My two preferred TV series (and actually the only ones that I am following) are back on screens with their new seasons. The Israeli cable TV channel Hot 3 transmits the episodes one or two days after their airing in the US.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvBEpAIvQlA
It’s the last season for Lost or so they say. It looked like kind of a dramatized ‘Survivor’ in the first season with flashbacks into the past lives of each of the characters, to evolve towards a combination of science-fiction and horror story in the 2nd and 3rd season. Then seasons 4 and 5 saw the story line getting more complicated, with multiple threads. The strike of the script writers crippled one of the last seasons, and with the number of episodes reduced to half, and the jumps into past starting to alternate with jumps into future as well as parallel presents generated by time travel, everything started to look more and more complicated. Sure, we became attached and some of us addicted to some of the characters, and felt like personal losses when some of them died, but at some moments the story lines seemed to become too many and too intermingled. For this reason I believe that the idea of the series producers to start the season with a look back into the previous seasons was very good. The prologue was really excellent, many of the blurry details from the previous season cleaned-up and became now more clear, some of the mystery characters found their places in the puzzle. The first two episodes aired last week start building up towards the final confrontation that will determine the fate of our heroes, of the island, and maybe of the planet. The good news is that with time travel and parallel life spans now well built into the logic of the script all characters have a second or third chance – even those we have seen dying in the previous seasons. At its pick ‘Lost’ is one of the best series in I have seen, getting close to the mythological ‘X-Files’. The thrill of great adventures that flows through good quality science fiction from Jules Verne to Spielberg is present here. Hopefully the great expectations will not be followed by a great disappointment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=399Hiwua0J4
24 has quite a different history. The best seasons were the first two ones in my opinion, as the concept of the 24 episodes telling in real-time one hour each of a story that happens during one calendar day was fresh. The initial team of actors were blessed with strong characters, and the intrigues in the halls of the counter-terrorist unit combined with the highest political level conflicts provided an interesting combination. As the show advanced in the next seasons the formula remained the same, so new thrills had to be found, new threats, new villains, new paths of treason. There is however a limit in how many ways the world can be saved in 24 hours, and after we have seen atomic bombs dropped on LA, ballistic rockets launched from the Mid West, dirty bombs contaminating DC, chemical attacks on the Big Apple, hostages at the White House and US presidents guilty of treason there is not much left even to the imagination. The problem with the last seasons of the show is that we almost can predict from start and with half a minute accuracy the murders, the lies, the cover-ups, and when will Jack Bauer torture and when he will be tortured. Unless something special happens and there are no signs in the first four episodes of the 8th season, it’s time for ’24’ to be put to rest.