimes remove worthwhile articles in an attempt to keep the encyclopedia up to often blurry standards (such as "neutral point of view"), Digg can keep certain items out of its system, whatever their quality. I just noticed today, for example, that MySpace blogs - any URL with the blog.myspace.com prefix - is not allowed listing, because some entry or entries with that prefix were "reported" (meaning, accused of being part of some gaming or vandalism).

But as I do with Wikipedia, I think the pros far outweigh the cons on Digg, precisely because the system gets imput from everyone, not just the pros. In the old media system, Walter Cronkite used to end his CBS Evening Newscast with the words "and that's the way it was..." But the truth is, that kind of news cast did and still does reflect the way that a tiny group of editors think you should think that it was ... That would have been a lot to admit, at the end of a newscast.

The New York Times still says you're getting "all the news that's fit to print" when you read the paper. But the truth is you're getting all the news that a small group of editors deemed fit to print. Doesn't parse very well, either.

Digg, whatever its flaws, is a valuable alternative to that kind of pretension.

Have a look for yourself - www.digg.com

Expanded podcast with some additional points: diGGin' Round

Carl Sagan and the Stuff of the Cosmos

Carl Sagan died 10 years ago last week - at the age of 62. He was best known as the voice that humanized science, talking about "billions and billions" of stars in the universe to Johnny Carson and the millions of people who watched the Tonight Show. Fortunately, this was at the dawn of videotaping, and you can see some of Sagan's work on YouTube, where he is as mesmerizing about the human place in the universe as ever.

In 1977, when Sagan was young and in his prime and I was even younger, I was appointed Book Editor of an obscure journal named et cetera. As a way of kicking off my tenure - which turned out to be brief (I've always found editing essentially boring) - I wrote to the people I considered the five greatest thinkers of the day. Sagan was one of them. (Should I tell you my other four choices? OK - Marshall McLuhan, Karl Popper, Arthur Koestler, and Noam Chomsky - for his theories of language, not his politics).

I wrote to each of the authors, told them they had made my Top 5 list and why, and asked them to say a few words about their work. To Sagan, I wrote that it was his work as a philosopher and a popularizer, not his work as a hard scientist, that made me admire him - in particular, his view that, because we come from the cosmos, when we look back out at the cosmos with our telescopes, we are but the stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself. I still find that view thrilling, today.

Happily for me, all five cutting edge thinkers responded with a few paragraphs, mainly thanking me for the honor, etc. But Sagan said something more: he said I shouldn't discount his work as a hard scientist, because that's what he was, and his philosophy and his appearances on television were all a part of that.

And that's stuck with me too. Because, whatever else Sagan may have intended by it, to me it said that, hey, going on the Tonight Show and talking with Johnny may be as much a part of a great cosmologist's work as analyzing the light received from the stars. There's no contradiction, in other words, between the pursuit of fame and the pursuit of knowledge.

And it does make sense, doesn't it? Carl Sagan was a star here on Earth, because of what he saw when he looked at the stars above. The stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself.

A few of Sagan's books:

Billions and Billions

The Dragons of Eden

Pale Blue Dot

And my podcast about Carl Sagan:

talkin' on the cell phone on Discovery

Actually, I'll be talking about the cell phone - not on the cell phone - on a new Discovery Channel tv series this Wednesday, but I thought talkin' on had a better, ah, ring to it...

Here are the details:

This Wednesday, December 27, 1PM (Eastern Standard Time) on the Discovery Channel: The Inside Story of the Cell Phone, featuring me and a handful of who knows who much more knowledgeable experts.

Here's What I Know About It: I was taped for more than an hour last June (2006) at the Museum of Science in Flushing, Queens (New York City). It was an excellent interview - but you never know what will survive to the show and what will end up on the proverbial cutting room floor. The folks who produced this and interviewed me, though, seemed savvy.

The hour-long show is part of a new Discovery series, The Inside Story of ...

What I Especially Like About This Showing: It immediately follows The Inside Story of the iPod - this is bound to draw a lot of viewers (I think Steve Jobs will be interviewed on it)...

What I'm Not Too Thrilled About: 1 pm? Who in their right mind is watching television then? Well, I will, and hopefully you (or set your TiVo or VCR) ... and I'm sure the show will be rebroadcast (I'll tell you when I know).

All in All: I'm pleased the show will be on. As I wrote in my 2004 book, Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium, and How It Has Transformed Everything, I think the cell phone is the most revolutionary medium we have going today. It's not only a vehicle of conversation - spoken and written - but it's giving us everything the web has to offer (tv, movies, radio, podcasts, blogs, websites, etc) and lets us take that with us, wherever we may happen to go. (Are any if you reading this on a device that fits in your hand? Let me know.) With every new month, there is less and less difference between cell phones, ipods, and little computers. I wrote a long time ago that, someday, anyone would be able to get any information that was ever created, from anywhere in the world, anytime ... and that day is almost here, courtesy of the cell phone.

I'd say I'd wave hello to you on the show, but that would require a time machine ... I hope you like it, in any case, if you get a chance to see it.
========================================

Added in January, 2007 - and here's a 4-minute clip of my appearance on the show ...





Relevant links:

• ABC-TV Nightline interview with me (9/12/06) about cell phones: video clip
• CBS-TV Early Show interview with me (4/1/05) about cell phones and kids: transcript
• my book: Cellphone: The Story of the World's Most Mobile Medium

Only Idiots Don't Watch Television...

"Only Idiots Don't Watch Television" was my original title for the following op-ed that I wrote for Newsday this past July, 2006. They changed it to the more dignified title you see below - taken from the next-to-last line of my op-ed - but that's ok, because I do indeed believe that we're seeing a new golden age of television (I say so in the op-ed) - indeed, I've taken to calling our era television's platinum age.

