TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

I don’t have your standard white-guy hatred for Al Sharpton. I really don’t. I have always felt like he has the right to do whatever he wants whether I agree with it or not. Most of the times I disagree with him, but that’s to be expected… he doesn’t represent my “community.” So, when he started pressing Don Imus to be fired, I whole-hearted disagreed with him (for the same reason that I think he has the right to do whatever he wants, I don’t think that anyone should ever be persecuted for what they say on a talk show; short of inciting an insurrection and, even then, I’d have to think about it).

The interesting thing, to me, about the whole Imus situation is this: what did firing Imus fix? Is it going to prevent other radio shows from being racist and misogynistic? Is it going to prevent stern from having “Stripper Jeopardy”? Are Opie and Anthony going to stop playing “Guess What’s In My Pants” (a game where a caller rubs the phone receiver over her delicates and they try to guess how her pubes are styled)?

Really, what did it accomplish? Are these girls, the real injured party in all of this, going to feel better about their season? Does it take away the fact that our parasitic national media followed them around over Easter break and shoved microphones in their faces to get comments on something they never heard, and never would have heard, had this not become a cause? That’s something missing in all this which I haven’t seen mentioned many places. These girls never would have heard this statement had it not blown up. They’re under 50, so they don’t listen to Imus, and they’re in college, so they don’t listen to morning radio. Had this not been turned into a juggernaut, this is something they never would have heard and they would have gone through their entire lives thinking they had a really good basketball season. Don’t forget that our national media turned this into a sensation. Imus sparked it, but our media finished it. The girls are the injured parties here, regardless of what idiot Steven A Smith said on Sportscenter; essentially that the girls’ wishes here didn’t matter. We didn’t have to wait to see what they said, Imus needed to go.

Really, Steve?

These girls had their season turned into national sensation by our media, not by Imus. What he said was out of line, but it was two-week suspension out of line. It wasn’t lose your job out of line. Isiah Thomas, on Smith’s radio show, physically threatened Bill Simmons. Is that out of line? I’d say it was.

But again, I’ll ask “What’s Sharpton’s angle?” What was he looking to accomplish? He certainly didn’t ease race relations. He certainly didn’t make white people respect black people any more. I don’t, and possibly never will, understand Sharpton’s goals. What if he had taken this opportunity to have Imus on his show to let him explain himself and apologize and not spent the entire spot attacking, including escalating an offhanded “you people” comment which was obviously referring to the people in the studio and instead interpreted to be racist. What if Sharpton had spent that spot explaining why the comment was hurtful? What if Sharpton had then gone on Imus’s show, with its predominantly white audience, and explained why black people found that statement hurtful? Why wouldn’t you use this situation to really try to get a message out there in a peaceful way instead of trying to have a guy fired who was obviously sorry and obviously wanted to make amends? Imus was totally willing to give Sharpton airtime. What does it accomplish? Will all the other morning shows stop goofing on stereotypes? I don’t understand it.

My problem with this is that every time Sharpton does something like this, which is waste his time on something meaningless, it takes credibility away for things that he attaches himself to that really do matter, like the Sean Bell shooting. Anytime police officers fire 50 shots in a public place, it needs to be investigated. Had Sharpton not attached himself to it, it probably wouldn’t have been. That kind of stuff is important. But when he attaches himself to meaningless things it becomes harder to take him seriously when it does matter. And that’s the worst part of it because there is good he can do.

At the end, who won? The girls’ season is still ruined. A rich white guy doesn’t have to work anymore. Imus’s telethon for kids with cancer and SIDS research is ruined (and CBS’s firing of Imus during this telethon is unconscionable). Freedom of expression takes a hit. Imus fans are upset. Radio shows aren’t going to change their format. Sharpton looks like a self-aggrandizing tool. MSNBC and CBS look like they don’t stand behind their people. Glaxo-Smith-Kline, Sprint/Nextel, Proctor and Gamble, General Motors, American Express, and DiTech look like they don’t support freedom of expression as guaranteed by the founding document of our country. Who wins?

No one does… and as long as we keep allowing the free exchange of ideas to be compromised, this kind of stuff will continue. I’ll be canceling my Sprint/Nextel account in the next couple of days and using this as an excuse to finally buy the new phone I’ve been putting off for the last six months and switch from Tums (GSK) to Rolaids (Pfizer). As a consumer, that’s all I can do.

This column was supposed to run lead on Inside Pulse as part of big Lost feature which supposed to coincide with a “huge interview” that the TV crew scored. It was a combination of two questions: “Can Americans handle serial television?” and “Is Lost still the best show on television?” Of course, the interview fell through and it’s been languishing in the approval queue since. I’m going to post it here so it gets out there somewhere, because I thought it was good. The context is that it was being written after the “ratings disaster” that the media made up in February where the show hit it’s lowest rating ever of “only” 12 million people… on Valentine’s Day. If only there had been some explanation…

A warning, this column includes information up to and including the most recent episode, Tricia Tanaka Is Dead. If you haven’t seen up to this, and are anti-spoiler, this column is not for you.

