Make a Desperate Move Or Else You'll Win

I had a conversation this past weekend with a couple of friends on the merits of 24 versus Lost. I had to admit to both of them that I was not the best advocate on behalf of 24 due to my admitted Lost-homerism, but as I began thinking about truly engrossing seasons of television, a specter loomed in my past.

We've all had those times where we've been sucked in by a guilty pleasure television show whether it is American Idol, MXC, Project Runway, or The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Okay, maybe that last one is just for the geriatric readers of Running Down a Dream, but you get the idea.

I'm sure this will all be dredged at some point in the distant future when I'm up for a job promotion/election/audition for world dictator for life, but I have to come clean. During my sophomore and junior years at ACU, I was a diehard, I mean diehard, fan of The O.C.

There, I said it. Does that mean I watched the entire series until its bitter end?

No.

Honestly, I have no idea how the series ended, but I can assure you of this: those first two seasons (particularly the first) were riveting television. I'm sure that part of the appeal is the legend that I have constructed in my mind, which may or may not bear an accurate resemblance with reality, but I've almost consciously avoided re-watching the show simply so I can remember it the way it was and not necessarily the way it is.

Perhaps it was the fact that we treated the weekly airings of the show as events where we would go to someone's house off-campus (obviously a big deal if you've lived in the life of an ACU underclassman) to watch the show. I can still remember the echoes of Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" drifting away as the image of Seth Cohen's sailing voyage to Tahiti flickered across the screen at the end of Season 1. No one moved for about a minute as we all wished Seth well, and then shamefully remembered that he was no more real than the Texas Rangers' World Series hopes.
You can laugh at all of this and dismiss it as the quasi-sappy ramblings of someone who enjoyed a ridiculous primetime soap opera about the life of the beautiful people in Southern California, but I bet if you took some time, you could remember a television show, or season, that meant something special to you, even if you cannot place your finger on the exact reason why.
Plus, it allowed Alan Dale to continue honing his chops as the "evil father figure" Caleb Nichol, which he has now reprised as Charles Widmore on Lost.

That's almost worth the price of admission itself.