The closest modern television comes is something like Game of Thrones, which similarly sprawls all over the place and incorporates more and more characters with every season. No, what I'm trying to convince you of is that Lost was special, that we're unlikely to see anything else like it. And thanks to Lost and others like it, that "something else" stood just as good a chance at being terrific as the show being turned away from.ĭamon Lindelof (Kevin Winter/Getty Images) One person can learn that the show's mystical Island was the center of experiments with weird pseudoscience in the ‘70s and have their eyes fill with delight, while another will roll their eyes and flip over to something else. It wasn't everybody's cup of tea, to be sure, and the audience shrank as the show catered more and more to the hardcore faithful. I'm not even going to try to convince you Lost was good, though I very much believe it was. Any show will produce some bum hours in that timeframe. Lost ran six seasons, and for three of those, it produced more than 20 episodes. Hell, even the show's co-showrunners, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, have publicly called out episodes they felt didn't live up to the show's standards of quality. Even I, someone who largely defends the much-derided finale, will admit that the series lost its way several times over the course of its run. No one is going to claim that Lost was perfect. Now, however, it feels like the last gasp of a model that would soon realize its obsolescence. At the time, it (along with Desperate Housewives, which also debuted in the fall of 2004 on ABC) felt like a herald of network television's new fearlessness in trying new things to stand out from a crowd increasingly filled with cable series willing to play dark to win viewers. And The X-Files married weird storytelling to a police procedural format in a way that proved incredibly entertaining and durable.īut Lost stood, in some ways, alone. Twin Peaks became a collective fixation for a few brief weeks in 1990. Star Trek: The Next Generation brought science fiction to one of the largest audiences ever assembled for such a program (and in syndication, no less). Lost was special, and we're unlikely to see anything else like it And no matter what you thought of it (or, notably, its ending), you have to grapple with the fact that for six years, a show with the soul of a cult sensation somehow became an obsession of the sorts of people who wouldn't have been into a show with such a heavy mythology, such bizarre symbolism, except for the fact that the show was so good at what it did that it essentially sucked them into caring about the sorts of stuff numerous other shows had tried and failed to interest viewers in. Abrams would leave the show seven episodes in, but leave an indelible mark upon it: the mark of going for broke, of trying anything, of never settling for the routine. He said this wisdom was instilled in him by his fellow co-creator, J.J. "Even if you fail, people will appreciate you having attempted the harder trick and crashed than just kind of doing the easy stuff," said co-creator Damon Lindelof during a 90-minute interview about the show's first season. A decade after its debut, Lost seems ever more like a weird, collective dream we all had.Ī complicated, character-driven sci-fi/fantasy hybrid with heavy elements of horror? And we all watched it? And it was on broadcast network television? When looking at the modern TV landscape, it's hard to find anything quite so ambitious, especially on the broadcast networks, which increasingly manage toward the margins in a dying business model.
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