How to watch Lost: a primer

I've been watching quite a bit of Lost as of late, thanks to the fact that all of the early seasons are on Xbox 360 Netflix Watch Instantly in pseudo-HD. I've gotten almost to the end of the second season now, and I've got the third and fourth queued up. I'd pretty much avoided watching or even really learning that much about the show, despite its considerable popularity, mostly because of my general policy of eschewing TV dramas for more intellectual pursuits, such as playing Horde mode in Gears of War 2 for the nth + 1 hour. However, I've really come to like Lost, partly because it's a quality show and partly because it fits particularly well with my domestic lifestyle.

What I mean by that is that I sort of prefer to be doing multiple things at once given the option. The idea of spending an hour just watching a TV show doesn't appeal to me nearly as much as spending an hour watching a TV show while cooking dinner and surfing the Internet. The problem with this is that most sitcom/drama style TV shows require a fair amount of attention to make the experience worthwhile, either to catch the jokes or keep the progressing plot points straight within the episode. By contrast, I can watch Lost while doing pretty much anything else and still get about as much out of it as I would watching it in rapt attention.

The canny thing about Lost is that it's a show that understands that people like mystery more than they like resolution. Once you figure out that basically every Lost episode is going to end with a cliff-hanger, you can pretty much ignore everything between the first two minutes (which helpfully recap everything of relevance for the brain-damaged or slow-witted viewer) and the final seven minutes to 30 seconds or so, depending on the episode, and still follow the overarching plot. You'll miss some specific developments, mostly congregated around the planned commercial breaks, but the bulk of each episode's content is mainly the various survivors talking about their feelings or some such.

There's also a B-story for each episode, which are always flashbacks that flesh out the characters. These are pretty easy to pay minimal attention to because they (a) only focus on one character per episode and (b) really only develop one character trait per entire set of flashbacks (for instance: Charlie's the world's whiniest heroin addict! Jack's a surgeon with a God complex! Sawyer's an emotionally conflicted criminal! Kate's an emotionally conflicted criminal and is also female!). Given that Lost devotes flashback episodes to uninteresting or annoying characters such as Hurley and Charlie about as often as it does to interesting ones like John Locke, Ana Lucia, or Mr. Eko, you're looking at being able to ignore up to 80% of some episodes with no real sacrifice to your overall enjoyment of the show, as you'll probably be able to discern the major point of the backstory in the first ten minutes.

Finally, actually watching the action unfold onscreen is surprisingly inessential to the Lost experience. It's an extremely talky show with very little onscreen action unaccompanied by dialogue, so as long as you're listening to what's going on, you really don't need to be watching it. I'd estimate that I'm actually only looking at the screen for probably about half of the total time that I'm watching Lost. From that angle, the experience is more like a radio drama than a television show, and I actually think it makes the more melodramatic and ridiculous aspects of the show far more palatable. This is particularly true having it on instant-watcher streaming, because I can put on an episode every day and follow the cliffhangers and plot twists like it's a soap opera rather than having to wait week-to-week or longer to find out what's coming next. It helps keep my expectations more modest, so I don't really mind when the series piles on cliffhangers rather than giving straightforward explanations for anything. I understand that the show goes downhill somewhat in the third season, but it'd have to fall off pretty hard indeed to disappoint me in any substantive way.