Television - An improbable plane crash resuscitates an ailing genre

There was once an American TV network that was lost and desperate. Then ABC found Lost and Desperate Housewives and it was lost and desperate no more. In Britain we know about Desperate Housewives. Even those who did not become besotted by it during its run on Channel 4 admired the skills of its attractive cast of comediennes and its artful borrowing from predecessors such as Twin Peaks and Six Feet Under. But what of Lost (Wednesdays, 10pm), nominated for 12 Emmys in the States and, apparently, ABC's fastest-ever selling export? Is it good enough to stick with?

Beyond any praise I can bestow on Lost, I first salute the American public for giving it a go. More even than Housewives, it crosses and denies genres. The pilot episode (10 August) was likely to leave you as disorientated as its hero, a handsome young doctor called Jack Shephard. The programme opens on his closed eyes. There is a thud and they open. Reflected in a pupil are the merest patch of sky and a forest of high trees. Incongruously, a Labrador dog briefly investigates his prone body. Perhaps, after all, we are somewhere homely. But then Jack gets up and staggers off to an apparently deserted beach. For the first two and a half minutes there has been no dialogue and virtually no sound. Then the screaming starts. To his left have fallen the remains of a passenger aircraft still on fire. A rudder hangs precariously, about to fall on a heavily pregnant woman. A whirring turbojet sucks in a survivor, shreds him and explodes. Jack reverts to doing what he does on the mainland - being a doctor.

There are, we are told, 48 survivors of this plane crash. Although it seems at this stage that we shall be following closely the adventures of only a dozen or so of them, this is still an exceptionally large and unwieldy number, even for an ensemble drama. The idea now seems clear, however: we shall watch the survivors revert to their civilian roles, and see how well these equip them for their new lives as Robinson Crusoes. The whiney but complacent rich girl, who initially sees the crash as an opportunity for sunbathing, is due for a reality check. A long-haired fat youth will face his greatest challenge since the Weight Watchers programme on which his mom enrolled him. The coke-fiend pop star looks poised for a speed detox. "Sayid" will prove that Americans of Middle Eastern origin can also be useful members of society. A beautiful female passenger, who sews together a wound on Jack's back, will become his mate. The prisoner being escorted in handcuffs on the plane will identify himself and turn a gun on his fellows.

But Lost's writer-creator J J Abrams, who also created Alias, a cult serial about a college student spy, is more sophisticated than that. By use of flashback to the flight, details emerge that refute what we fancy we know about the passengers. Jack looks a little too eager to accept the second miniature bottle of alcohol from the flight attendant. It turns out that the beautiful woman is herself the dangerous prisoner. Sayid fought in the Iraq war, but in the Republican Guard, not the US marines. There are more secrets and lies in this tropical paradise than on Wisteria Lane.

Yet even that is not all. As a writer, Abrams turns out to have a broad unsophisticated streak, too. There is, wait for it, a monster on this island. It grabs the pilot of the plane and deposits his body at the top of a tree (and grabs the premise of the pilot and gives that, too, a good shaking). There are wild beasts: a polar (!) bear charges at the party. They are not alone: the emergency radio transmits a French distress message that is 16 years old. Later we shall get cabbalistic numbers, a secret hatch and the appearance of the French Girl Friday herself.

All this confusing improbability is made very much more acceptable for viewers by the cheesecake fitness of most of the cast, and the happy accident that their designer clothes have been spared incineration. Yet despite the gloss - the pilot episode alone cost $12m - the quality of the writing suggests this is not going to be Baywatch with gore, but a programme you'll need to keep your wits about you to enjoy. I particularly savoured the distinctive idiolect Abrams has given each character: a Korean couple are actually subtitled, for goodness sake. Lost may even prove to be a serviceable allegory of an atomised America coalescing into a community as it comes under attack from undreamed-of horror. As I say, "may".

On the face of it, a dramatic serial about plane passengers stranded on a desert island might seem to have little in common with a jokey soap set in Californian suburbia. But the dissimilarity of Lost from Housewives points to one moral: American viewers were ready for a change. Their drama had largely been reduced to variations on the themes of two crime procedurals, CSI: crime scene investigation and Law and Order. Meanwhile, with the expiration of Friends, Frasier and now Everybody Loves Raymond, the sitcom was looking like a dying art. These genres had been largely replaced by every variety of reality television - of which audiences were also wearying. Desperate Housewives and Lost provide something different. Originality would perhaps be going too far, but novelty, certainly. America settled for that and so, I expect, shall we.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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