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The Lost Finale

/ Jared / 2 Comments

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So, Lost is over.  I was out of town and therefore a few days behind on everything, but I managed to avoid spoilers and sat down last night to watch it with an open mind.  When I went to bed after watching not only the finale, but also last week’s episode and the two-hour recap show that had aired immediately prior to the finale, I certainly had some questions.  I felt mostly satisfied, though.  Then this morning I found myself getting kind of angry about it.

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“The End” was a fitting end to this season, and I think it was pretty great as a stand-alone episode.  The final season was not a fitting end to the show as a whole, though.  It’s not even a matter of tying up older plotlines; there are enough holes in the recently introduced plots alone that there is no way that this finale will age well.  The more people think about it, the worse it’s going to get.  Which is why everyone who wants to love it unconditionally is telling the rest of us we’re thinking too much about it.

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A Model Day in Disney World

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I’ve spent the day getting hyped for my trip to Disney World, and also looking for music videos on YouTube, and the two activities somehow merged and led me to these.  They’re time-lapse videos that use a weird lens to make it look like a stop-motion movie made with models.  Or something?  I’m not totally sure what’s going on here, but I know that they appeal to two of the major facets of my barely-suppressed dorkiness, a love of Disney World and a love of models.

A Model Day at the Magic Kingdom

A Model Day at Epcot

So yeah, hopefully after Disney I can get some posts with some substance up.

Conan O’Brien on 60 Minutes

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So, as you might have heard, Conan O’Brien was on 60 Minutes .  The whole thing is available on YouTube, I think.

Let me start by saying that it’s always weird to see Conan O’Brien being a normal human being.  He can be hard to take seriously, and during the interview he slips into his “character” occasionally, which leads me to believe that he might have a little bit of trouble taking himself seriously, too.

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This wasn’t the most revealing interview.  I actively avoided all of the pre-show press about it, because I knew that would make actually watching it sort of redundant, but I still didn’t really feel like I learned anything new.  That’s what happens when someone is legally prohibited from badmouthing his former employer/colleagues, I guess.  I did learn that Jeff Zucker went to Harvard, too, and he and Conan actually knew each other.  That’s sort of weird.  Wikipedia even claims that Zucker was president of The Harvard Crimson at the same time that O’Brien was president of the Harvard Lampoon.

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The Office, Steve Carell, and Viewer Fatigue

/ Jared / 1 Comment

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News broke earlier in the week that Steve Carell is considering leaving The Office when his current contract is up at the end of next season, presumably to make more movies.  The reactions were swift, numerous, and oddly full of surprise.  Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog called the possible departure “notionally earth-shaking.”  I don’t really understand this.  The Office had only aired six episodes when The 40-Year-Old Virgin came out in 2005; I’m surprised they’ve managed to hold on to Carell as long as they have.  Whether or not he should leave, career-wise, is a different argument, but I’ve been anticipating his departure since season two and feel lucky to have gotten six seasons with a seventh to look forward to.  But this does raise a few questions.

If he leaves, will the show go on without him?

Short answer: without a doubt.

Alan Sepinwall has a great post about the situation, in which he points out that The Office, relatively modest hit that it is, is one of the few things NBC has going for it at the moment.  We all love the rest of the Thursday night NBC lineup, but those shows just don’t consistently pull ratings, and would be doing even worse if they didn’t surround The Office.  Take a look at NBC’s primetime schedule; it is pretty bleak.  They will milk The Office until it absolutely can’t go on.

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