Nerdfotainment 16 Mar 2008

Today I came across the Nerdfotainment post at Rands in Repose.

The premise of this post, like the really excellent Handbook post, is that nerds love and in fact need puzzles and projects. Provide them as in Lost, Donnie Darko, etc. or we’ll create them ourselves as in endless debate about the original Star Trek. I get that. In fact I cannot watch shows like Lost live in their season, I have to do it on DVD because I can’t hack the week breaks between fixes. But, I just plain don’t watch Lost anymore. Because in the third season I got the feeling that there was no plan. They’re just making this shit up as they go along. Abrams more or less said this in his Mystery Box Talk at Ted. The mystery is more powerful, and I believe easier to pull off, than the answer. And that, to me, is a nerd trap. It’s a funneling of that problem-solving energy into nothing. There’s no there, there. It’s just providing ad breaks for (in the case of Lost) the next three years.