Spectacularly Lost

Lost, which starts tonight, brings a whole new dimension to the conventional TV format.

The influx of American TV is gathering momentum. We no longer have to settle for old seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and musty Friends reruns. We still get those, of course, but we also get much more besides.

The biggest, newest, glossiest American TV shows are adding glitterdust to our primetime schedules "" last month it was the highly popular Desperate Housewives on Star World, and from this Saturday sister channel Star Movies joins the fray, airing Lost, the show that has attracted record-breaking audiences in America since it was first aired last year.

According to the BBC, when the show was first aired in the UK, earlier this month on Channel 4, unofficial ratings showed that the first part of the episode was seen by an average of 6.1 million people.

This is in contrast to other successful American shows like ER, which attracted five million viewers on its first night and Desperate Housewives, which attracted 4.6 million.

Lost breaks new ground in several different ways. Firstly, its basic premise is highly risky: a plane that has crashed, thus raising the spectre of 9/11, into a deserted (although lush and beautiful) Pacific island.

Naveen Andrews (of The English Patient and more recently, Bride and Prejudice), a British Asian, plays an Iraqi, part of Saddam Hussein's erstwhile Republican Guard, and bears the brunt of much of the ill-feeling and racism that nowadays will always crop up in the wake of a suspected terrorist incident.

The other big way in which Lost blazes new trails in TV is in production value. The sets include a very impressive plane in various stages of ruin, a scary monster that we probably won't get to see until further on in the season, and, as will happen when there is a monster of unknown proportions on the loose, some rather spectacular deaths. One guy even dies spectacularly in a non-monster related incident "" he gets sucked into the engine of the crashed plane.

The pilot episode is said to have cost $10 million, and it shows "" the first scenes, from the very first shot of the hero of the series, the handsome Dr Jack Shepherd (played by Matthew Fox), disoriented right after the crash, and the subsequent zoom out to the panic of all those around him, are a vision in carefully orchestrated chaos.

As the plane smoulders in the background, Shepherd jumps from passenger to passenger, administering the kiss of life here, pushing a heavily pregnant young girl out of the line of a falling jet-wing there, while around him his fellow survivors scream, cry or simply look dazed. The camera weaves effortlessly through and around the chaos, making the first scene look far more like the opening shots of a movie than a TV show.

Of course, everything isn't spot on. First off, you have to suspend some of your disbelief, as Jonathan Bernstein puts it in The Guardian, "The crash appears to have spared the lives of most of the passengers seated in the Hidden Agendas cabin. Even though they're no more than disaster scenario stereotypes to us "" the Pregnant Single Woman, the Bitchy Socialite, the Asian Couple Who Speak No English, the Mysterious Silent Guy Who Eats Oranges In The Rain, the Cheeky English Rock Star "" [creator J J Abrams] skilfully sets up potential storylines and looming conflicts for all these key members of his teeming ensemble".

James Delingpole in The Spectator is just as unkind: "How could there be any island left in the world where you wouldn't be found? What about the electronic equipment in the plane? How lucky a crash would it have to be for 48 people to survive intact? Lost isn't about to let verisimilitude get in the way of a good drama."

Although the first episode does stretch itself in a real effort to answer some of these questions, you may still need to suspend that pesky disbelief, for it will keep cropping up.

Jack, a young woman called Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and a British rockstar (Hobbit Dominic Monaghan) go off to find a piece of equipment called a transceiver that Jack fortuitiously knows will be in the cockpit.

When they finally come across it, they also discover that the pilot, still strapped into his seat, is alive "" or alive at least long enough to gasp out a crucial piece of information, which goes some way (but not much) to explain why the survivors have not been rescued yet.

Ultimately, Lost is a sort of cross between Survivor (which was, in fact, one of the inspirations behind it), The X Files and one of those scary monster movies "" Godzilla, perhaps, or Jurassic Park.

In the pilot episode, the creators have been careful to suggest intricacies of plot without giving too much away, and I for one am curious to find out why the delectable Dr Jack Shepherd stowed away an extra bottle of alchohol in his jacket, why the creepy bald guy is so creepy, what is making the unearthly noises from the trees "" and how on earth the producers are going to keep the plot going for one whole season.