Because, if anything, television has gotten even better since the summer. The first half of the third season of Battlestar Galactica, just concluded last week, was the best science-fiction I've ever seen on television (or at least, the first part of it was - as good as the best Star Trek episodes, and better than most). The Wire concluded a low-key but outstanding season. Kidnapped, foolishly cancelled by NBC, just concluded last night on nbc.com, and it was a superb series - intelligent, stylish, suspenseful. NBC does, at least, deserve credit for fielding it in the first place. Dexter, which I wrote about in a blog post here last week, is a marvelously unusual cop show. Brotherhood is an excellent new political drama. Sleeper Cell, which I also wrote about last week, offered an excellent second season. All three were on Showtime.

And in January, new seasons of Rome (on HBO) and 24 (on Fox) begin. I can hardly wait. In the meantime, as the cold winds of late December blow, here's another look at the view from this past summer...

Newsday
Editorials
IDEAS
TV's new golden age
BY PAUL LEVINSON

Paul Levinson is professor and chairman of communication and media studies at Fordham University. His latest novel is "The Plot to Save Socrates."

July 23, 2006

It used to be called the "idiot box." Critics have been muttering for years that we're a nation of "videots," that television's been rotting our brains. But who are the idiots now?

People who saw "Rome" on HBO this fall? The opening credits alone were a masterpiece of music and animation. Or perhaps the video dopes are those who just finished watching the next-to-concluding season of "The Sopranos" or watched the past three seasons of "The Wire," or I forget how many seasons of "Da Ali G Show," all also on HBO, or the new "Battlestar Galactica" on the Sci-Fi Channel.

All of these shows have been lionized by critics. Tim Goodman of The San Francisco Chronicle called the acting in "The Wire" both "virtuoso" and "phenomenal." David Zurawik of The Baltimore Sun said of "The Sopranos": "If this isn't art, then neither is Mozart." The series won four Emmys in 2004 and has been nominated for many more. "Ali G" has been nominated dozens of times. "Rome" boasts Jonathan Stamp, former BBC executive producer for history and archaeology, as its history consultant. "Battlestar Galactica" has lifted science-fiction on television to a new level of political sophistiction, sensuality and style.

Awards in themselves are certainly no sure indication of quality. But, combined with the raves of critics and cinema-level writing, acting, and production, the achievements of this new age of television are unmistakable.

Who are the nitwits, now? People who saw or missed those shows?

It's not all cable - the networks have been enjoying a golden age, too. "Lost" on ABC and "24" on Fox are two prime examples - "24" led the pack in Emmy nominations announced earlier this month. And in all cases, the availability of these series on DVD, which allows the viewer to see multiple episodes of a series without commercial interruption, is fueling the new excellence of television.

But it's not entirely new, either. There have been great programs throughout TV's history, ranging from "Have Gun, Will Travel" to "Star Trek" to "All in the Family" to "Hill Street Blues" to "ER," to name just a representative sampling over the decades.

What's different now, though, are the wings of new media that, rather than flying away from television, are lifting it to new heights. Not only cable and DVDs, but iPODs, which offer downloadable episodes, are making television easier to watch - and better. Why better? Because when people were obligated to watch television on inflexible schedules dictated by the networks, many shows were pitched to the lowest common denominator. The cardinal rule of that first, now bygone, age of television was "thou shalt not offend or confuse." But when people can see television on their own schedules - whether via on-demand cable, DVD, TiVo or iPODs - television can take chances. It can hire topnotch character actors like Ciaran Hinds, who last year played a supporting role in Steven Spielberg's Oscar-nominated "Munich" and starred splendidly as Caesar in "Rome."

TV can now cater to more individual tastes. Its programs must still live or die based on their rating shares, but the pie is now split so many ways that a smaller piece can go a lot further than in decades past.

Like books and movies, TV can now take real risks to achieve excellence. It can try a prime-time show on polygamy, such as HBO's "Big Love," or a sitcom about a suburban school mom who sells marijuana, like Showtime's "Weeds."

Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan applied the term "rear-view mirror" to help explain our perception of new media. He meant that we see new technology through lenses ground in the past. The automobile was first called "the horseless carriage" and radio "the wireless" before they broke free of their pasts, attained names in their own right and claimed their destiny.

How many people who still think TV is only for dullards and laggards are seeing it through a rear-view mirror, looking at it backward, focused on network domination and stick-figure characterization? Was that what Harper's editor Thomas de Zengotita had in mind when he called cable TV - along with the Internet and DVDs - a "vast goo of meaningless stimulation"? Maybe TV needs a new name.

But, by television or any other name, the much-maligned tube is finally achieving its potential not only to entertain but inspire.

It used to be thought that watching television distracted us from more noble intellectual pursuits like reading. But, to the contrary, it seems that an intellect charged by any medium is all the more hungry for new adventures of the mind. Literacy is on the rise. The National Assessment of Adult Literacy found an 8 percent increase in reading abilities in the past decade. "Harry Potter" and "The Da Vinci Code" are happening in this new golden age of television. Its rising tide will likely be lifting many more boats to come.

Relevant links:

• Defending TV, Again - This Time, Because It's Too Good! 31 March 2007
  
• The Goldplated Globes: What They Missed On TV 18-minute podcast
  
• TV Roundup: The Field in Mid-November 21-minute podcast
  
• first place for Dexter 3-minute podcast
  
• Weep Not for Kidnapped 3-minute podcast
  
• Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium by Paul Levinson

---

The Plot to Save Socrates "challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly "a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News "Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

first place to Dexter

[Updated December 17, 2006, after Season 1 finale.]

Dexter concluded on Showtime this weekend. I think it is easily the best new show on cable or network this season.

Nothing else is easy about the show, and that is what makes it so powerful and appealing. Dexter works for the Miami police. His specialty is bloodwork. He's a master at his job. That's because he really loves his work. And he gives the people of Florida a little something extra: he moonlights as a serial killer of sociopaths and psychopaths.