When we first began to talk about this Lost feature, we started tossing around ideas for columns. I, of course, chose my topic at the last minute. What really made my decision was the general hate and bile that the Tricia Tanaka Is Dead episode has received. One of my friends has gone so far as to insist the episode doesn’t really exist. Which leads to the question:

Can the American television fan handle serial television?

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve watched One Life To Live for about six years now. I know serial television. I know the frustration of wanting a story to run its course. I fully understand the “GET ON WITH IT” mentality. I’m also fully willing to entertain the notion that years of watching daytime television tempered my patience. I know that, sometimes, you have to wait to get your answers. Extending that patience into primetime shows isn’t that hard. In comparison with daytime (200 episodes per year), prime time television, even Lost, (22-24 episodes per year) moves at the speed of light.

The problem is: what do you do with everyone else who doesn’t much care for soaps and, by extension, doesn’t really know how to deal with shows that don’t give them instant gratification? For all the hatred it receives from fans wanting all the answers now, Lost is a well-paced show. The first season essentially did nothing but introduce questions. After the show was renewed, they set up for the long haul. Was the island really a mystical place? Why was Jack seeing his dead father? What was the monster? A polar bear on a tropical island? Why is there a giant metal hatch? People devoured these mysteries. Fan-sites popped up and people couldn’t wait to tell other people their theories, no matter how far out they were.

Season two spent some time answering these mysteries while introducing new ones. We know that an electromagnetic event caused the plane to crash. We know that the dinosaur is really a cloud of black smoke. We have a feeling that this smoke is what causes people to see their long-lost relatives, but we’re not quite sure. We know people have been on the island for quite a long time. We know that the Others aren’t really bearded, dirty island natives that steal children to eat them, but we don’t know exactly what they’re all about. While it seems like Lost is never giving answers, it is. But for every answered question, the show introduces another one. For instance, we learn that a giant electro-magnetic system failure caused the plane to crash, but what was causing the electro-magnetic event in the first place? Why were DHARMA’s Powers That Be making a person press a button every 108 minutes when they certainly could have wrote a 10 line computer program to do it automatically? Where was the other computer that Walt was IMing dad from located?

This is how serial television works. You never get all the answers. Unfortunately, in the current world of instant gratification, brutally short attention spans, and the god-awful negative nature of the Internet, a show in this format struggles. Columnists love to be the first person to declare a show dead. They need to be the first person to claim: “I don’t watch this show anymore, sheep, and therefore I’m better than you.” Columnists want to be the one to declare a show dead, and they want people to agree with them; therefore they point out every perceived weakness in a show, exploit it, and then claim some other show on television is the most brilliant show ever and you should be watching that because they’re edgy and different. Ignored in all this is the fact that, even with the viewers remaining, it’s the #3 show on ABC, the best 10pm show on ABC in a decade, and one of the top 10 shows on broadcast television.

Lost, granted, has had its problems. Most of them aren’t the writing team’s fault. The writers and producers don’t control the asinine scheduling of ABC. They didn’t choose to be broken up by constant reruns last season, forcing joke websites like Is Lost A Repeat to pop up. They didn’t decide to air six episodes, take three months off, and return to an uninterrupted season. They don’t create the promos that say “THIS IS THE BIGGEST EPISODE EVER AND ALL SORTS OF STUFF WILL BE REVEALED” when really they’re just revealing that the other tail section people aren’t dead. This doesn’t work with a show like Lost. People are voracious for it. Interruptions are a frustration. Fox figured this out a few years back when it started airing 24 in uninterrupted seasons. 24, for all it’s predictability, is still regarded as one of the best shows on television even though it follows, essentially, the same formula year after year: Jack is coaxed back into working for CTU, something bad happens, he follows a lead to a person, that person dies, something leads him to another person who dies, which leads him to another person who reveals the BIG BOSS is really behind everything before he dies, and so on. Have you ever, even for a moment, wondered why people fall in love with nearly every show HBO airs? The Sopranos has more plot holes than Dr. Sam Beckett’s memory and more untied plot threads from Season One than in both seasons of Lost, yet it’s still critically acclaimed. Sex In The City is a comedy about four of the most annoying women in the history of the world and ladies world-wide shed tears when it came to an end. No show on HBO has ever aired a re-run mid-season. Coincidence? An uninterrupted season for a show where full, can’t-miss-an-episode attention is required is almost essential.

