"Heroes" (9 p.m. Mondays) also toys with our concept of winners and losers, throwing together a ragtag assortment of losers with freakish powers that present themselves first as liabilities. Following the age-old comic book narrative arc, these misfits and outcasts learn to redefine themselves -- and their powers -- as positive, joining forces to save New York City from a nuclear holocaust. Lest you take the swooning comic-book flavor of the show too seriously, the writers offer us a hopelessly kitschy motto for the show's heroes: "Save the cheerleader, save the world." Making one of the show's losers (one that needs saving) a cheerleader is a particularly sly way of turning the American stereotype of winning and losing on its head.
Land of the lost
And then there's ABC's "Lost" (9 p.m. Wednesdays), the show that wallows in the loserly status of its characters more than any other. Through those dreary flashbacks week after week, we learn that each of the lovely, sad characters stranded on that lovely, sad island has an incredibly tragic background, usually due to some major missteps or bad decisions he or she made along the way. Indeed, each time we return to any particular character's story, we learn that he's an even bigger loser than we originally thought he was.
Kate (Evangeline Lilly) didn't just kill her father, she also left her one true love shortly after marrying him. Not only that, she drugged her poor husband before she told him she was leaving -- for his own good, of course, so that he wouldn't lose his job as a cop when he refused to give her up -- which made the whole depressing, pathetic thing all the more depressing and pathetic. Meanwhile, Eko (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) couldn't simply have gotten his priest brother killed. No, he also had to go back to his brother's church, interfere in the situation there, get a random villager killed and eventually ruin the church that his brother had built. Upon returning to his (comparatively) happy existence on the island, Eko scampered through the jungle and was summarily executed by the mysterious big black cloud that we hadn't seen for months.
Did the writers bring the black cloud back, along with the polar bear, simply to save face in light of criticisms that both elements of the island were central to the first few episodes of the show, then disappeared when the writers wandered into the more fruitful and interesting territory of the Dharma Initiative and the Others? Probably. But more important, why kill off Eko? Did they decide to kill him off in the Great Hatch Explosion of Season 2, but then they reconsidered, since, as long as they were executing the guy, they might as well squeeze a little bit more drama and sadness out of his story before they were through?
Sometimes it feels like Sawyer (Josh Holloway) and Kate and Jack (Matthew Fox) aren't the only ones being tortured around here. Remember the occasional hand-holdy, strummy-music scenes at the end of some of the lighter episodes from Seasons 1 and 2? Where have all the flowers gone?
Apparently J.J. Abrams is getting a little bit more involved in "Lost" this season after not really having a hand in things since early in the first season. If that's the case, then it's clear that Abrams has a real hunger for hardship and melancholia, given the way the third season is going so far.
And someone on staff clearly hates Jack's character and wants to make him into the whipping boy for the whole island. Just as Nate of "Six Feet Under," with his whiny, self-involved musings and selfish maneuvers, suffered a slow unraveling and untimely death in the final season of the show, so does Jack seem to be painted in increasingly merciless tones and made to endure exactly those conditions that are the least bearable for a control freak like himself. In addition to being a workaholic who loves/hates his drunky daddy, in addition to being left by his wife out of the blue, we learned this season that Jack became hopeless and angry and obsessive and paranoid in the wake of his wife's departure. Since he blamed his dad for everything crappy in his life, he actually started to suspect that his wife and his dad are having an affair. As if that weren't depressing enough, Jack woke up to the relative peace and comfort of his slimy underground prison cell, only to discover that his singular hope for happiness, his love for Kate, had been snatched out of his hands by that dirty hillbilly Sawyer. This was a torturous twist for tight-assed Jack: Not only did perky Kate not love him, but she was in love with a total loser -- a vastly inferior, unkempt, unpredictable specimen whom no reasonable woman would choose over a winner like Jack. (That's how Jack sees it, anyway.)
Poor Jack. His particular flavor of loserdom is that he overestimates his own control over the world, overestimates his charms, overestimates his logic and his instincts under pressure and vastly underestimates everyone around him. In other words, Jack is the ultimate ugly American. For all of his skills and obvious strengths, he has a superiority complex, a certainty that he deserves to win, without fail, that's destined to keep him angry and lonely and out of touch indefinitely.
And speaking of loserly behavior, didn't you find it a little odd that Kate and Sawyer stripped down and made sweet love in that open, outdoor cage, where Ben and any of the other Others could wander up and witness them in the act? I understand that they're in love (although I didn't really understand that at all until that particular episode) and that they're both exactly the devil-may-care types that would throw caution (and their clothing) to the wind under those circumstances, but since we've been waiting for Kate to bed down with someone, anyone, since the show began, couldn't the writers at least have offered her a firm bed, some nice, clean linens and a sweet-smelling, freshly showered mate? Is it really romantic to tangle with someone who smells like toe cheese? I appreciate the raw impulsiveness of the moment, but my inner professional cheerleader felt queasy over how dry and parched those passionately locked lips must've been, without access to Chapstick for so many long weeks.
But then, if I were a character on "Lost," I'd be the one whose tragedies are utterly trivial, yet who experiences them all as monumentally unbearable. My character would spend her time on the island loudly fretting over the fact that her contact lenses can't be removed and disinfected properly every night, and that the deodorant she found in some dead stranger's carry-on is the non-threatening hippie kind that has patchouli undertones and still doesn't cut the stink in half, not by a long shot. Occasionally, they'd offer a flashback of my character, ruining her marriage by spending most of her so-called date nights with her husband chattering neurotically about whether it's more dangerous to leave the HEPA filter running all day, which must present some kind of a fire hazard, or whether it's more dangerous not to run it constantly and therefore breathe in untold dust and allergens and little particles of that kind of mold that kills you in your sleep. Yes, it's true, Jack: Unnamed tropical islands are no place for the tightly wound.
Next page: Beggars can be losers