so my parents just (about an hour ago) finished watching the entire LOST collection. my father was in a horrible accident in november, and my folks found themselves with a lot of spare time because of it once he was home. so after years of suggesting it to them (and buying them an netflix-ready-blu-ray player) i finally got them to dig into lost.
my guess is they started the first episode of the first season sometime late in january. they finished the last episode of the last season this evening. and while the general response is the same, i was amazed at how different their reactions were, cramming what all of us took 6+ years to do into a 2 month window.
not only did we have an entire week to reflect upon and discuss each episode, we also had a half-a-year long break between seasons. we had all the recap episodes with the CC and DL. we had discussions of every episode with colleagues at work. and, most importantly, the intraweb! whole chats here, wikis, theory sites, etc. we had so much to our advantage that i just assumed that's how we were sposda watch it.
but, im guessing the vast majority of "that" world out there is non-uber-nerd, or nonber nerds. even gauging by the ratings for the show, which were never all that amazing, seem to suggest many people watching each week were casual fans. ...which, in listening to my parents' thoughts and questions on the show as it was going on, makes everything sound way more confusing than we thought it was.
even simple stuff like john locke being the smoke monster. i remember us discussing that in like the second or third episode of the final season. ...but, apparently, that's never confirmed until one of the last episodes, and we were just basing it all on theories and such.
in general, it makes me wonder how different most shows (or movies) from my youth would have been were there such an intraweb at the time. like, how quickly would "sixth sense" be spoiled in the era of twitter? would earlier sci-fi shows like the x-files, V (first), quantum leap, etc. excelled with the added dimension? are shows of today, like lost, geared for intranet use, casting aside such innocent victims as my parents?