We have seen serial killers and vigilante killers before, but none mixed into the puzzle that is Dexter, played to subtle and intricate perfection by Michael C. Hall, who received a much-deserved Golden Globe nomination for his acting on the show. On the one hand, it's hard to identify with a character who gets such satisfaction from killing people and cutting them up - even if they are bad people. On the other hand, there is almost a lovable, irresistible quality about Dexter. He has a gentleness, and his cool detachment from life often makes him a perfect gentlemen, and even an oddly considerate and protective boyfriend.

This first season had lots of good trimmings. Excellent cop details and intra-squad rivalries. Deep background on what makes Dexter tick, including a father who recognized Dexter's problem, and taught him how to sublimate his urges into something that is at least helpful to society. And a great evil adversary, in a serial killer who is Dexter's equal or better in his craft, but has none of Dexter's redeeming qualities. The finale wrapped it all up just as we might have hoped in a story that excels in double-edged swords and deeply amibiguous heroes. Evil was dispatched, heroes were confirmed, yet we shudder for their future even as we breathe a ragged sigh of relief. Season 2 in 2007 should be some piece of work.

Showtime is really starting to give HBO a run for its money in the original drama niche. Brotherhood, which Dexter replaced on Showtime, was far and away the best drama on tv in the Summer and early Fall. Sleeper Cell just finished a fine week-long season of intense television on Showtime a few hours ago.

All part of our platinum age of television.




See also my preview review of Dexter, Season Two: Dexter's Back!

Wide Awake for Sleeper Cell

[updated Dec 17 with finale of Season 2; what follows gives away plot details]

Just finished watching the complete 8-hour new season of Sleeper Cell on Showtime - pretty much all in one sitting.

That in itself is extraordinary and indicative of one of the new ways of seeing a television series - as a long movie of eight hours (or, in the case of 24, of 24 hours - which you usually need two or three sessions of viewing to see).

Showtime deserves credit for putting the whole series up On-Demand right away. This certainly beats waiting for the regular showing to be over before you can see the whole series - which in the case of Sleeper Cell would have been eight days, as this series is being shown daily - or waiting for the DVD, which of course means you have to wait much longer.

The series itself had some excellent moments - and three outstanding episodes - the third, the seventh, and the eighth, if you'd like to know. They had some jolting twists, and one major, very interesting and original innovation in the pacing - a thoughtful and provocative departure from what you would expect of a finale.

Indeed, the story for this season could well have ended with Episode 7 - the single best episode - which featured the determent of the major terrorist plot (a dirty radioactive bomb in the Hollywood Bowl), but the success of another (suicide bomber in Las Vegas), as well as the heroic death of Gail, Darwyn's love. This was one of the more breathtaking episodes I've seen on television.

But Sleeper Cell continued with Episode 8, which was really a coda to the first seven episodes. Darwyn and Farik have a final but inconclusive confrontation overseas - which felt for all the world like Darwyn confronting Osama. And if this episode wasn't quite as strong as Episode 7, Sleeper Cell nonetheless deserves praise for going there, and ending this season with a thoughtful portrait of the eternal, never-ending contest between good and evil.

The acting was fine - Michael Ealy put in a strong performance as Darwyn the undercover agent, and Odeh Fehr was powerful and chilling as Farik the terrorist leader - same as in the first season. There were a few soft episodes in the middle - meaning, they could have been cut or reduced with no real harm to the story - but all in all the story was gripping on a variety of social and personal levels.

Highly recommended - especially in this usually lean time for worthwhile tv viewing.

Listen to the podcast of this review at Levinson news clips

Deja well worth Vu

The only thing not close to perfect about Deja Vu is its name. The movie isn't at all about the pyschological feeling of deja vu. It is, at first, about some very interesting surveillance technology, and for that reason the name makes good enough sense. But it is most profoundly about time travel, pure and simple (or maybe: pure and complicated), which has little do with deja vu, and it gets very high marks for respecting the complexity of the paradox of attempting go back into the past to prevent something bad from happening.

That's paradoxical, because if you succeed, you will have eliminated the very motive that you had for going back into the past in the first place.

Denzel Washington plays the hero with his customary cool and power. Paula Patton is sensitive and compelling as the heroine. Current New Orleans - post-Katrina - makes an excellent location, and the movie worked it into the action with just the right eye for detail.

Most satisfying for me - as a long-time fan of science fiction movies - was the way plot built from hi-tech wizardry that just might be actually possible today to techniques that could actually have an impact on the past to ....

Well, this is where I'll stop, so I don't give anything away. But suffice to say that, in order for a time travel story to work, very clear rules of engagment - in terms of what is possible with the given technology - need to be posted, and then respected. And the plot should be sprinkled with a clue here and there, so we can look back and say, ah yes, with the wisdom of hindsight, that's what was actually going on... Deja Vu does almost of this very well (and, when it doesn't, it gives plausible explanations).

The movie was so good, I'll want to view it again...

XXXXXXXXX S P O I L E R S Below - Don't Read On Unless You've Seen the Movie

Here's my explanation (of course, the right one) for what happens in the end: First, the movie begins with DenzelOne. He is one who investigates the explosion, looks into Claire's murder, etc. When he finally travels two hours back in time near the end of the movie, he creates a universe in which there are two of him: DenzelOne, who travelled back in time; and DenzelTwo, who hasn't traveled, and is living his life as a ATF investigator two hours before the action in the movie begins. DenzelOne dies in the car in the water. DenzelTwo comes to investigate the explosion that almost but did not happen, and will live happily ever with Claire (who does not die in this universe).

The New James Bond - Without the Golden Pun

Actually, I thought Daniel Craig was great as James Bond in Casino Royal - I thought the movie was was excellent, too - but I missed two things in the new movie: gadgets and puns.

I'll save the gadgets and Q for another post. Here, I'll just lament the loss of puns. There were so few of them in Casino Royal that you could hear a pun drop. In fact, I heard only one (but I won't tell you what it is, because that would spoil the fun, and give away an important part of the plot).

