Lost Ahoy!
Like the rest of the television world, I am gearing up for the premiere of Lost’s last season, beginning next week Tuesday. My own Lost viewing tradition over the past several seasons has been to watch it with a few people who tend to have a different perspective than I do about what they want out of the show, which I’ve always enjoyed. In continuation of that, I will be pleased to bring you weekly blog posts on Lost, featuring the viewpoints of both a lit PhD as well as several chemists. They have not yet agreed to let their opinions appear here, but sometimes I feed them while we watch, so I bet they’ll be amenable.
In preparation for the last season, several interviews with Lost producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof have begun appearing around the web, including this first part of a two-part interview with Jace Lacob of televisionary. The whole thing is a good read, but there were two quotes in particular I found intriguing.
Carlton Cuse: I think that how people perceive the show has a lot to do with… the way in which they watch the show. It’s our belief that [viewers] who were in it strictly for the answers got fed up and jumped ship a long time ago… I think the people who have stayed with the show are people who really appreciate the idea that the journey is more important then the destination.
That’s not to negate the fact that we hope that the destination will be satisfying. But I think that our intent is to have made the entire ride an enjoyable one.
This may sound like bad news to a few people I watch with, who I think fall a little bit into a category of people who Carlton Cuse feels would have already abandoned the show. They want answers! I mean, I want answers.
But the more interesting thing here is that Cuse is focused on a particular aspect of his show that keeps people coming back, and it’s not as simple as withholding information. The experience of watching each week and following characters through the story is far more important than figuring out the smoke monster. Part of this has to be the nature of making a television show, which Cuse and Lindelof discuss elsewhere in the interview – there are so many unknown variables that it’s impossible to know what you’ll be able to say three years from now, or whether you’ll even be on the air. Maintaining suspense is all well and good, but it’s never going to be enough.
Cuse: We like to believe that we’ve sort of opened the door for certain types of shows that were not welcome on network television before Lost. It has led to the networks taking gambles with heavily serialized shows, and also genre shows. I mean, basically, there was no science fiction on the networks prior to Lost.
Obviously, this point about the presence of science fiction on network television can be debated, and Lindelof quickly jumps in to mention The X-Files. The idea that Lost has made room for “heavily serialized” shows is a more complicated and problematic claim. Certainly it’s been a huge presence on network television, and Lost made it eminently clear that there is some audience for demanding, multi-plot, long-arc shows. Still, that it has “opened the door” for more network shows in the same mold is a harder case to make. No one has been able to capitalize on a show quite like Lost, and when it leaves this May, its absence will leave a big empty hole, not a proliferation of rich, complicated, narratively innovative programming.
I do think, though, that Lost has played a more important role in the larger television landscape. There may not be a great deal of like-minded network shows, but SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica, HBO’s True Blood, Big Love, AMC’s Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Showtime’s Dexter – they’re complicated shows that have The Sopranos and The West Wing in their DNA, but Lost is in there, too.
It’s too early to start writing Lost’s legacy, but I’m happy to be reminded of how strange and different it felt at first, and whatever else Cuse and Lindelof think I’m actually in it for, I want to know what happens.