Golden Age of Television - LOST is One Show That Hits the Mark

It is safe to say that the entertainment industry has a multidimensional, cultural and global impact.  I say to the entertainment producers of the world, if you want to help wake up or lift up souls, give us a great film. If you want to help keep our souls awake, lifted up and reaching deeper, wider, or higher, give us a great television series.

The Golden Age of Television has traditionally been identified as beginning in the late 1940s and continuing into the mid 1960s.  However, looking over the past decade of television shows (Network, Cable, Premium), though indeed many have pushed the envelope far over the edge of what is true, good, and beautiful, it can arguably be declared that we are in a new era in The Golden Age of Television.

Many of you reading this have at least a few, if not a dozen shows over the past decade that have gripped you.  Why? Because of the shows excellence in writing, acting, and producing whose truth, beauty, and goodness have had you coming back episode by episode.  Although in general terms there is more progress needed, welcome to The Golden Age of Television!

A great film can work like a catalyst. Within 90 to 180 minutes, it can uplift a down trodden soul or spurn it into action, ranging from personal compunction (Passion of the Christ) to social reform (Films on human trafficking such as 12 Years a Slave).  However, for the most part, even a great film is here today, gone tomorrow.  The characters we come to identify with, those we loathe or fall in love with, happens somewhere within 90 to 180 minutes.

A great television series has the potential to work on us weekly, 12 to 15 or more weeks per year, and usually over 5 years and sometimes up to 8.  If the writing is well done, we are introduced to a greater depth and complexity of character development.  These characters we not only come to loathe or love, but might even try to take on certain characteristics they convey.  Now that I live in LA, I like to watch films and television shows that can give me a deeper look into this culture I now call home.  Recently, I have been tuning into the gritty, unconventional cop show, The Shield (2002-2008, Mature Audiences).  The show is in reference to the true life Rampart Division police scandal, and loosely based one of it's Strike Teams.

Though the show has certain elements folks might find offensive, how inspiring is Captain Monica Rawling (Glenn Close).  The shows writers were able to spend a whole season masterfully developing this character as a firm, courageous, yet compassionate leader who stands for the good amidst a tough and complex environment where the moral lines of good and bad are blurred daily.  I aspire and pray to have her qualities as leader.  Although, as a parish priest, I will not need to exercise those qualities exactly in the same manner she needed to - Wait, let me think...(just kidding).


New Ethos is pleased to lift up Lost (Created by Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lendelhof) as one of the shows that deserves the New Ethos Logo of Excellence - A show that carried an overarching spirit of the true, good, and beautiful for 7 Seasons.  It is a show that  successfully explores the complexities of the human condition while connecting it with the transcendent.


Recently, Lost's showrunners, Lendelhof and Carlton Cuse had this to say in answer to claims that the show was about people who died on a plane crash and were in purgatory:


"No, no, no. They were not dead the whole time," Cuse said...But the characters definitely survived the plane crash and really were on a very real island. At the very end of the series, though? Yep, they were all dead when they met up in heaven for the final 'church' scene." Cuse also shared that Lost was metaphorically about "people who were lost and searching for meaning and purpose in their lives."


Many TV shows set out to entertain and maybe throw in a political PSA every now and then. But how many offer the service to all humanity to help reflect on the meaning and purpose of their lives?  Lost is by far not the only show deserving of a New Ethos Logo Award of Excellence.  In this current climate of television where people are rightly frustrated and violated by the many shows that have had a clear agenda to reverse some traditional values and universal truths we so dearly embrace, I am confident to say, this is the Golden Age of Television.  There are and will be others besides Lost. Use prudence and keep your hears open to "word of mouth" and do not be afraid to check out television today (or pick up a box set, "Hulu or Netflix it" to watch when time permits).  It's worth the search to keep your soul awake, lifted up and reaching deeper, wider, and higher to the transcendent meaning and purpose of life.