Think about this for a minute. If there hadn’t been 13 weeks where writers had nothing to do but criticize and re-criticize the first 6 episodes of Lost, where would we be right now? The season premiere gave us essential information about the Others. The third episode (Further Instructions) was the Boone episode, which was excellent. The fifth episode (The Cost Of Living), which included Eko’s death, the introduction of Eyepatch, and more information about the Smoke Monster, was very good. The fall finale (I Do) was a strong episode, if not strong enough to carry a 13-week layoff. Not In Portland, the Juliet episode, finally started giving us some insight into the Others and was great. Flashes Before Your Eyes, the Desmond episode, was one of the better episodes in the entire series. So far, this season, there haven’t been many complete and total clunkers. According to previews, Eyepatch is going to be revisited next week, six episodes after he was introduced. If the shows were running uninterrupted, the writers are paying off the set-up rather quickly. In reality, we’re finding out about Eyepatch months after he was first introduced. It’s frustrating. With the entertainment options out there these days — including the ability to wait until September to watch the complete season uninterrupted without commercials on DVD — ABC is shooting itself in the foot.

The only true complaint about last week was that nothing happened. I answer: so what? Every single episode of a serial drama can’t have giant, series-shattering events occur; it’s not supposed to. Take-a-break episodes have occurred every season. The only difference between then and now is that now it’s cooler to hate Lost. Now, wheelspinning episodes are a reason to criticize the show for not revealing enough in a timely manner. After all, instead of an episode where we find out that DHARMA apparently had enough of a presence on the island to include janitors and DHARMAwagen vehicles with 8-track players, that they were constructing a road to somewhere, and they apparently left in enough of a rush to leave poor Roger dead in the jungle with cases of beer and quite a number of documents, people see an episode that was a waste of time. I’m glad to be in the part of the 13 million fans who humbly disagree.

Lost’s power is in a delicate balance of introducing new questions while occasionally clearing up older ones. Some episodes won’t do much of either. It’s part of the deal when watching serial television. I have read the sentence “collapse under the weight of its own mythology” more than I care to think about. I don’t even know what that means. Collapse under the weight of having too much story? That’s a bad thing? Folks point out how well Heroes is paced compared to Lost. Heroes clears up mysteries week after week, keeping people interested. I ask the Heralds of Heroes this: where is Heroes going in seasons two and three? Will you still be watching when it turns into X-Men vs. The Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants? Or are you going to complain that Heroes blew through its whole story in the first two seasons and should have taken a pacing lesson from Lost?

Aaron Spelling once tried to make a daytime serial (soap opera) because he thought people would watch a daytime show paced like one of his many successful prime-time dramas. He ran out of story in less than three years. When the Heroes defeat whatever super villain is behind the paper company, what’s left? In three years, the same people praising Heroes for their quick pacing are going to be the same people saying Heroes ran out of steam. Watch, and remember this column for reference. Don’t get me wrong; I’m a fan of Heroes. I love the show but unless they have some incredibly creative story up their sleeve, there’s not much to tell after this season. This season they have the Heroes vs. Exploding Peter. Next season they have the Heroes vs. The Paper Company. Following that they have the Heroes vs. each other. What follows that? What happens when Heroes has to slow down?

Unequivocally, Lost is still the best show on television. On a weekly basis, one still can’t predict what’s going to happen. The worst thing they can do is cave to the pressure of revealing too much, too soon. That’s what would actually sink the show. The best thing they can do is what was being discussed earlier this year: pick an ending date. They could tell the entire story of these castaways in six or seven seasons. Having an ending date will let them pace the show. It will keep the show from “sticking around too long” and turning into the X-Files’ later seasons. There’s a distinct, planned story to tell. Pick a date and stick to it.

Don’t believe the “fans” and critics that say the story has become too confusing. It hasn’t. Essentially, it’s still the same people who have crashed on an island that isn’t just an island. Let the people who think the story is too confusing go back to their easy to grasp CSIs and Law & Orders where you don’t have to think too hard, violating people’s rights is cool, and everything is wrapped up with a neat little bow by the time the hour is up. Let them watch Heroes to turn on it next year when the story gets “campy.” Let them watch Ugly Betty until they realize there’s only so many ways you can say: ‘HAHAHA, SHE’S SO UGLY. ISN’T THAT FUNNY??’

My prediction for next season: Lost will run an uninterrupted season from November to May, 8pm to 9pm, and people will come back. Dumbing down the show is the worst thing they can do. Then, all they’ll manage to do is alienate the existing fans and make a far worse show. Uninterrupted seasons are the way of the future and the sooner ABC realizes this, the sooner their shows will become successful again. Remember this: there isn’t one single popular show on television that people won’t or haven’t turned on, except for the “brilliant” shows that got cancelled. Think about that for a minute, try to prove it wrong, and then you’ll realize the nature of the beast you’re dealing with.

Calm down, be patient, and trust that the writers have a plan. Everything will be answered in time. Lost is too good to give up on and you’ll only hate yourself later.