A few thoughts on LOST

Emily and I are huge LOST fans. We've watched every episode, we have friends over on LOST night, and we discuss the themes and mythology of the show.

But beyond the fantastic narrative the show has given us, it's pretty amazing that this show was produced in today's entertainment industry. Here are a few things that if had going against it:

1) It was a simple concept that became more complex

Television networks love pitches and concepts that can be explained in a single sentence, and LOST actually began that way. A network executive at ABC came up with the idea of doing a scripted version of the CBS reality show Survivor. That’s how the show started. The exec wanted, essentially a tv version of Castaway, but with massive group dynamics. It was pitched out to some producers, and a script developed. I’ve heard that this first pilot script (before eventual producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelhoff came aboard) ended with the survivors of a plane crash having built shelters and bowling on the beach at the end of the episode using driftwood and coconuts. Abrams came aboard and said, forget that, the first episode needs to be the first hours of life on the island, not the first weeks. He also added things like a monster, a polar bear on a tropical island, a mysterious radio signal…and the network accepted it. Not only did they accept it, they let Abrams direct the most expensive episode of television in history. For the pilot they actually had a real plane destroyed and placed on the beach. At that point the network had only ordered 13 episodes, and they allowed them to have that sort of creative control and budget. Network notes are typically to simplify shows, but they let the producers have the biggest budget in history and go nuts.

2) A tv series with an end date

Television shows are bought by networks to run forever. Especially on the main broadcast networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX). LOST (eventually) said, sorry ABC, but we have this much story to tell and that’s it. And the network, rather than firing the producers and hiring new ones (which networks have done before), said “Okay.” This just doesn’t happen very often in the entertainment world. I heard in a podcast with one of the LOST showrunners that they were talking with very longtime television producer (who had launched more than 60 shows in his career) who said that he never once was able to end the show the way he wanted to, the networks always had mandates to change things.

LOST definitely struggled towards the end of the second season and the start of the third. During the first season they had broad ideas about the island and the mythology (they brought in the Adam and Eve skeletons with the white and black rocks back in the sixth episode, and just explained them last week), but they didn’t have a firm map of the mythology. Between the first and second season they figured the big ideas behind the island and knew more or less what the mysteries and answers were, but they had no idea how long the show would be on the air. So how quickly can they reveal mysteries?

The pace was pretty clearly slowing at the end of the second season, and the third season started with a six episode mini-season, went on a several month break, and aired the final 16 episodes. The six-episode mini-season had several of the main characters sit in cages and not really do much at all. I heard one of the writers say that, though they didn’t realize it at the time, the cage story arc was a metaphor with how they felt as creators: trapped with nowhere to go. They knew what they wanted to do, but couldn’t move forward so long as the show was meant to go on forever. After that mini-season they negotiated with ABC to end the series after two more seasons (the writers strike messed that timing up, hence the sixth season). That means that, unlike most shows which find out it is their last season partway into that very season, the creators have been writing towards an end date for a three years now. The tail end of the third season definitely picked up the narrative pace. Having the end date for this story allowed for an entirely different kind of story telling than is possible in most tv shows. Some cable shows do get this kind of creative control (choosing the number of episodes per season, choosing how many seasons to produce), but very few network shows do.

3) A big genre mash up

What is LOST? It’s a drama, but it also deals with time travel, alternate worlds, god-like beings, immortals, ghosts, smoke monsters, mental displacements, etc. And yet, it doesn’t act like a “genre” show (see: Heroes), it acts like it's a straight up hour long drama. It’s a crazy sci-fi, fantasy, horror, paranormal, occasionally sit-comy (Hurley, Miles), romance with love triangle with whatever else they want to toss in. That sort of mash up comes across as very unfocused to networks, who favor simplicity of concept (easier to sell to an audience, appeals to a wider audience). It’s amazing that this show did not get “noted to death” as they sometimes say to describe the process of network heads sending down regular notes to what to change on a show (“Get rid of the polar bear!”). Some shows have tried to mash up genres but without much success (a sci-fi western like Firefly: awesome, but canceled).

Any one of those three factors (a basic premise that is made more difficult to explain, going against network’s wishes for the show to go on forever, and a mix up of genres) would be enough to kill most shows. In fact, between greenlighting the pilot and the pilot airing, the ABC exec who picked up LOST was fired, reportedly for allowing such an expensive and “incomprehensible” show to be filmed. ABC had spent so much on the pilot there was no way it wasn't going to air, but apparently they were very concerned that they had just made an insanely expensive mistake.