The I-Land: "Lost" Written by a Writing-School Dropout

10 people on a desert island, with no memory of who they are or how they got there.  Sounds interesting, sort of Lost light.

We discover almost immediately that this is a computer simulation (the title I-Land is one clue.)  But that's ok, maybe a combination of Lost and The Prisoner.   Does someone want in-for-mation?

Except: the people are complete jerks.  They immediately start bickering, hooking up, and trying to rape each other instead of looking for food, water, and shelter.

For plot complications, there is a cannibal among them, and two bounty hunters named Bonnie and Clyde (Clyde played by KeiLyn Durrel Jones, left).

We learn all the details in Episodes 3 and 7 (the finale),  which are all long plot exposition discussions.  Hey, did anyone take Creative Writing 101?  Show, don't tell?

Due to global warming, Texas is now mostly underwater, so the crime rate has increased, and the prisons are full:   "So many more people are criminals, now that the water has reclaimed the land, that we have to find a way to redeem them."

Um...we've had rehabilitation programs for over 180 years.  Job training, GED classes, life skills classes, drug treatment, counseling....

 So they are trying out a program to give parole to murderers if they can prove that they have been reformed.

Um...what about the non-violent inmates?  Maybe parole them first?

So the murderers are memory-wiped, put into young, hot bodies, and dumped on a hologram-island to see what happens.  This group consists of:

1. Chase, who killed her husband and children
2. KC
3. Cooper
4. Moses (Kyle Schmid, left)
5. Blair

6. Mason, a mass murderer
7. Donova
8. Taylor
9. Hayden
10. Brody (Alex Pettyfer, left)

It would be very interesting to see the back stories of all of these people, to learn how and why they became murderers, but nope, the writer never took Creative Writing 101.  We learn nothing about the lives of most of them.

Therefore I have no idea if any of them are gay.  Some shy away from hetero-hookups, but that's as far as it gets.

I sort of liked the scenes set back in real life, with Bruce McGill as the Warden channeling the Rich Texan from The Simpsons.  He is so incredibly over the top that I thought he must be a parody.  After all, Bruce McGill has been in a lot of movies.  He must have taken acting lessons, right?

Now, if we can just get the writers into Creative Writing 101....

The Fate of "Gilligan's Island"

What Boomer kid doesn't get all wispy and nostalgic upon hearing "Just sit right back, and you'll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip..."

Gilligan's Island (1964-67) was an iconic Boomer tv series, part of the "lost far from home" genre, about seven people who set out from Hawaii on a "three hour tour" and ended up shipwrecked on a desert island.  We didn't care that their escape attempts were ludicrous, or that visitors managed to make it off the island with no trouble.  What counted was the adventure: they fought pirates, headhunters, mad scientists, Russian spies.  They found a Jungle Boy and a buffed surfer. 

It was a "boys only" paradise, with no girls or grownups around to spoil the fun. 

Ok, the Howells were grownups.  Sort of.

Ok, there were two girls, Ginger and Mary Anne, but no one acted all goofy around them.  They were like big sisters.

Although they paid lip service to the goal of getting off the island, it was obvious that no one really wanted to leave.  Back home they were failures, parodies of themselves.  Ginger was an actress relegated to horrid B-movies, but on the Island, she was a star.  The Professor was a polymath teaching high school science, but on the Island he was a genius.  On the Island they could shine.

There was no ongoing plot arc, as is common in tv series today, nor was there a conclusion.  The last episode of the series leaves them still stranded on the island.

But iconic Boomer tv series don't stay dead for long.  There were endless reruns, and, 10 years later (1974-77), The New Adventures of Gilligan  appeared as a Saturday morning cartoon. Most episodes involved inter-group squabbles, with an 1970s "the more you know" moral, rather than escape attempts.



The characters look considerably younger than the actors they depict.  Gilligan and Mary Anne could be in their teens, and Skipper and the Howells look barely 30.

.

In October 1978, I was a freshman in college,  and like every Boomer kid, I had no choice but to watch the tv movie Rescue from Gilligan's Island .  They finall made it back to civilizatioN!  Except instead of having them shipwrecked for a reasonable amount of time, the premise is that they've been on the island since 1964.  They're obviously older, well into middle age or old age, which makes their stuntwork cringeworthy.

They arrive in Hawaii to a huge crowd of well-wishers and fans (except none of their family or friends).  The moment Gilligan leaves the coast guard ship, a soldier hands him an ice cream cone.