God Bless you and keep you in His truth, beauty, and goodness!

Fr. Don Woznicki

12 Years a Slave - A Cry for Human Solidarity

I know a film has great potential to meaningfully impact its audience when I leave the viewing experience with (and even hours later hold) a bit of a pit in my stomach.  12 Years a Slave (TYAS) did just that, as images, characters, and words were impressed on my heart about the sad chapter in our nations history about the slave trade in pre-Civil War times. Sean Bobbitt, who also photographed director Steve McQueen’s previous movies, “Hunger” and “Shame,” delivers the evocative imagery that forcefully portrays the barbarity and twisted logic that fueled the idea of slavery in America, the land of the “Free and the Brave.”

The film is based on a book Solomon Northup published in 1853 about his own personal ordeal as a slave for 12 years.  What is astonishing about this film is that it opens with Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a gifted black violinist living as a FREEMAN in 1841 Saratoga Springs, N.Y., with his wife and children in a charming upscale home.  Like with modern day human trafficking tactics, Northrup is invited by two white performers to join them on a lucrative circus tour with his musical talent. It was a trap, however, and Northup was kidnapped and given a new identity, Platt Hamilton, and accused of being a runaway Georgia slave. Northup is sold to William Ford of Louisiana (Benedict Cumberbatch), a saint compared to other slave owners in the film. But after clashing with an overseer on Ford’s sugarcane plantation, Northrup is sent to the cotton estate of Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a sadistic and manipulating man who is fixated on his young slave mistress Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o).

John P. McCarthy in his film review for TYAS in America Magazine says it well, “The film astonishes because it is so wrenching yet unsentimental, so devastating yet sober, so harrowing yet beautiful. But be forewarned: even knowing that Solomon’s odyssey ends eventually, it is hard to find joy in this unsettling work.” [America Magazine – Film Reviews, “Multiple Restraints”, October 21, 2013].

The epic television mini-series, The Color Purple (1985) was ground breaking in unveiling the reality of being an African-American slave in the deep-south.

TYAS is ground breaking in how it will draw the viewer into experiencing and feeling (uncompromisingly) an African American’s journey (already a free man, living in dignity and honor with a family in Northern United States) that descends into a hellish world of human slavery in the “Deep South.” TYAS helps the viewer to enter into the nightmare of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse people suffered in our very own nation due to skin color.  I call it the “Passion of the Christ” film of slave movies where all you can say after the massive human rights abuses is “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

But hopefully TYAS will helps us as a nation to reflect deeper into our own hearts about the reality of discrimination and human abuse of African Americans and their emotional and psychological pain that may still exist today in the United States.  Although we may have an African American in the White House, and our nation has come along way since the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Washington D.C., racial discrimination is alive and well.  There are still generational scars and healing needed between races and within society that still needs to take place.  This film can help deepen the empathy and compassion that is needed for the African American race, an important factor for progress in this area.

There is one scene when Epps talks about the parable of the faithful and unfaithful servant from Luke 12:35-48. The unfaithful servant is “beaten with many stripes” in that passage, and Epps warns his slaves he will whip any disobedient slave with many lashes, just like Scripture says.

What Epps, and the movie, leaves out is Verse 45, which says that the unfaithful servant “begins to beat the other servants, both men and women, and to eat and drink and get drunk.” Of course, it is Epps who actually does these bad things, so, as a Christian, he is the unfaithful servant of Jesus Christ, not Solomon or the other slaves.

TYAS’s value goes further also than the roots of racial discrimination of African Americans.  TYAS had me reflecting on how human beings of all races deal with others in a discriminatory way simply because they are different than they are, whether it be gender, politics, religion, or just demographically.

Brad Pitt has a cameo as the abolitionist carpenter Samuel Bass. Before predicting a day of reckoning for the nation and slaveholders, he asks Epps, “In the eyes of God what’s the difference between white and black?”

This echoes what St. Paul says in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”