Lost is – in my not so humble opinion – THE best show there has ever been on TV.

My life is only complete when it’s on and in the hiatus between seasons, I am bereft. I live in mortal fear of dying before the end because then I’ll never know why they’re there.

Does this make me a saddo? Quite possibly, but I don’t care; I’m addicted to Lost and am literally counting the days until season 5 is on our screens and until it is, I’ll keep replaying old episodes and scouring the net for spoilers and trailers, and I’ll do so unashamedly because I think a show of this calibre deserves addicts.

From the very beginning, as soon as I saw this trailer, I was hooked…

So why do we – and more specifically, I – love the show so much? Because it’s intelligent, it needs thinking about, it’s based on something that could really happen – in as much as people could really crash land and not be found – it plays on our fears and hopes and the intricate story is so well crafted, I really can’t imagine how the writers are going to come up with answers in the end that do it justice.

Blink and you’ll miss it!

From the very start it’s been the sort of show where if you take your eyes off the screen for even a second, or someone in your household has the audacity to speak during it, you may miss a vital clue. Often the main action or the biggest clue is going on right behind the forefront story, and you have to be on the ball to spot it.

It’s a giant puzzle and we are all intrinsically involved in solving it. And not only is it on TV, the makers have even gone to the trouble of building websites and publishing books of stories within the story that provide clues and/or red herrings which make addicts like me crave more and more of it.

New and fresh faces

The main characters were all relatively unknown when the show began and I think that made the entire premise that bit more believable. Yes, they’ve all cropped up somewhere before but for the makers, they took a big gamble when they cast the show because a series with the enormous budget that they had would normally automatically attract big showbiz names as characters but then, we would have had trouble buying into their stories.

The fact that they were relatively unknown made me feel that they were genuine. Yes I realise that this fact puts me on a par with the sort of nutters who believe soap opera characters are real but nonetheless, it’s true; I wholeheartedly bought into the storyline and the fact that they were all on some godforsaken island somewhere, and even now, I find it disconcerting to see Jack and Sawyer doing adverts for aftershave… they aren’t real actors for me, they’re Losties and shouldn’t be anything other.

But why is it so addictive?

I’ve spent a long time trying to analyse why this show is so addictive, and I’m still not sure of the answer. I do know it has all the elements that appeal to me in a programme; it has the supernatural, it has ghosts, it has time travelling and it has the voyeuristic appeal of knowing intimate details about someone’s life – albeit an entirely fictional life – but isn’t that urge to peek behind someone else’s net curtains what keeps us hooked on soaps and the like too?

I also love that they aren’t afraid to bump off major characters or at least to give the appearance of having bumped them off. I also love all the characters with one exception, Ana-Lucia. But actually, it was the actress who played her who I didn’t like, not the character. I thought she overacted horribly and for me, she ruined weeks of the show.

However, I also love the fact that the writers have managed to make connections between all the major characters and they haven’t been lazy about any of it. All the back stories are totally believable and although coincidences abound, they are believable coincidences.

Do I really want to know the answers?

In the search for answers though, I’m left with one inexorable and troubling certainty; yes, I want to know why they are all there, I want to know what the island wants with them, I want to know what the doohickley is going on in general and why, but the thing that bothers me is, once I have those answers, I know it’s over, and that’s a thought that I simply can’t cope with.

I think that’s perhaps the magic of Lost – the questions are far more entertaining than the answers but when the answers come, I will be devastated if they are something lame or mundane. Remember Bobby Ewing in Dallas coming back after his ‘death’ and it turned out to be a bad dream? Well it’s an ending of similar lameness that worries me…

So what do you love about Lost and what makes it compulsive viewing for you?