My brother Gary was the one who got me interested in cult TV in the first place. I saw him watching Buffy‘s ‘Hush’ during its original airing when I was 7 and was hooked straightaway. For the next three years, I watched the series religiously with him. This opened the door to other cult series – Buffy’s spin-off series Angel, spy drama Alias, even the ridiculously convoluted yet captivating island drama Lost. On Gary’s recommendation, I saw all these series as they aired and enjoyed them as popcorn TV.
It was Lost that turned me from a casual viewer into one more interested in discussing and analysing what was going on. Whilst it started off fairly straightforward, by Season 5 there was a complex time travel storyline placed on top of a handful of other mysteries. What started off as a quick Google to understand the plot led me to online forums full of people discussing what was going on, trying to guess what would happen next, and posting pages of theories on how the series would end.