The puns were always one of my favorite parts of the Bond movies - Sean Connery saying Lotta Lenya got her kicks (she wielded a shoe with a knife), Roger Moore saying he was keeping the old British end up as he made love to the heroine in a boat under the closing credits ... you know, that sort of bling.

Now, it makes good sense that Craig's Bond doesn't say many of those things - he's just starting out, and the whole point of the movie is that he doesn't yet have the polish and sophistication of the later Bond. He's not sure of his drinks or his clothes or even his poker cards. He's more vulnerable to women. He's driving a Ford in the first part of the movie.

So we can forgive him and the movie makers if they left him with barely a verbal barb. Who knows, maybe the world has outgrown that kind of repartee, which was most in vogue when Cole Porter was the top, a good two decades before the first Bond movie, anyway.

But I miss the license to kill which if it didn't make you die of laughter at least left you with a chuckle. Let's hope we haven't had the last laugh on Bond.

Listen to the podcast of this review: The Man Without the Golden Pun

See also Quantum of Solace Felt Like HBO or Showtime - High Praise

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

more about The Plot to Save Socrates...





Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE!

TV Roundup: The Field in Mid-November

reposting this here - the original post on twice upon a rhyme on November 9 is getting lots of attention...

also check my latest Light On Light Through podcast on this - also available on iTunes

============================
Time for another assessment of the current tv season. We're in the November sweeps - one of the months which advertisers use to decide how much commercials on tv are worth. The networks - all of tv - are thus more attuned than usual to getting the highest possible ratings - the greatest number of viewers.

I realized, the other night, that my tv viewing can basically be divided into three categories. At one end, I drop whatever else I'm doing, rush home early from dinner, put aside writing a blog post or listening to a podcast, to watch a tv show when it's broadcast live. At the other end, I'm feeling as I look at the tv that I'm wasting my time, and just about anything else would be more enjoyable or productive or of value or interest to me. Then there's everything else in between - which translates into I like a show enough to tape it and watch it later, catch a replay, but not enough to let it direct the schedule of my life.

So, with that in mind, here's how I see the current tv field:

Battlestar Galactica:

Well, as I've mentioned many times, I think it's the best show on television right now. The show took a daring turn last season, introducing a radically new plot thread at the end of the final episode. The thread was wrapped up almost completely in the first part of the current season - another unexpected move. I had lunch the other day with Bob Hughes - entertainment reporter for the Wall Street Journal. We had a great conversation, in which I indicated that The Wire was the best show on television about the real world, because Battlestar Galactica, a better show this year, is science fiction. Battlestar Galactica is about the real world, Hughes replied. And he's completely right. The show is so good that, not only do I put aside everything else to watch it, I'm almost willing to do the same for the many blog posts, message boards, and podcasts percolating about the show.

Dexter:

Showtime's new show about a serial killer who takes out other serial killers is, so far, the best new tv this season. Michael C. Hall - of Six Feet Under fame - plays the part to chilling, sometimes even humorous, perfection. I've never quite seen anything like this on television. A serial killer with a social conscience... He has trouble relating to people - because he so detached - but is nice to his girlfriend. (Note added November 16: The shows raises the important ethical issue of whether a serial killer of serial killers is ultimately a good or a bad human being - worth seeing for that reason alone.)

Heroes: NBC's surprise hit, which had a nice recent cover on Entertainment Weekly. Sort of X-Men meets Unbreakable, but more charming. Highlights are a great Japanese character with a realistic (as far as I know) portrayal of Japanese culture, a single mother who does web-cast porn, and a literally indestructible cheerleader. But not all the heroes are all that interesting. Still, there is enough that appeals to me that I'll keep watching - if not always on its prime showing on Monday, then its replay on the Sci-Fi Channel on Friday (two hours before Battlestar Galactica). (Note added November 16: I'm enjoying this show more and more - especially because Hiro is a time traveller. Heroes gets more complex with every episode - a very good progression.)

Kidnapped: The merciless dictates of ratings first caused NBC to move the show to Saturday night, and then to a life solely on the nbc.com web page. At least that's better than what happened to Coronet Blue, the classic fragment of a lost tv series from the 1960s (which I'll likely be writing about on some quiet weekend). Kidnapped has intelligence, style, subtlety, and deserved better than this - though, who knows, maybe life online is not such a bad life these days.

Lost: Came back after a disappointing second season with a pretty good first third of a third season. But, I don't know, the show could have been better this season, too. The flashbacks had almost no new information. The action in the original camp was boring. Mixed into this were some excellent threads about the Others, about Kate, Sawyer, and Jack ... but the show still feels to me like it's in a little bit of trouble. We're still without answers to most of the crucial puzzles of the first season - such as why characters who presumably met for the first time on the doomed plane had intersecting lives years before the plane... (see my twice upon a rhyme blog post on this from about six months ago)

The Nine: It's on right after Lost, but the possibility of even one new message or e-mail is enough to pull me away from this show. The main problem, for me, is the show has not really progressed very far since the bank robbery which got the ball rolling. I suspect it will soon have fewer than nine viewers...

Six Degrees: Another show that started off pretty good, but doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Like Heroes, it has an uneven mix of very appealing and somewhat boring, obvious characters. But it lacks the sparkle of Heroes, and its New York City ambience is not as good as the streets in Kidnapped.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Bring back 77 Sunset Strip from the late 1950s! Studio 60 had a few good moments, but the Aaron Sorkin banter weighs heavy. I don't dislike this show as much as do some critics, but NBC skipped a couple of weeks for this show, and I barely knew it was missing.

The Wire: Well, you all know how much I enjoy this show. And though this season is not the best for The Wire, without Stringer Bell, it is still outstanding, superb, television. And that opening song - "Down in the Hole". Every season I'm a little annoyed when they put up a new version in the opening credits. And every season, after 3 orr 4 episodes, I'm liking the new version the best.... (Note to blogspot readers: See my "The Wire Without Stringer," a post from a few weeks ago on my twice upon a rhyme blog. And the listen to the Light On Light Through podcast of "The Wire Without Stringer," for a 60-second preview of Idris Elba's new song, "Johnny Was". Idris played Stringer Bell.)

