*** Lost Season 1
*** Bleak House

Lost season 1 was pretty good, even though some of the characters are kind of annoying. We burned through every DVD we got and waited impatiently for the next one, which is pretty much the entire goal of a show like this. The show has a great sense of having a grand plan behind all the strange incidents that you really really want to figure out, which is what keeps yu coming back. Though comments I’ve gotten from people who have seen most of the other seasons suggests that’s not really true, that new mysteries just keep being introduced, old ones are left dangling, and stuff just gets made up along the way; which is why, even though we enjoyed season 1, after finishing it we were debating whether to continue with 2.

Bleak House was really good. Gillian Anderson was amazing and most of the other roles, big and small, were very well performed. Bleak House is definitely one of those Dickens books with lots of funnily-named characters (Snagsby! Smallweed! Tulkinghorn! Guppy! Skimpole! Dedlock! Bucket! Krook!) and a lot of them looked pretty fun to perform too, with some over-the-top dialogue and accents. And the story itself is good, with plenty of tragic and comic bits.