Lost - The Complete First Season (DVD, 2005, 7-Disc Set)

It should first be noted that I watch a lot of T.V. This means I watch a lot of good T.V., a good amount of fair T.V. and, yes, on occasion I have been known to sit through some horrible television.
When news began to leak out that J.J. Abrams was working on a pilot about a plane crash, my initial thought was: Cool, but it will never see the light of day, I figured some network honcho would corner J.J. wih, "It's good, but is it a series?"
Yes, it is a series. A well-written, well-acted, cinematic series with plot twists, high production values, and cliffhangers that keep you coming back every week.
I am telling you, even if you have never seen this, this is the one and only T.V. DVD that I would say it's okay to buy sight-unseen. It's that awesome.

Right off the bat, with the opening scene, one can sense that this is something reaching the extraordinary. A devastating frame: the catastrophic wreckage of a plane ripped apart and smoking- the hellish nightmare of chaos wracked upon a shore of sublime beauty, where stunned survivors clamor about trying to get a grip- the bright sands, the deeper shades of the jungle slightly inland, and the rocky heights of the cliffs against the backdrop of vast ocean and sky, conjures the feeling that the medium projecting all this can't possibly be merely a TV screen.

Needless to say, I was hooked from then on. I'd not only made up my mind to watch the rest of the Season One episodes (4 episodes to each of the first 6 DVD's, and then the 7th for special features), but had also made sure that I would acquire them, as I knew I'd certainly not be the only one of my acquaintance to needs get hooked on something such as this.

Each episode focuses on one of the 14 main characters in the form of flashbacks while the storyline moves forward on the island (there were some 48 survivors in all, but only a few- the "take action", plaintively elite of the bunch - who are the focus.) Among them are Jack (Matthew Fox), a doctor; Kate (Evangeline Lilly), a fugitive from the law; Locke (Terry O'Quinn), a salesman at a box company; Charlie (Dom Monaghan), a British has-been rock star; Sayid (Naveen Andrews) an Iraqi soldier; and Michael (Harold Perrineau) an unemployed artist & construction worker who had just recently reclaimed his estranged 10-year-old son, Walt (Malcolm David Kelley) after the boy's mother's death. Add to the mix, with piquant dashes of blessed good chemistry, a rough-necked Texan con artist, a self-centered young woman and her brother, a young Korean couple, an unmarried Australian woman about to give birth, and a young man who'd won the lottery under weird circumstances, and you have here a show that raises the bar for all of network TV entertainment.

What makes this series additionally so appealing is its atmosphere, which contains somewhat of an undeniable supernatural factor. Indeed, it's almost as if the island itself were alive: an entity possessed of a soul all its own.