So, there you have it ... I'll have another round-up in the next few months - by which time, Jack Bauer will back on the screen...

The Enjoyable Trouble with Time Travel

I've been thinking more about time trave than usual - I always think about it at least a little - because I've been enjoying Heroes on NBC, and the main reason is one of the most appealing characters, Hiro, can bend space and time. In other words, he can teleport and time travel.

Now teleportation, though extraordinary, is really just an extension of what we already do, all the time - move across distances, or space. As in walking across the street or taking a plane. Time travel, on the other hand, is something we never do. That is, we live forward in time, but never go backward, and never go forward any faster, certainly not instantly.

Which is what makes time travel such an immensely enjoyable vehicle for fiction. You can travel a day or a year into the future and see what you're doing then, and what's happening in the world. You can travel to the past and have a drink or a cup of tea with your great-great grandmother. (You can go back in the past and try to save Socrates...)

Except ... you'd need to make sure that if you did meet your great-great-grandmother, it wasn't before she met your great-great-grandfather. Because what if your meeting somehow distracted the two from ever meeting... Where you would be then?

Paradoxes like this are what make time-travel stories so much fun - and I think they're also what makes time travel impossible. Sure, you could come up with scientific possibilities, such as the creation of an alternative universe every time you travel into the past, which would allow you to change past A (your great-great-grandparents met and had children) into past B (they did not, because of your trip to the past), which would allow you (a product of A) to travel to the past and avoid the paradox of doing away with circumstances that allowed you to travel to the past (because the A that created you would still exist - all that would happen is a new B would be created) ... but, whew, creation of such alternative universes every time you travel seems even more farfetched than time travel!

And travel to the future has its own devastating problems. If I travelled even just a day into the future, and saw what you were wearing, would that mean you had no choice about what clothes you put on tomorrow? I don't know about you, but I'm rather sure that I have free will - at least, about what kind of shirt I wear. (Whether I exercise that will well or not is, of course, another story.)

So, in the end, I'm afraid that we'll never be able to travel in time, except in our minds and our fiction...

On the other hand, I just could be an agent from the future, doing my best to disguise my tracks...

Useful links:

Deja Well Worth Vu blog post review of 2006 Deja Vu movie

see elsewhere on Infinite Regress for reviews of Heroes and Lost episodes...

Time Travel in Fact and Fiction free 20-minute podcast

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The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"a Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

"Sierra Waters is sexy as hell" - curled up with a good book

my other blog & podcast

Brief initial post to welcome you to this blog - which I expect will be mostly about television and movies. I love responding to comments, so by all means jump in.

You also might find my other blog of interest - twice upon a rhyme - more or less weekly commentary on new techs, popular culture, tv, movies, Wikipedia, outer space, politics, the works, that I've been writing since March 2006. Come over any time and jump into those discussions.

And, if you enjoy podcasts, give my Light On Light Through a try - also free on iTunes - pretty much the same as my two blogs, but with a little music, phone-ins, and the occasional sound effect...

You can also subscribe at http://lightonlightthrough.com/rss

Of Asterisks, Black Swans, Thom Yorke, and D*ck

So, Thom Yorke has a haunting new song - "Black Swan" - to be released on his Eraser CD in July. You won't hear it on any radio station - at least, not the non-satellite kind.

Radiohead never did too well in airplay, anyway. But there's a more explicit, illicit reason you won't hear Yorke's plaintively beautiful song. "This is f*cked up, f*cked up," the refrain says, over and sadly sweetly over again.

The FCC was just empowered to increase fines for allegedly "indecent" broadcasting by 10 times their previous amounts. Even with the original amounts, no radio station would want to risk hundreds of thousands of dollars for repeated offenses.

But it's not just radio and TV. Our society is so provincial that you can't just come out and write "f*ck" in most publications - that is, you can write "f*ck" but not the actual word.

Which is interesting. Because, in addition to writing "f*ck," you can further write that the asterisk stands for a "u". You can say that on the air, too. You can also go the "freakin'," "f'ing," and "f-word" routes - in print or in speech - but you can't write or say the actual word. Even though "f*ck" and the other substitutions are all saying exactly that same thing.

Just who would be hurt by seeing or hearing the actual word? Kids? I bet it's a rare 9-year old in America these days who hasn't heard the word at least as often as your average man or woman in Congress. (Or maybe not - VP D*ck Cheney did tell Senator Patrick Leahy to "go f*ck" himself just outside the floor of the Senate a few years ago.)

Well, we can all hear "Black Swan" on the Web, and soon on the new Thom Yorke CD. We'll no doubt be able to hear it on Sirius Satellite Radio, too, where Howard Stern had to go to continue his show in the way he and his fans wanted. Except Sirius costs money. So, thank you, FCC, Congress, and President B*sh, for this new sin tax.

We'll also be able to hear "Black Swan" over the closing credits of A Scanner Darkly in July - Richard Linklater's rendition of the Philip K. Dick story. Thank goodness the F*ds haven't gotten to the movie theaters yet.

But the FCC is ushering in a new Dark Ages for non-satellite radio and non-cable television - programming them, in effect, out of cutting-edge artistic relevance. And they're sharpening their talons for cable and satellite radio, too. After all, it's unconstitutional - in violation of the First Amendment - for the government to go after broadcasters, so why stop there? Why let an artist paint the human condition with a full palette of options, when you can go in an outlaw the most vivid colors?

It's fucking ridiculous.

How Star Trek Liberated Television

This essay was first published in Boarding the Enterprise, edited by David Gerrold and Robert J. Sawyer, BenBella Books, 2006.

