I watched the season five premiere of Lost last night. I’ve made a couple posts before, years ago, when I first started watching it. At the time they were running the in-show/out-of-show online game that had people running around buying things and figuring out puzzles and finding easter eggs on websites to win something. I postulated that the entire series was going to be like the Little Orphan Annie decoder ring scene in A Christmas Story… Once you eat 5 boxes of cereal and send away for the decoder ring, the secret messages you decode are commercials.

Ironically I watched the first episode (the one where the plane comes apart and they crash land on a tropical island) WHILE I was on a flight from Cayman to Miami on a PSP.

There are probably a zillion websites about Lost out there already, so I’m not going to post any theories or anything here. I’ll read some of the message boards (The Onion AV Club’s TV Club recaps and discussions are by far the best of the bunch and not just for Lost… for Battlestar Galactica, Top Chef, The Office, 30 Rock and a bunch of other shows, too) and contribute there if I feel like farting in a hurricane (again).

What I wanted to expound upon were the ads. For the last four seasons of Lost, I was, well, almost Lost myself. No cable, never home, no TV… I relied on BitTorrent to watch the show. Nice half-HD widescreen content and no commercials. Bliss. I watched it “live” last night which I had only done a few times before and was appalled at A) the amount of commercial breaks and B) the content of said commercial breaks.

Astra Zeneca, some gigantic pharma had ads for all these poisons (sorry, I meant to say medications) they’re peddling for everything from boner pills to asthma and anti-depression add-ons (+2 to your hit points when taken with another anti-depression med!) The anti-depression add-on they were shilling had the longest list of possible side effects I’ve ever heard up to and including “fatal” in two or three of the effects. Listening to all the awful things that could happen to me if I took this drug, I think I’d almost prefer being depressed and killing myself. At least the pain wouldn’t last as long! At one point, Laurie turned to me and asked me if this was an SNL spoof commercial but it was on ABC. The sad thing is it wasn’t.

Whatever you do, do not tempt Happy Fun Ball.