In the current vein of giving up on TV shows, today we gave up on True Blood part way through episode 2 of season 1. That’s a pretty early “give-up”, even by our standards, but it felt just. The show reminds me a lot of Battlestar Galactica in the sense that it has a great premise (vampires integrating into everyday life), but crappy pretty much everything else. The acting is like a Mills and Boon novel, the characters’ motivations are either overly mysterious or blank, and the plot is fragmented and manages to be dull by being too florid.

So, no, thanks.

It’s been very interesting watching Lost during its fifth (and penultimate) season as compared with the finale of Battlestar Galactica we saw just last Friday. In particular, there seems to be a marked difference in terms of having a sense that the show’s creators have some kind of plan for the overall structure of the show.

In BSG, there was this general sense of stalling for many of the episodes in the first three seasons – when the show was mostly a vehicle for political commentary rather than narrative exposition. Then, in the final episode it was pretty evident they were essentially unable to tie up a number of the more confusing and infuriating elements of the plot. In fact, I read an interview with the creators in which they explicitly stated they didn’t exactly plan the show in a big sense, going with intuition instead – which they were, of course, quite happy with.

Lost, on the other hand, gives off the distinctive aroma of a show which is generally planned within an inch of its life. You can imagine a room full of documents and maps and whiteboards all carefully constructing the world it takes place in and the insanely twisted chronologies. Simply put, it has to be that way because it’s so damn complex.

The fact that Lost feels so in control gives me a lot of confidence they’ll resolve it in some interesting and satisfying manner in the sixth season. That’s not something I expected from BSG, and it isn’t something I got.

Amazingly, after all but three seasons of watching Battlestar Galactica I may finally be enjoying it. The turn-around seemed to come along with the trial of Gaius in which the irritating tendencies of many of the characters of the show to be cruel, manipulative, and hypocritical was exposed and then not withdrawn like it usually is.

This was very important in allowing me to have some modicum of respect for the usually absurdly dodgy moral universe the show operates in.

Further, the revelation of four of the final five Cylons (and maybe the fifth) in the final episode of season 3 was possibly the first time the show has been kind of entertaining and “WTF?!” I very much liked the banality of the cylons realising what they were and then deciding to go on the way they were anyway, but casting eyes at each other, themselves thinking “WTF?!”

It’s frankly a relief to finally enjoy such a popular show, if only for a couple of episodes, instead of shrieking at its inadequacies. Here’s hoping season 4 can keep it together.