How Star Trek Liberated Television

“Minerva’s owl begins its flight only in the gathering dust…”
-- G.W.F. Hegel, 1770-1831

by Paul Levinson


Hegel was talking about how the greatest writings of the classical world –- those that would have the most lasting impact on our popular culture –- took shape as the civilizations around them started to decline. He was thinking about Socrates and Plato in Athens, Cicero and the Roman Republic, Augustine and the end of the Empire.

Let’s think about Star Trek and the decline of network television.

The twenty-first century has not been kind to traditional network television in America. Overall viewership has been falling for more than a decade. The premiere of The Sopranos several seasons ago drew more viewers than any program on the networks. A mere handful of millions separates Fox News on cable from network news on free TV. Although the Nielsen ratings in the Fall of 2005 show more people watching television than ever before, it’s often not the networks they are watching.

It wasn’t always so. Television entered the 1970s at the height of the networks’ oligarchic power. CBS, NBC, and ABC accounted for 90 percent of the prime-time audience back then, which watched television on some 36 million TV sets. This translated into more than 100 million people. In contrast, the four networks today (the original three plus Fox) often have trouble attracting more than half that number of viewers in total.

The competition back then was as fierce as it is now. In order to attract the top advertising dollar, networks had to field a reliable 30-percent share -- a consistent third of all network viewers. Programs that achieved less lived on short leashes, regardless of their quality and the passion of the their audiences. The original Star Trek on NBC was such a program. It was one of the best series I had ever seen on TV. And it was cancelled in 1969, after just a three-year run. The reason: its ratings were slipping. Even worse: the majority of its viewers were children and teenagers, not the kind of audience that advertisers were looking for the 1960s. In those days, kids didn't have much purchasing power. And they spent what they had on products not advertised on prime-time TV.

I was one of those kids (well, I was 19 when Star Trek debuted on NBC TV in 1966). I was furious and heart-broken when it was cancelled.

We all know what happened afterwards to Star Trek. How it first returned in the afterlife of syndication, on local, unimportant stations throughout the country, at midnights on Sunday on Channel 11 in New York City, at after-school hours and other decidedly non-prime time showings in other cities. How it inspired a following that generated four subsequent television series and ten motion pictures, and propelled Star Trek into the popular culture zenith inhabited by the creations of Homer, Shakespeare, and Dickens.

This is the story of how that syndication not only launched Star Trek into mythic levels in our popular culture, but signaled the beginning of the end for the network domination of television. From The Sopranos to Rome, also on HBO, from MTV to CNN and Fox News to the Discovery and the Sci-Fi Channels, all that we see on cable today is the result of Star Trek’s amazing off-network voyages.


Syndication and Star Trek

Syndication before Star Trek was an afterthought for viewers. The pleasures it afforded were akin to those you got when you drove a friend’s jalopy, or enjoyed food you took home from a fine restaurant the night before.

Other enormously successful reruns had only a fraction of Star Trek's impact. "To the moon, Alice, to the Moon!" is no doubt recognizable to countless viewers around the world who have seen The Honeymooners in reruns since its CBS prime-time debut on a Saturday evening in 1955. So is the theme music from Bonanza. But only one movie has been made of The Honeymooners -- with Cedric the Entertainer in 2005 -- and no movies have been made of Bonanza. No further series carried forth the story of The Honeymooners, and Bonanza had one failed "prequel," The Ponderosa, on cable TV in 2001. Lost in Space, on CBS from 1965 through 1968, did manage a movie adaptation, but it and the original series have had little to no effect on our popular culture.

I Love Lucy is the high watermark of this kind of syndication. The show began filming for CBS in 1951, continued for 23 years in one or another version, and soon was syndicated all over America and the world. By 1974, Viacom had 179 syndicated episodes of Lucy in the field. In New York City alone, you could see reruns of Lucy on three different local TV networks -- in fact, twice a day on one of them. Lucy is as hilarious today as she was in the 50s, and you can see her in a fair number of old movies, too. But of course there can be no new Lucy series, and nor are there any sections in bookstores stocked with paperbacks that tell the story of her further or alternate adventures.

What did Star Trek have that all these other shows did not? It was not only the story line. It was the specific way in which Star Trek broke into syndication. It fit none of the patterns. It broke all of the molds. Unlike Lucy and Bonanza, which were huge successes throughout much of their prime-time original runs, Star Trek was a ratings disappointment. Indeed, Lucy and Bonanza were still riding high in prime-time network television during their syndications -- which of course far outlived their original lives -- but Star Trek was dead and all-but-buried when its syndication began in 1970. Its success in syndication was thus a slap in the face of network television and its ratings logic from the very beginning.

But Star Trek’s syndication also came along at just the right time in the history of television.


Diversification of Media

The history of media shows a very interesting pattern that has repeated itself many times. When new mass media start out, they attempt to please everyone. They create entertainment, report news, in a way that is designed to appeal to as many people as possible. They are the most “mass” of mass media at these outsets.

But sooner or later, this changes. The first American magazines that rolled off the printing presses in the 1840s were intended for all readers. Harper’s had something for men, women, children, outdoors types, bookworms, everyone. A hundred years later, a hundred different magazines on newsstands beckoned to fisherman, gardeners, coin collectors, doll collectors, businessmen, housewives and almost every conceivable taste and interest. Radio underwent a similar, if faster, development. Stations in the 1920s and 30s broadcast news, talk, sports, all kinds of music, and soap operas and mystery shows, to boot. By the 1960s, we had stations devoted entirely to rock ‘n’ roll, country and western, classical music, or talk.

Television from its inception did everything faster than every other medium. It was in ninety percent of American homes by the end of the 1950s -- a decade after its commercial introduction –- a record for adoption still not exceeded by personal computers and cell phones.

