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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

aka https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_box_show

I will never forgive Lost (which I originally watched in real time) and almost always wait for shows to conclude now before giving them my time.

Nonetheless, I'm enamored by Severance. The attention to detail by the show runners is amazing[1]. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at[2]. It's downright funny at times. I've re-watched the entire first season and there's so many details I missed the first time through. I will likely be satisfied even if it doesn't answer all its questions, but I have a feeling it will.

[1] BTW, the first eight chapters of The You You Are were released on Apple Books yesterday in both eBook and Audiobook form (read by the author).

[2] I watch in a home theater on a 120" 2.39:1 screen. I love that recent shows are being released in scope (see also Silo).

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Hah, I hate the theater-wide trend. Most people are watching on 16x9 screens and it's so annoying that TV directors refuse to take that into account and shoot taller to use the whole damn screen. It's seriously non-trivial to get a wider setup than that for normal living-room use. And there's not even a wave of TVs on the way like when people started moving to 16x9 from 4x3. It's just a bad side-effect of prestige and money moving to TV from motion pictures.

Especially when you consider that the real snob format for many is IMAX which is taller anyway.

I don't understand why TV shows are shot in anything but 1.78. There's what, maybe 1% of watchers on wider screens? 2.00:1 or even 2.20:1 seem like a reasonable compromise, but 2.39:1 is insane.

They could at least shoot it open matte (maybe not as easy in 2.39 to do) so that those of us who want to mask to 2.39:1 can enjoy it that way w/o losing anything important while most watchers wouldn't notice the difference.

Here's the thing I don't get about post-finale annoyance at Lost -- how does the lack of plot resolution impact all of your enjoyment previous to the finale?

You still enjoyed thinking of all the plot points after the second to last episode, no?

And after the end of the first season?

Those moments existed independent of how it ended.

Sure, people having an issue with the ending and plot threads is maybe a reason not to start watching it now (I'd say it's still worth it...), but behaving as though somehow the ending invalidated all the realtime enjoyment is weird.

I went into Lost thinking it was sci-fi, but in the end, it was all fantasy. So for me, Lost never really answered its core mysteries and that was before it threw in the whole purgatory flash-sideways stuff. I did actually start to lose interest because it felt like the show was stringing us along, but hung in there for answers. Instead I felt like all I got were narrative dead ends and then a conclusion where most of them die. It was immensely unsatisfying.

(I'm reflecting back now on 15 year old memories. I'm actually surprised to learn it aired from 2004-2010. Gosh, I remember this as being a show from the 90s.)

It's also not like there were a lot of options for other shows to watch at the time. I'd never stay with a show like Lost today. I punted on Yellowjackets as soon as it started bringing fantasy into the story.

You have to know that how a series wraps up is important to its viewers. A great or terrible finale can make or break how a show is later perceived. The Lost finale was the most disappointing of any show I've seen.

Great finales I recall are The Americans and Justified.

A terrible last book chapter or poor movie ending can ruin all that has come before for me. When deciding whether to read a book, I'll read the last chapter first. Spoilers don't ruin good stories for me. But bad conclusions do. And Lost's conclusion was just terrible. I'd rather it have been canceled.

It's not like I need literal answers for everything. I love Mulholland Drive. But I felt like Lost spent six seasons just jerking me around.

$0.02.

I think this is a Type A enjoyer vs Type B enjoyer thing.

To me, if I enjoy every episode but dislike an ending... I still enjoyed 99% of the series.

Because, as I was watching each of those episodes, I was having fun.

It seems super unhealthy to retroactively go back in time and say 'That expression of glee on my face at the time wasn't actually happiness, because I just didn't know the ending was going to suck.'

> It seems super unhealthy to retroactively go back in time and say 'That expression of glee on my face at the time wasn't actually happiness, because I just didn't know the ending was going to suck.'

That's reading a lot into my words. There were no expressions of glee on my face as I watched Lost. I was hanging in there for answers because the mysteries were the only part of the show I found interesting. Conversely, I'm really enjoying Severance as it comes. I'll likely be happy however its finale turns out to be. I really enjoyed the bizarro world of Scavengers Reign and am sad it was canceled after one season. Lost didn't float my boat, and then ended terribly on top of that. Again, $0.02, and I won't make any judgements about your mental health. :-)

p.s. I'm glad you enjoyed Lost and hope I haven't yucked your yum.

It's a reason not to re-watch or even talk much about or recommend the show. Compare to something like Babylon 5 (plotted out well in advance) where a rewatch is rewarding because now you see extra significance of so many more early things. It's the complete opposite - everything interesting is now LESS interesting.

The enjoyment is capped at the initial run; a better-plotted show rewards you much more over time.

Let's not pretend Lost didn't explain anything. There were certainly plot holes, but there's also a ton of concrete explanations and information you get but don't have at the beginning of the show.

I mean, two of the biggest: smoke monster and hatch.

Both get definitive answers.

With Lost, I knew they had no direction in mind, and that bothered me. But I also knew that whatever they were doing, they were doing a damned entertaining job of it.

I didn't feel like the terrible ending ruined the fun I had with the first five seasons, but I did believe they had a direction in mind through most of it. What I remember bugged me most was that sometime quite early in the show, probably season one, the writers "promised" that they had an ending and explanation for everything, and that it explicitly wasn't going to be a cheap cop-out like "it was all a dream". Which, as it turns out, was either one or two lies by my count.

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