Lost won, apparently. A TV series that went on to achieve global success, Lost, or rather, its capacity to captivate an audience numbering in the tens of millions, has come to be considered as crucial by the Obama Administration. A big event on the political calendar, the State of the Union address, was said to have been rescheduled to avoid clashing with the drama series.

Granted, the rescheduling is quite possibly a trivial matter of a poorly communicated announcement by the White House, which the media have been only too happy to sensationalise. Nevertheless, the mere appearance of trying to avoid clashing with a season premiere of Lost gives pause for thought. Obama had better improve his public relations team in the White House. His predecessor, George W Bush, was lucky enough to have a finely tuned PR spinning machine that managed to get a weak leader re-elected for a second term. The current Administration appears to risk suffering from a reverse form of this malaise.

Have serial TV dramas become the latest opiate of the masses in the 21st century, just as religion and football were in the past? The sheer size of the television audience means a lot of people are kept occupied on matters other than politics, so it certainly acts like it. If so, those who believe in grand conspiracy could easily imagine that the strategy must have been carefully designed by previous GOP Administrations – the Democrats have yet to learn about the importance of TV scheduling. A recession, global warming, and history repeating itself in Afghanistan are no-longer sufficient reason for a quite significant section of the US public to switch over to the presidential address, missing crucial plot-defining moments in the process.

So who are these mysterious Lost viewers? Who have managed to dictate the terms of Obama’s biggest PR moment in months? My guess is Generation Y. Generation X are a little on the old side to form a large part of Lost’s audience. Generation Z are too young be bothered with such trivial matters as voting anyway. Incidentally, it seems that there really was a “Lost Generation“, but that referred to notable authors of US literature who found themselves down and out in Europe after the First World War. I’m sure that the Lost viewers would have been considered useful material for the Lost Generation’s own view of the political and social realities of the 21st century if they were with us today.