Although few people realized it, television’s sped-up evolution made it ready for diversification by the early 1970s. Certainly the network executives had no idea what was coming. Having pulled the rug out from under Hollywood and the neighborhood movie theater in the 1950s – Hollywood moguls hugely underestimated the appeal of staying at home and watching TV – the network execs made the same kind of mistake about cable. They overlooked the public’s appetite for specialized choices in TV viewing, and how cable could feed it.

Star Trek in syndication provided the first example. In retrospect, a science fiction show was an ideal vehicle for this maiden voyage.

Although the 1950s is known as the “golden age” of science fiction, the sales of its leading authors, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, were far from golden back then. On television, Captain Video and His Video Rangers ran on the third-rate Dumont TV network from 1949 through 1955. Actually, Dumont was fourth-rate - always struggling, limping far behind the big three networks. Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh kindly describe it as "perpetually impoverished" in their 1979 Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows. Captain Video's budget was so pinched that it provided the grand total of $25 per week for props! (That's right - twenty-five dollars - I didn't leave off any zeros.) The Twilight Zone had considerably more success in its original 30-minute format on CBS from 1959-1962, but failed to make the transition to an hour-long show.

Given this ambiguous status of science fiction – the mixed signals it gave to the popular culture – it is entirely understandable that NBC first took a chance with Star Trek, and then was quick to cancel it. What happened afterward to the networks is also understandable, but only now with the wisdom of hindsight.


The Time and the Place: Guerrilla Television

How can TV – how does any medium – cater to a specialized taste? How can it satisfy that appetite in a way that invites the rest of the public to join the party? What is the best time and place for such presentations?

The thing about syndication is that it had no time and place - nothing appointed for everyone at the same time, at least not nationally. It was off or under the radar. It went totally contrary to the mainstream miracle of network television, in which everyone in the country, or at least 30 or so million viewers, watched the same show at the same time. In its heyday, network television reveled in everyone arranging calendars, making a point of staying home at a particular time, to watch a hit show.

But even locally here in New York City, Star Trek's schedule in syndication was sketchy. It was on midnight on Sunday, but sometimes it was also there on Saturday.

I remember calling my girlfriend Tina, long since my wife. "Did you see 'City on the Edge of Forever' last night? I tuned in in the middle, and didn't want to wake you."

"When will be it on again?"

Who knew? Maybe a year, maybe next week, if you took into account the Saturday schedule, but who knew what that was or how long it would be in effect?

The people at Channel 11 presumably knew, though come to think of it, maybe not. I'm sure I saw "The Trouble with Tribbles" at least three times in syndication in one year, and "Spock's Brain" twice ("You'll get nothing more from her, Jim -- hers is the mind of a child!"). Where was the sense in that?

It didn't make much sense but that was its charm – and its power. Marshall McLuhan's celebrated 1960s distinction between "hot" and "cool" media explains part of it. Hot media put everything out clearly and precisely. But once we get it, hear it, read it -- like a newspaper -- we have little further interest in it. We already know its stories. We know what to expect. Cool media are more low-profile, ambiguous, imprecise. We therefore can never get enough of them. We can't get our fill because we can never imbibe them completely. Star Trek's banishment from the networks immersed it in a dark, cool pool of our memories. The vagaries of syndication brought it a lot closer -- yet still somehow always just a bit beyond our calendar and reach. You couldn’t really make a plan or precise appointment with yourself to see it. But you also knew that it was somehow always there, anyway. Like some ubiquitous, invisible being, it was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Many people worship such beings. Star Trek's fans felt that way
about Star Trek in syndication.

And cable television was just about ready to pick up on that.


Dumont Avenged!

Ironically, cable was introduced in State College, Pennsylvania in the 1950s as a way of providing TV network programming to people beyond broadcast range. The town of State College is located right smack dab in the middle of that wide state, too far from Philadelphia in the east and Pittsburgh in the west to receive their signals via air. But it is a big college community, and the television networks and their advertisers wanted to reach it. The answer was cable. Like FM radio when it was first introduced in the 1940s, cable was thought of as an adjunct, an extra channel, for mainstream broadcasting.

This did not change until the early 1980s, when CNN, MTV, and HBO began offering programs not available at all on the networks. This was less than a decade after Star Trek in syndication had shown the good sense of providing a program no longer available on network TV. Cable was the brain-child of many people, all of whom were aware of the success of Star Trek in syndication. Only a TV-exec confined to a planetoid around Alpha Centauri could not have been. But at least one of the great pioneers of cable in the 1980s had a more explicit connection: Star Trek reruns had been a big hit on Ted Turner’s WTBS television station in Atlanta in the 1970s. He had seen first hand, in his profit-and-loss columns, that there was not only life but spectacular impact beyond network TV. You need only to hear Darth Vader as the voice of CNN to appreciate how deeply Ted Turner was tuned into science fiction and its power in the real world.

When a medium begins to falter, it has no shortage of would-be successors nipping at its heels. Videotaping technology was also invented in the mid-1950s, and soon replaced the feeble kinescope, which at first was the only way of making copies of television shows. Among the early successes of video was the taping of the 1959 Nixon-Khrushchev "Kitchen" debate for broadcast on NBC. But these Ampex videotape devices were used by the networks to enhance their programming – like cable TV in those days, videotaping was an adjunct of network TV, not a stand-alone medium – and the taping devices were in any case not available to the general public. An Ampex recorder had a price tag of $45,000 in 1958.

Sony came to the rescue of videotape and television viewers starved for diversity and more control over their television in the mid-1970s – just as Star Trek was beginning to make a big name for itself in the backwaters of syndicated television. VCRs introduced by Sony were intended for the viewing public, and cost less than one-tenth of the 1958 Ampex. As demand quickened, prices dropped to below $2000 per device. Still no bargain, but affordable to the upper middle classes. Soon VCRs would be in reach of everyone, and become standard gear for television.

