TMC
01-08-2022, 06:13 AM
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-yellowjackets-is-teaching-gen-z-what-being-a-lost-fan-was-like
"At the risk of horrifically dating myself, I was two months shy of my sixth birthday when the Lost pilot premiered in 2004," says AJ McDougall. "Everything I know about that cherished tropical clusterf*** could fit neatly on the back of a 'Wish You Were Here!' postcard, sent from somewhere deep in the Canadian Rockies. Which, conveniently, is the stretch of wilderness where roughly half of the new series Yellowjackets takes place. The new Showtime series follows the Yellowjackets, an undefeated high school girls’ soccer team in New Jersey. The pack is headed to the 1996 Nationals when the plane they’re traveling in crashes. With little hope of rescue, Something Awful happens out there in the woods, and the girls—the ones who survive, anyway—are hounded by it well into disaffected adulthood." McDougall adds: "Lost, as I understand it, not only transfigured television, but the way fans talk about television. On Wednesdays, every street corner came alive with people attempting to decode the twists and turns of that night’s episode. Fans brought physical notes into schools and offices to discuss with their friends. A handful of valiant souls, as a symptom of their Lost fever, forged into the then-brave new world of podcasting. And then, of course, there was the unprecedented avalanche of forums, fan sites, and IRC channels, in which an episode could be discussed in real time as it aired. Like critic Alan Sepinwall wrote in his book The Revolution Was Televised, though Lost may not have invented the art of discussing TV on the internet, it may have perfected it. And Yellowjackets, though its nine-week-old fan culture is still taking its first tottering steps, may reinvent it. The show feels like it’s teetering on the edge of an explosion into mainstream popularity, and with it, the next epoch in the evolution of fandom. Every Sunday, thousands of Yellowjackets fans gather on Twitter and Reddit to do exactly what Losties were doing in the mid-aughts: talk about that group of plane crash survivors in the remote wilds who are haunted by menacing, possibly supernatural occurrences. They aren’t officially called ‘the Hive’ yet, but they’re already swarming in patterns not only reminiscent of Lost-lovers, but also the avid viewers of other mystery-driven cultural phenomena."
"At the risk of horrifically dating myself, I was two months shy of my sixth birthday when the Lost pilot premiered in 2004," says AJ McDougall. "Everything I know about that cherished tropical clusterf*** could fit neatly on the back of a 'Wish You Were Here!' postcard, sent from somewhere deep in the Canadian Rockies. Which, conveniently, is the stretch of wilderness where roughly half of the new series Yellowjackets takes place. The new Showtime series follows the Yellowjackets, an undefeated high school girls’ soccer team in New Jersey. The pack is headed to the 1996 Nationals when the plane they’re traveling in crashes. With little hope of rescue, Something Awful happens out there in the woods, and the girls—the ones who survive, anyway—are hounded by it well into disaffected adulthood." McDougall adds: "Lost, as I understand it, not only transfigured television, but the way fans talk about television. On Wednesdays, every street corner came alive with people attempting to decode the twists and turns of that night’s episode. Fans brought physical notes into schools and offices to discuss with their friends. A handful of valiant souls, as a symptom of their Lost fever, forged into the then-brave new world of podcasting. And then, of course, there was the unprecedented avalanche of forums, fan sites, and IRC channels, in which an episode could be discussed in real time as it aired. Like critic Alan Sepinwall wrote in his book The Revolution Was Televised, though Lost may not have invented the art of discussing TV on the internet, it may have perfected it. And Yellowjackets, though its nine-week-old fan culture is still taking its first tottering steps, may reinvent it. The show feels like it’s teetering on the edge of an explosion into mainstream popularity, and with it, the next epoch in the evolution of fandom. Every Sunday, thousands of Yellowjackets fans gather on Twitter and Reddit to do exactly what Losties were doing in the mid-aughts: talk about that group of plane crash survivors in the remote wilds who are haunted by menacing, possibly supernatural occurrences. They aren’t officially called ‘the Hive’ yet, but they’re already swarming in patterns not only reminiscent of Lost-lovers, but also the avid viewers of other mystery-driven cultural phenomena."