Ten years later and we're still Lost

It is common for people to decry network television as being a vast wasteland, a medium that serves up nothing but bland pablum.  And they’d be right—mostly. But networks have to produce three hours of programming nightly, 15 hours a week, 780 hours a year, plus all the non-prime time programming.  Any beast that voracious demands to be fed, and oatmeal isn’t always available. 

Every so often the networks produce something completely original; networks produced TV fare such as Arrested Development, Pushing Daisies, and Quantum Leap.  Sometimes these shows are short lived, filed in the “brilliant but cancelled” category. Occasionally they last longer; Doctor Who has survived in some form for over fifty years now.

The last great innovative network TV show debuted ten years ago this week.  It was called Lost, which also describes how its audience felt over most of the next six years.  For six years water coolers in America were the scene of people discussing smoke monsters, The Others, fate, Benjamin Linus, the Black Rock, and a boy named Waaaaaaaaaaalt. It featured a group of castaways led by a doctor with a compulsion to fix things, a paraplegic named after a philosopher who was their best hunter, a bickering couple who were deeply in love, and the most sympathetic character happened to be a former torturer who had worked for Saddam Hussein.

Lost’s unique combination of character-driven story lines, over the top fantasy elements, kaleidoscopic cast mutations and perpetual cliffhangers spawn dozens of imitators, all of who failed miserably. Lost remains a singular accomplishment. Like the movie Citizen Kane, it is undeniably brilliant, yet we can learn nothing of why it is brilliant. It is more than the sum of its disparate parts.

Most people associate Lost with the more fantastical elements, the smoke monster, time travel, and such nonsense.  My mother, who described anything resembling fantasy as “silly” stuck with Lost even during season 5, which should be called The Season of Time Travel. Why? Lost gave us a collection of the most interesting, complex characters ever assembled for a single show.  Heck, the totality of programming on CBS doesn’t have as many interesting characters as the first season of Lost.

But they didn't stop at season one; it is astonishing to realize that the motivating force for the last three seasons of Lost was the character of Benjamin Linus, who showed up calling himself “Henry Gale” late in season two.  The last great episode the show produced, season four’s “The Constant,” was a love story about Penny and Desmond, also not original characters.  The show endlessly evolved, reinventing itself with each new season, which is an even better trick than creating an original show in the first place.

Lost had its flaws.  I still don’t believe creators Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof had a plan for the middle section of the show.  The first six episodes of season three are six of the worst episodes ever produced for television (in one, the main plot is John Locke’s quest to rescue Mr. Eko, who was kidnapped by a badly animated polar bear); they were clearly spinning their wheels, and got back on track once an end date of six seasons was determined. The episode Eggtown contains more legal errors than the entire run of LA Law.  After its first season, in which it won the Emmy for Best Drama, it won “only” four more Emmys, two for supporting actor (Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson) and two for technical categories, which is a small haul for such an influential show.

Lost unfortunately shares a fate that more recently befell How I Met Your Mother, namely a final episode that was deemed so disappointing that it tarnished all that preceded it. [SPOILER ALERT] They’re all in purgatory?  Sayid ends up with Shannon, not Nadia? The smoke monster is Allison Janney’s son? We knew the end would be weird, but seriously, Allison Janney?

Maybe Lost’s epitaph should be something Jacob uttered in the final episode of season five; “It only ends once; anything that happens before that is just progress.” There was a lot of progress before Lost got to its inevitably unsatisfying conclusion.  Lost came along at the perfect time, when the internet could propel it into the social media stratosphere but before the internet got too spoiler-y.  Probably no series in the future can produce so many surprises, because now everything is spoiled.

But I won’t say networks can’t produce another show like Lost; to paraphrase John Locke, I won’t tell networks what they can’t do.