Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, Season 1 (1999)

In the early 20th Century, Professor George Challenger hypothesises that dinosaurs still exist in an isolated location deep in the Amazon jungle.  His scientific colleagues scoff at the idea, but with funding from the enigmatic heiress Marguerite Krux (pronounced "Kroo", but the spelling's similarity to "Crux" is I think not an accident), he intends to mount an expedition to prove it.

Joining them on the journey are man of action Lord John Roxton, journalist with a point to prove Ned Malone, and Challenger's greatest professional rivel, Professor Arthur Summerlee.

Of course they're going to find that Challenger is right, and there is indeed a storm-shrouded plateau where dinosaurs still roam.  But they're also going to discover that finding this Lost World is the easy part.  Getting out of it alive - even with the help of a young woman who grew up there - will be far more difficult.

I suspect that it is not an accident that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World - which is quite a mouthful, so let's agree to just use The Lost World from now on - debuted on TV a couple of years after the second Jurassic Park (also subtitled "The Lost World") came out.  Dinosaurs were big business.

Of course, dinosaurs also don't talk or scheme, and they're expensive to do well on screen, especially when you have a 1999 TV show budget.  So the show's plots quickly wander off in a multitude of directions, plundering from myth and history and public domain fiction with a complete lack of shame.  Or any concern for plausibility.  There's an ocean on the plateau.  An ocean on the plateau.  And Egyptians.  And Camelot.  And a vampire who lives in a Gothic castle.

It's this shameless pastiche of everything under the sun that makes me like this show more than it probably deserves.  Because let's be honest, it's frequently Not Very Good, and sometimes quite a bit racist and/or sexist too.  If you're interested in a gonzo kitchen sink fantasy adventure show and you're willing to suffer through a fair chunk of cultural and patriarchal insensitivity, then you might find yourself watching this show in the same kind of bemused wonderment that I did.