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Showing posts from September, 2014

BuzzFeed: "Lost Changed My Life In More Ways Than I Can Count"

“Guys, where are we?” At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " Lost Changed My Life In More Ways Than I Can Count," in which I revisit the 10th anniversary of Lost 's premiere and look at how my life has changed in the time since the show first began. I saw the pilot episode of Lost a few months before it premiered on ABC exactly 10 years ago today — on Sept. 22, 2004. I was working in television development at the time, and a box of pilots — they may have even been on VHS tapes — had just arrived from a talent agency. My co-workers and I gathered in a tiny, cramped office to sort through the 30–40 screeners, most with titles and premises now forgotten, to find our copy of Lost. Damon Lindelof was an unknown name to us then, but we were addicted to Alias, the trippy espionage drama from Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams, who had also won our hearts with the wistful Felicity. Twitter and social media as we now know them did not yet exist and, while we had followe

BuzzFeed: "Downton Abbey Season 5 Begins With A Jolt"

Julian Fellowes’ costume drama begins its fifth year with a slew of domestic intrigues in place, as well as some new tensions. WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead! At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " Downton Abbey Season 5 Begins With A Jolt," in which I review the fifth season premiere of Downton Abbey , which launches on ITV in the U.K. (Sorry, U.S. readers!) Period drama Downton Abbey had begun to show signs of wear and tear, particularly in its fourth season, where the creakiness of the subplots began to match that of the house’s ancient stairs. It was, simply put, not the best year for the drama, which had come off the narrative highs of its third season, including the highly emotional deaths of two linchpin characters, Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) and Lady Sybil (Jessica Brown Findlay). But, in its fourth, Downton sagged into overt melodrama with storylines involving murder, blackmail, and the shocking and highly controversial rape of Anna Bates (Joanne Fr