HOW TO MAKE A SUCCESSFUL TELEVISION SHOW: 10 EASY STEPS

After watching every episode of Lost, and winning countless arguments with anyone who tried telling me it was a good show, I can finally stand proud and rest my case. Here are 10 easy steps to make a successful show.

1. First, create a show about a plane crash on an island with all of these explosions. That will get people to watch the pilot.

2. Then create all of these unnecessary mysteries on the island to draw people in. Polar bears, mysterious sounds, reoccurring numbers, weird symbols and lights, and even a tribe native people.

3. Name your characters after philosophers so people will think that their actions are based on the depth of once extraordinary human beings. Also, make up hundreds arbitrary rules (i.e. no having babies on the island) and then break them when you need to. No need to explain the inconsistencies of the plot when you...

4. Make sure many of your characters are inconsistent in their behavior. In terms of dialogue, make sure your characters never ask questions that common sense would normally dictate. If those questions must be asked, make any response a version of "Because I'm supposed to do this" or "because I said so." Also, be sure to change your characters on the spot, if one is a bad guy and then suddenly becomes nice, make sure you don't explain it or have your characters question it. When in doubt, give a character a "daddy" issue to make them more compelling and sympathetic.

5. Apparently since it's so difficult to do an entire episode about people stranded on an island, make sure you waste half of each episode on characters' lives off of the island at a different point in their respective lives, so you can wow the audience with coincidental interactions with other characters off the island. Idiots love small degrees of separation because the larger the world seems, the more insignificant we become.

6. When you run out of things to do on the island, make some get off the island, then insist that the characters feel like they have to go back to the island without ever explaining why or how. Keep adding conflicts that don't need to be explained so daughters can be inexplicably killed and former torturers become hitmen. Don't worry about how this resolves, or even explain why it happened.

7. Now that you have everyone back on the island, make them exist in different times, but don't explain that either. To reunite everyone, just set off a nuclear bomb. Even more importantly, make your characters survive a nuclear bomb. That solves everything.

8. When surviving on the island, inexplicably returning to the island, inexplicably time traveling, and nuclear bombing characters no longer matter, inexplicably turn your show into a biblical battle between good and evil. Of course, don't ever explain why it would be so horrible for the alleged evil to win, just insist that the world would end.

9. When you can't figure out how you want the battle between the good and evil end (because you arbitrarily decided that they couldn't kill each other), just turn them both into human beings at the last minute, without explanation, so they can actually kill each other.

10. Then when they all die, have them all meet in the end so presumably overwhelming emotions from personal time investment and emotional attachment to characters can negate any form of rational and analytical thought as to how you managed to take a show about survivors of a plane crash into a sappy duel over an alleged unconfirmed suspicion of an apocalypse.

Lost fans, both the drama queens and the moron loyalists, got what they deserved. The drama queens got their drawn out, emotional happily-ever-after entertainment ending at the expense of the moron loyalists who defended the show as if it was going to reveal the ultimate answers and offer some significance on reality. Initially, that sounds like only the drama queens got what they deserved. Yet, the moron loyalists learned a valuable lesson: IF YOU WANT INTELLECTUAL AND CREATIVE STIMULATION, TELEVISION DRAMA IS NOT THE PLACE TO GO. Try reading a book. Do a crossword puzzle. Learn how to play chess.

I know at Tufts there was actually a student-taught class about Lost. I wonder how that idiot felt after a show that he deemed so significant to society, a show that he felt could teach us so much, ended with a crashed plane, taking off a beach, in the middle of an earthquake. I'm sorry, but can anyone read that with a straight face?

Looking for significance and answers to rich, philosophical questions from Lost, a show about survivors of a plane crash that turned into a sappy duel over an alleged, unconfirmed suspicion of an apocalypse, was probably an unwise decision. Anything you can take from Lost are the same lessons you can take from Grey's Anatomy, Brothers and Sisters, Gossip Girl, and Dawson's Creek.

Lost proved to be exactly what it is: lazily written, poorly acted (with the exception of Michael Emerson and occasionally Terry O'Quinn), emotion-pandering television entertainment; and nothing more.

Whether it be a valuable lesson about the nature of TV drama or the dim-witted drama queens who don't care about answers as long as they get a happy ending with all their couples reuniting, every Lost fan got what they deserved.

-- Boosh