Giving a middle-aged man an ice cream cone rather than a hefty check from the insurance company? Bogus!

 They try to go back to their old lives: the Professor to his research university, the Howells to their snooty friends, Ginger to the movies, Mary Anne to her farm in Kansas.  But it's the midst of the sex-and-sleaze disco era, everything has changed, and they're miserable. Fortunately, they end up being shipwrecked on the same island again.  There's no place like home?

Every Boomer kid watched them being rescued again in The Castaways on Gilligan's Island (1979).  This time they return to convert the island into a resort, where they proceed to solve guests' soap opera problems.  Apparently this was the pilot to a proposed tv series, with different problems every week, sort of like Love Boat and Fantasy Island. 

First up: a workaholic husband whose wife wants him to relax (played by Happy Days' Tom Bosley and The Bob Newhart Show's Marcia Wallace), and an unaccompanied minor (popular child star Ronnie Scribner) turns out to be a runaway.

Plus since this is a tropical island, there is some beefcake among the extras lounging at poolside.

Not many Boomer kids, now young adults, cared enough to tune in to The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island (1981).  The island is still a resort, with the Harlem Globetrotters as guests, but the plot involves the villainous Martin Landau trying to get control of the valuable mineral "supremium."

Jim Backus, who played Thurston Howell III, was in poor health, so he appeared only in a cameo; his character was channelled by David Ruprecht (left) as his never-mentioned-before "son,"  Thurston Howell IV.

The last gasp of Gilligan's Island, except for in-character guest spots and retrospectives, came in 1982-83, with the Saturday morning Gilligan's Planet. The Professor can't built a boat, but he builds an interstellar spacecraft to get them off the island.  They end up spacecraft-wrecked on an uncharted planet. 

Really?

I was in grad school at Indiana University at the time, too old for cartoons.  But even if I was 10 years old, the premise seems unbearably far-fetched.

Besides, I had already seen Lost in Space.

See also: Gilligan's Island

Wrecked is a Wreck

Lost (2004-2010), about plane crash survivors facing paranormal peril on a desert island, was great.  Well, it started out great, and went downhill with the secrets-with-a-secret, most of which would be easily answered in the course of ordinary conversation.

"I thought there were five other survivors in your group."
"There were."
"....well, so tell me what happened to them?"

Instead of saying "Locke has risen from the dead," they make some cryptic reference to shadows.

My favorite is are the twin demigods or whatever, Jacob and ___. Everyone takes great pains to not say ___'s name, even though it's obviously Esau.

And the writers wrote themselves into so many inescapable corners that they had to fall back on a cop-out "They were all in Purgatory" ending.  I think...

Sorry, lost my train of thought.

Anyway, it's been 8 years, so a Lost parody hardly seems relevant.  I went in to Wrecked with low expectations, thinking maybe I would get a little beefcake and maybe some bonding.  I didn't.  Not much, anyway.

A disparate group of people are stranded on a desert island in a plane crash.  Danny (Brian Sacca, left), the slacker son of a rich businessman, and shy flight attendant Owen (Zach Kregger, top photo), see their chance to shine, and take charge.

They also develop a lovey-dovey gay-subtext bromance, in spite of their pursuit of ladies.

There are many other gay subtexts on the island.

Florence and Emma have a gal-pal romance.

Everyone, male and female, is in love with the British special agent who is squashed by the airplane fuselage during the first episode.

Todd (Will Greenberg, left) is mourning the loss of his golf clubs, but fey New Zealander Steve (Rhys Darby) thinks he's lost a child.  He tries to be supportive, offering hands-on-shoulders and gifts, which Todd interprets as sexual come-ons.

Sports agent Pack (Asif Ali) doesn't display any heterosexual interest or pursue any heterosexual relationships.

Unfortunately, no actual, honest-to-goodness, canonical gay characters, just subtexts.

There is some beefcake, but not as much as on Lost, where every male castaway was a fitness model.

Is there any other reason to watch Wrecked?

There is no paranormal peril on the island; minor mysteries turn out to be just that: minor.  Most plots involve struggling to survive: food shortages, tainted water, medical emergencies.  A very gross episode about not being able to poop in the jungle.  Some people die.  That just isn't funny.

Other than a few brief call-outs, like the episode title "All is Not Lost," Wrecked  doesn't try to parody Lost.  And it's not funny enough to make it alone.

I suggest holding out for a program with real gay characters.  Or fitness models.