As it goes with so many of his posts on Counterforce, this one starts with Marco emailing Lollipop and asking her a question about who knows what, seeking advice and inspiration. There’s a suggestion that one should put their thinking cap on, and then…

from here.

Lollipop Gomez: I was always so confused when people in elementary school would say put your thinking caps on. Like.. wait, an actual CAP? A pen cap?

Oh, for a future Lost post, I insist you use one of these AMAZING photographs of sawyer from his early modeling days.

from here.

Marco Sparks: Yeah, sometimes in school I would get bored and draw little doodles of people with these big electorate and bizarre mechanical things that would go on their heads and spool up power and stroke the electromagnetic waves of their brain to inspire, I don’t know, thoughts.

Man, those pictures. That’s hilarious. Thank you. Like something out of Cool World. What are they going for there… like an early Brad Pitt thing?

LG: They’re going for an early HOT thing. I don’t know, actually. He looks completely different now. I’m sure that’s intentional. But man do those photos encapsulate the aesthetic of the 90s or what? Which is interesting because LOST as much as I can’t stand the way it manipulates its viewers week after week totally encapsulates the TV of the ’00s: with the Internet & Tivo (and even more, DVR which is becoming standard in cable packages now), people are much choosier about what they want to watch and they demand a much higher quality than ever before. Lost, while being pure entertainment, is also a really complicated show that’s difficult to follow — can you imagine that kind of show in the 80s?

And if you use that in a future post, please credit me as a “pop culture scholar.”

Marco: Oh, I will. (editor’s note: It’s this post. The one that you’re reading. Fourth wall? Gone!) Gladly.

But you’re absolutely right. Lost is the ultimate example of a show for this day and age. It’s deeper than just what’s on the surface, in the sense that… for lack of a better metaphor… you can wiki it, or make a wiki out of it. It forces you to make certain connections on your own, and to bring certain meanings to it yourself.

The 90s water cooler show was Seinfeld, sitting around with people after the fact, just repeating jokes and single lines that you heard the previous night and guffawing. The most depth you got was “I loved the way that so and so did this and that.” But with Lost, you’re not just admiring and recapping, you’re hypothesizing constantly. You feel as if you’re a part of the thing, as if you’re as important to it as it is to you.

LG: And the other thing, thinking about it from say, a creator’s perspective, it forces you to follow it week after week. And that’s exactly it, you keep thinking about it and making connections. Which is why, I hate when people say “TV rots your brain”, maybe it used to, but it certainly doesn’t any more. The Sopranos totally ushered in that age; of shows where not everything was handed to you and you had to think about it and look for the subtext and the meaning. And I think (and this is a cheesy hypothesis but this is on the cuff), that maybe that has something to do with it being the uncertain twenty first century. In the 90s we were clintonized and happy and the most drama we had was the president having phone sex with an intern. We had no idea what to expect with the ’00s; and now we are kind of forced to be much more self reflexive with the economy and having no idea what the hell is going to happen next. So, the TV shows are more serious; more complex and more involved.

Does that make sense?

Marco: Yeah, perfectly. It’s a weird time now, just cause of the 00s, but we’ve gone from”Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” (or “Don’t stop believing“) to whatever the hell was going on in the past 8 years (hello rise of post-apocalyptic worries and fears that drifted into our collective pop cultural unconscious zeitgeist) to this new age. We’re still scared, we’re still afraid, but at the same time… we can that “yes, we can.” We’ve been happy, we’ve been terrified, but now, even though things are bad, we know that we can do amazing things if we really work at it.

And TV rotting your brain… yeah, maybe once upon a time. The premium cable TV shows, following the British model of doing TV, did change that. An episode of your favorite show can now be a chapter in the amazing novel that you’re reading and watching enacted on the tapestry of the cathode ray before you. It’s an amazing time.

And we’re accepting heavily serialized television too! Some shows don’t make it because they’re buying into a serialized story just to do so (like Jericho, from what I gathered), but some are working, like Lost. And back in the 90s, that never happened. Remember Twin Peaks? You had to watch every episode and if you missed one, you were fucked hard. So of course it failed.

LG: There’s a great book called Everything Bad Is Good For You that focuses on video games, mostly and how they’ve become incredibly complex and layered and how they can teach kids comprehension and analytical skills rather than rot their brains. It’s the same thing with television. We are totally in a golden age of it; even the old style of sitcoms no longer really exists. I ended up watching a traditional sitcom the other night because it was on after another show and you compare that with say, an episode of The Office or even a mediocre show like My Name is Earl, and there is no comparison. We don’t need to be told when to laugh; we know when the joke is funny now.

Okay, now I’ve gone off on a different tangent but this is a very uncertain time and I kind of love it. I’m kind of excited to see what happens with all these old industries that are no longer working; they are being forced to evolve or die. Everyone has to adapt. Like with TV, people are more sophisticated now, even if they don’t appear to be.

you know what’s a good serialized drama that lost me mid-way? Rescue Me. Maybe I write a post on the first season, which was amazing.

Marco: Is that show good? I’ve caught bits and pieces here and there and didn’t dislike anything I saw. In fact, what I saw was intriguing, but something holds me back from that show. You know what it is? Leary himself. You play a character like this once, and you do it well, that’s fantastic. I guess it irks me when this is the kind of character he always plays. You know his show before this one? The Job, which was a short lived dramedy about him as a NY cop and it was pretty much the same, just cops instead of firefighters, and no post-9/11 purpose, and from the episode or two I caught, not that bad. I guess I just don’t this as his brand. Dylan Moran, who was excellent as an alcoholic misanthrope in Black Books, and seems to be one in real life if his astronomically hilarious comedy specials are to be believed, still changes up his thing in other roles.

Going back a step, part of me misses the half monster of the week/half serialized shows like The X-Files (even though the serialized parts were shit because they just were never going to give you the answers about those aliens each week)(the same as a main character is not going to die in week 2 of a show like Harper’s Island), or in the Star Trek mold, which rarely tested the half serialized mold.

But what’s next for all of these mediums as things change? A friend of mine who follows video game trends tells me that besides flashy bells and whistles, the video game industry is stagnant. Another friend who obsesses over web 2.0 and folksonomics, tells me that social networking is getting the same way, and that the future of all these things is true interactivity. At least, of some sort. Granted, that’s not economically viable in television, or part of me thinks the human race is too lazy to do anything but watch, but I ask you, Lollipop, what’s next? What’s the new thing going to be?

And to get Lollipop’s answer and so much more, you’re just going to have to check back with us tomorrow…

Or, to put it more succinctly: To Be Continued!