When the television networks finally realized what was happening, they were horrified at the prospect. People were watching rented movies rather than prime-time shows on their TV screens. Even worse, viewers could tape a program, play it back, and speed past the commercials. So upset were the networks about this possibility that they went all the way to the Supreme Court – in 1984, as cable was first beginning to flex its muscles as an independent medium - in an attempt to make it illegal for viewers to videotape television shows. (So much for corporate network support of the First Amendment, when it can hurt their pocketbooks.) The Supreme Court, in a rare display of good judgment about the media in the twentieth-century, wisely decided not to give the networks what they wanted.

Today, TiVo and similar technologies, as well as “on demand” cable, are making the VCR obsolete, and the networks along with it. V-casts and mobisodes are debuting on cell phones. How much longer commercial television can endure with viewers effortlessly able to delete commercials, or watch programs by subscription on cable and cell phone with no commercials to begin with, is anyone's guess. But the successful assault on network hegemony began in 1970, on the date that Star Trek went into syndication.

The feature shared by all of these developments -- Star Trek in syndication, the rise of cable TV and VCRs, and now TiVo and its siblings -- is the assertive viewer, the basic human desire to see and hear our entertainment when we want it, rather than wait passively for a network to dole it out.

The Internet probably has been the least injurious of new media to the traditional television networks. We can look on the Web for additional information about our favorite network shows. We can discuss them in online communities and message boards. And we can "stream" or download a missed episode of a current network series -- or simply see one we want to view again. But these very benefits of the Web cater, again, to our hunger for entertainment on our schedule rather than someone else's, and in the long run only expose the rigidity and unresponsiveness of traditional network TV to our needs.

The Internet as a medium for first military and then scholarly work goes back to the 1960s. The personal computer as a device at hand for everyday people was introduced in the 1980s, and its connection to the Web took wings about a decade later. Once again, the transformation from corporate and administrative to personal satisfaction took place just a few years after Star Trek debuted in syndication on Channel 11 in New York City, Ted Turner’s WTBS in Atlanta, and local stations across America. Coincidence? Well, one could argue that the impulse to satisfy our entertainment needs on our own schedule was so strong, and the networks so inept in fulfilling it, that the revolution would have happened anyway, with or without Star Trek. Certainly the technology of cable and the Web, and the daring of innovators like Ted Turner, would have been there, anyway. But revolutions need a first shot, a Paul Revere, to signal their onset. And Star Trek in syndication provided that.

It is probably also worth noting that David Gerrold, author of the acclaimed "Tribble" episodes and one of the editors of this book, also contributed to the digital revolution with a column about personal computing in Profiles, a magazine devoted to the Kaypro "CP/M" computer in the 1980s. In fact, so did my friend Rob Sawyer, the other editor of this book. The roots of the revolution fomented by Star Trek run wide and deep.


Human-Fashioned Futures

The evolution of television towards greater satisfaction of viewer tastes and choices is no coincidence. Along with the diversification and specialization of mass media, the empowerment of the viewer points to a crucial truth about the human relationship to technology: in the long run and the last analysis, we control our technology and media, not vice versa.

You wouldn’t know this given what most critics of media say. Those who pass judgment on our popular culture often depict us as creatures of our media, which increasingly dictate our tastes, schedules, and lives. In fact, the liberation of television begun by Star Trek shows just the opposite.

It is entirely appropriate that science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular led this charge. At its best, science fiction shows human rationality struggling with and triumphing over a chaotic, hostile, dangerous universe. Until 2006, The New York Times confined most reviews of science fiction to columns on page 38 or the equivalent in which three or four novels are accorded a paragraph or two each of review -- almost literally on the margins. That may in fact have helped science fiction, by keeping it suppressed and edgy, but it missed how science fiction is the quintessential story-telling of our time, uniquely capturing the human connection to the cosmos: our capacity to first know it and then reshape it to our own specifications. (Not only science fiction got short shrift in The New York Times. Mystery and detective fiction still do. And romance novels are not reviewed there at all. The genres are apparently too popular to merit the Times' attention. If it's not about a dysfunctional Southern family, the "newspaper of record" has little interest in reviewing it. But that's a story for another essay.)

More than any program in the history of television, Star Trek exemplified these highest ideals of science fiction. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu and the rest were standard-bearers for our human encounter with the cosmos, for the unique mixtures of passion and logic that we bring to our encounters with everything.

Back here on Earth, in the 1960s, the program failed. But its lessons and thrills were far more profound than could be contained in any decade or network. It was and is a story for the centuries and the millennia, and its appropriate medium could therefore never be just network television, or indeed any single means. Its proper vehicle is, instead, every possible kind of communication at hand, which today includes books, television, motion pictures, and the Web.

Who back in the 1960s could have predicted such pollination, which broke through network TV like an explosion of dandelion seeds, invigorating half a dozen media and transforming television in the process? Not even Harlan Ellison, author of "City on the Edge of Forever" (in my and many other people's estimation the best script and episode in the original Star Trek series), who told the Washington Post in 1972 that in his opinion Star Trek was "dead." (Thanks to David Alexander's 1994 biography of Gene Roddenberry -- Star Trek Creator --for salvaging Ellison's classic of poor prediction from the historical dustbin.)

In those days, after all, gone was pretty well gone on television. Like an enemy of the state who had been declared a non-person in Orwell's 1984, with all images expunged from the public record, a television show once cancelled was invisible, unattainable. It wasn't like an old book that stayed on the same shelf, in the same library, for years and years. Its exile was far worse than yesterday's newspaper, which you at least could keep to wrap fish in. For that matter, last year's and earlier newspapers were available on microfiche in the library, for anyone who wanted to peruse them.

It was into the pit of such programmed, televised amnesia that NBC and just about everyone assumed Star Trek was headed after its cancellation. Instead, when NBC cancelled the series, it actually was taking the first big step in canceling itself and the two other networks as the mighty triumvirate that once dictated everything new that we saw on television.

The twenty-first century revolution in media had begun.

See also: Star Trek: Reborn, Reset, Resplendent and Star Trek Into Darkness: Echoes, Resonances, Great

                                        

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