ALL IS NOT LOST

The only question to be answered in the pilot of Wrecked, the new TBS series, is whether the show is worthy of die hard LOST fans' appreciation.

It is very difficult to bridge parody, comedy and amusing situational comedy on the backbone of a legendary dramatic series like LOST.  Could the creators of Wrecked do it?

No.

The characters were flat, the performances stiff and the story line non-existent.

It seemed the writer's room had a bunch of index cards with words or scenes from LOST then they tried to make a joke about one or two. The ensemble cast had no continuity.  There was no connection to the characters so I could not remember any of their names.

The irony of the pilot episode, "All is Not Lost," was the fact that the dashing, handsome leader of the castaways, a 10 year special ops soldier from Australia, was killed by a falling plane part just as Jack was supposed to have been killed in the LOST pilot.

There were some strange set-ups with no pay-off. A guy addicted to technology gathers up all the cell phones to try to get a signal to phone for help (another LOST scene). But when he gets a signal, none of the people can remember an actual telephone number. The scene painfully stalls quickly. It takes one of the oldest bits about answering machine fake-out messages, last used recently in the animation series Archer.

Another scene had a character's ghost father berate his son for being a coward and a loser for being freighted about removing dead bodies from the airplane. The character wanted people to respect him so he lied and said he was a police officer. The resolution of that snippet was the character going back in the plane to yell back at his ghost dad.

There was no one funny joke or humorous spit-take in the entire hour of the show. It was a train wreck. There are many shows that can make gallows humor work; M*A*S*H jokes in the ER to the gross humor of South Park. But nothing showed up in Wrecked. The xfinity Dish diss commercials were more entertaining that the show.

Verdict: PASS.  The show is not worth a view even as summer filler.

PARADISE?

There is a new television show called "Wrecked" which will debut on June 14th on TBS. It is about a bunch of airplane crash survivors on a Pacific Island. Sound familiar?

But this show is a comedy. In the first trailer, it used images from LOST as a parody send up for this new show.

Can LOST work as a comedy?

IndieWire explains:


I don't think this is what Jack had in mind when he screamed to Kate that "We have to go back!" TBS has premiered the first trailer for "Wrecked," a desert-island comedy that looks mysteriously similar to "Lost." Rhys Darby, Zach Cregger, Jessica Lowe, Asif Ali, Ally Maki, Will Greenberg, Brooke Dillman, Ginger Gonzaga and Brian Sacca are all in the ensemble cast; no word yet on whether any of them are Others.

The 30-second clip, which parodies the opening sequence from the pilot of "Lost" — once the most expensive ever made, with a price tag estimated between $10 and $14 million — shows the survivors of a plane crash running around the wreckage in chaos. One man fires a gun into the air, another screams while cloaked in flames, a woman carries the dead body of a hog onto the sand...and a dead body falls from the sky.

"Lost" was as controversial as it was successful, with fans and detractors alike going back and forth on how much of it was planned in advance as opposed to written on the fly. Its series finale in particular has become a flashpoint of debate, despite clearly being the best, most moving episode of its kind ever. (Désolé, haters.) This show's very existence shows that the series created by J.J. Abrams continues to resonate.

 Whether the ending of the show was good, bad, disappointing or a fraud is not at issue. The current question is that whether a plane crash premise leads itself into a full blown comedy series. There were light moments on LOST, mainly through Hurley's interactions or Sawyer's crude jokes. Whether a large ensemble cast will mimic the original LOST characters or will they try to become their own, independent ones? From the initial trailer, it seems that at the very least the elements and critical scenes of LOST are in the forefront for a satirical tangent on the LOST popularity.

WELL WELL WELL . . . D-OH!

It is about a month shy of the two year anniversary of "The End" to LOST.


So in an out-of-the-blue, out of sight out of mind return, LOST got a satirical beating on the Simpsons last night.


Homer Simpson drops off Bart at the movie theater so he can go his his favorite place in the complex: the food court. After stuffing himself, Homer can barely walk and breathe to the exit when he stumbles across a fitness store. The slick fitness salesman ("who is not required to give his name") convinces the overweight Homer into an expensive exercise treadmill, complete with an HD TV and Internet streaming.


So in order to cope with the boredom of exercise, Homer finds out that he can stream old television shows while on the equipment. One show he never heard of was called STRANDED. In the pilot, the burning crash wreckage is shown, and Jack is smashing open a coconut which reveals his childhood puppy inside (in a demon state with red eyes) where a collar with the flight number "815" on it. Suddenly, Homer is hooked on this old television show.


Homer becomes obsessed with the show's mysteries that he starts living (not exercising) on the treadmill. He starts a journal of all the mysteries, and groans when the flashbacks "create more questions than answers!"  There are scenes of LOST characters speaking illogical gibberish between themselves, until the Locke character is eaten by a Lava Monster. 


Homer gets so into the show that he forms a discussion group with Lenny, Carl and Moe. However, that turns into a violent personal confrontation between the three, leaving Homer with no one to share his thoughts and feelings about the show that is confusing, frustrating, obsessing and contradictory. He tries to block out what other people had said about the show (that only the first and last seasons mattered).


Homer then goes into bunker mentality,  "spoiler free" mode to the ire of Marge, who basically sums of the show as being exactly what the producers said at the beginning did not happen: that all the characters died and went to hell and the afterlife.

Homer then realizes what the rest of us world knew-- that LOST or in his case, "Stranded"-- the television show about mysteries, the character stories, the plot twists, anticipation of answers came to a jolting halt when things didn't all quite add up in The End. Homer's frustration at television, which promises more than it usually delivers, is a parody within a parody.

The episode also infers that the state of network television is so bad that viewers are willing to watch old television series (or buy DVD box sets) just to escape time even though there may be no satisfying payoff in the end.