Is Lost the Best Show of All Time?

So the conversation has been floating around that Lost is the best show ever. It is quite possibly the best network sci-fi show ever, actually, it is easily the most viewed network sci-fi, but best show ever? Hardly. I didn't even like every season. Remember pressing the button season 2? Yeah, that season was worthless. Remember Nikki and Paulo? No? Well you don't really need to. Did it have its good moments? Yeah, of course it did. We had the fantastic season that culminated in the Oceanic 6 getting off the island (in my opinion the best season of all of them), some characters doing dreadful things for what they thought they had to do (Ben killing Locke, Michael killing Ana Lucia and Libby, Sawyer killing the con man), and good character development almost all around.

Aside from some legitimately bad episodes (and almost all of season 2), the show was fairly consistent in quality, but it is not one of the best shows ever. I compared this show early on to a magician. It isn't a smart show, but it is clever. It has plenty of slight of hand, and uses parlor tricks to keep our attention. It played on people's need for romantic relationships (only a few people in the show didn't find some kind of love). I know some people that watched the show for nothing more than to see if Jack and Kate would end up together. The writers were like a magician that handed out three cards from a full deck to the audience and said he would guess them correctly. He gets the first two, and the crowd erupts in applause even though we never know what the hell the card the third guy was holding. There were an insane number of plot holes, unexplained mysteries, and simply building up "important characters" and forgetting them altogether (Walt anyone?). If you can't see that as poor writing and incomplete storytelling, then you are simply blinded by the emotional ending that was intended to leave people sobbing for joy. I feel like the flash sideways was an incredibly waste of a story and the 'heaven' or whatever was going on was a ridiculous ploy to satisfy people's desire for a happy ending. I would have been much more content if the flash-sideways never happened and Kate, Sawyer, and the other four had escaped the island and the show simply ended with Jack dying and justifying his faith in his purpose in life. And where was all the forgotten actors like Mr. Eko, Michael, and Walt? Were they implying black people go to hell? I'm totally kidding about that by the way.

Either way, I feel like Lost wanted to appeal to people's intellectual needs throughout the entire series and they took a cheap emotional exit because it was the best card they could play.

I know this all sounds bitter, especially coming from me considering I liked the show a lot and watched it all the way thru. I just think a show that wasted as much as they did can't be considered one of the best shows ever. I can name several shows in the past decade that either have ended or are ongoing that are better shows than Lost in almost every regard (for the sake of argument we are doing non-comedies or this list would get even longer): Mad Men, the Shield, Sopranos, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights. Personally, I think the Wire is the most flawless show ever made, but I understand there is a lot less people that have seen it and appreciated it. But one thing the Wire did that Lost couldn't do was make everything in the show count. There is not one wasted line, action, character, or plotline in the Wire. With Lost, there was so much wasted, and for that reason more than anything, it cannot even be close to being the best TV show ever. It is a very entertaining show that might be one of the most culturally relevant, but certainly not the best ever.