The journal of a traveling scholar, studying the semiotics of televisual narratives and digital design.
Considering I’ve seen The Hunger Games all over Twitter for the past few weeks, and the raving comments I’ve read about it, yesterday I got the full trilogy. I had reservations, but decided to treat them more as unmotivated prejudice, and not let them get in the way of me making up my own mind.
An updated version of my essay “Understanding the End” has just been published in LOST Thought: Leading Thinkers Discuss LOST, an anthology edited by Pearson Moore. The book is available through CreateSpace and Amazon (there’s also a Kindle edition).
The word I’m hearing all over the web is that NBC’s planned midseason hiatus for Community is merely a way for the network to see if the ratings will go up while the show is out of the way. As if to say, if the ratings do go up, maybe the hiatus will go on indefinitely—proving once again that television networks care nothing about quality, and that they’ll show you pooping dogs all day long if the vast majority of the viewers liked watching that.
I made a deal with my friend Erin that I would go see Inception and in turn she would watch Lost. So I went on Monday, since it was still playing at the Metreon in San Francisco.
In the past couple of days I’ve watched the entire first season of Glee, despite the fact that, after watching the first two episodes, I had decided I wasn’t interested at all. But since risking an anaphylactic shock is a lot of fun, I gave the show the Sex and the City treatment—that is, if I want to be able to comment on it (and justify my dislike), I need to have watched the whole thing, like I did years ago with Sex and the City. (Although in this case season one is as far as I’ll go.)
Call me short-sighted, but I don’t understand academic-level television criticism. I’m not saying it’s not interesting or it doesn’t stem from accurate—and often passionate—viewing; what I mean is you can bring to the table all the readings, all the theories, all the analogies you want, but if you lack a solid analytical method, it will show. And it will make your argument moot—academic, as they say.
Warning: if you haven’t watched the Lost series finale, or the final season, or the whole series, you might want to wait until you’ve done so before reading my ramblings. However, if you haven’t watched Lost at all I don’t see how you should be interested in this article in the first place. Nonetheless, and despite whatever my judgment may appear to be in this article, if you haven’t watched Lost—or are one those who watched nothing but a season-two episode featuring a strange Nigerian man carrying a stick and claim that nothing makes sense in Lost—I really advise you to point your time machine to September 22, 2004. Or just get the DVDs—whichever is easier.
In a perfect world, good stories would never end. Wait—let me rephrase that. In a perfect world, good stories would always end gracefully. I don’t mean happy endings across the board. I mean good stories should always be allowed time to reach a conclusion after they’ve hit their narrative peak.
On television, however, the narrative peak often coincides with a peak in viewership—in ratings—and after that is reached the networks are just not interested anymore. A few months’ notice, if anything, and the show is gone. I will not delve into the historical implications of this. Current technology allows for easy storage of and access to all sorts of content, so it’s not oblivion I’m concerned with.
It is confirmed: CBS didn’t get the memo about sitcom being dead and all. Still, Accidentally on Purpose won me over the moment I realized it’s set in San Francisco. What can I say?, I’m sentimental like that.
I realize how easy it is to shoot at the dubbing actors, considering the situation in which they are forced to work. Ever since, last year, the Fox Italia channels started airing American shows even before the end of the original season, translating and dubbing episodes must have become a frantic job.
Such premise cannot be an excuse for the way in which, when dubbed, characters lose depth and often become ridiculous.
One example is Lost, one of whose most notable features is the treatment of characters. The whole show – and particularly its season one – is founded on cultural differences, which are in good measure manifested in the different accents in which the English language is spoken: the California “standard,” the New York, Australian, Scottish accents and so on. These are all nuances that will necessarily be lost when the show is translated and dubbed.