Originally published at: New book looks back on things we lost since LOST premiered 20 years ago - Boing Boing
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I agree with this part. The pre-streaming-on-demand model meant that you could enjoy a single episode of a show like Star Trek: the Next Generation or a “monster of the week” episode of The X-Files without feeling obligated to see every other episode of the series just to understand what was going on.
The main problem with Lost in particular, like all those non-“monster-of-the-week” episodes of The X-Files, is that the creators built the central narrative arc around a mystery that they didn’t have any more of a clue about than the audience did.
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… can we just wait another 10 or 20 years first before we have to be nostalgic about “Lost” 
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This is weird, as I just started a rewatch of Lost this week…
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I think “The X-Files” was breaking its own continuity on purpose, telling a kind of anti-story full of unreliable narrators, where making viewers feel confused and paranoid was the whole point — it was a horror show, after all
I don’t think “Lost” was really doing the same thing — I think “Lost” was just written badly 
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I’ve never seen Lost. I can’t remember what channel it was on in the UK. I was a huge X Files fan, though.
As a writer myself, I feel like modern US TV scripting has introduced an unwritten set of rules which have become somewhat prescriptive, like the multi-episode story arc. I like TV programmes where there’s a complete story in a 1 to 2 hour episode.
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Or they were so busy complaining about their favorite plot threads weren’t resolved that they didn’t realize that at the end pretty much every mystery was explained. For better or for worse the explanation for some of those things boiled down to “the island was a magic place”. Perhaps not a satisfying explanation, but one all the same.
It was still a damn great show with a great cast, and I’m glad it existed.
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I’ve actually stopped watching shows that rely too much on cliff-hangers. I find that sort of thing to be lazy and manipulative writing, and there’s plenty of other things I could be doing with my time.
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I do think one of LOST’s worst legacies was the rise of Mystery Box television that relied more on secrets and cliffhangers than actual stories
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Yeah, I think the show ultimately reached a satisfying emotional conclusion. I also think the creators bit off way more mystery than they could handle.
Years ago, Javier Grillo-Marxuach wrote a blog about coming into the LOST writers room for season 1 but after the pilot was already written. It was actually pretty fascinating. They did have to retroactively figure some stuff out. But one of the guiding rules they followed was that every mystery they introduced needed at least 3 possible answers or paths it could take. That’s a neat way to leave a lot of possibility open for the future, which you need to do with TV like that! The only problem was, the writing staff kept changing, so there was no institutional knowledge to keep those 3 Answers locked in…
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Exactly. And LOST influenced other shows to their detriment. While the rebooted Battlestar Galactica premiered before LOST, the later seasons which were all about setting up various mysteries that went nowhere were clearly inspired by LOST.
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Strikes me that Twin Peaks got there first, and once the “mystery” of who killed Laura Palmer was solved, the show had nowhere to go (and I think Lynch left over that anyway)… But that show was too far ahead of it’s time, and David Lynch is just too weird for a mainstream American audience. Lost has weirdness, but not quite like Lynch did.
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From what I’ve read Lynch and Frost never intended to “solve” the mystery (or rather, intended to never solve the mystery), but the network executives forced them to.
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Yeah, that’s what I remember too. The mystery was never the point… I actually like Maggie Mae Fish’s take on the show, that it was more about exploring different genres of TV/film rather than just being about the mystery… Lynch really is more interested in exploring what makes America America, I think, and what better medium than TV and film, which is deeply American… Full of spoiler obviously…
I like Lost, but I think they were more interested in the mystery that can be explained, and using the mystery to keep eyeballs coming back. Abrams has always struck me as more of an industry man, more invested in entertainment than art? Sure, good shit can come out of that, but then it also gives you his take on Star Trek… which… meh. Lindelof, though, he seems more interested in the art of things…
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It absolutely started off on Channel 4- I remember them trailing it extensively.
More generally, I think Lost is one of the first big examples I remember where a series was killed by its success. I remember the plot getting increasingly convoluted in order to fill more seasons as time went on. they couldn’t bring it to a satisfying end because the networks were demanding more of it because it was popular, so it was just stretched into absurdity, and limped to a conclusion after the auidence ebbed away.
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I think Vince Gilligan learned from that… he plotted the whole thing and never got off course on where he was going. He knew how long the show was going to run and how it would end. That just makes for better storytelling ultimately.
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The requirement? that US series be packaged into syndication-length seasons also means some less-than-stellar episodes along the way. The streaming model of a-dozen-or-less focused episodes may also mean more budget allocated and focus on the episodes that do air.
I’d rather get through 10 quality episodes than slog through 26, of which only 10 were good. And on-topic, this is how they Lost me as a viewer decades ago, in the third? season when it was clear there is no plan, we have no arc, let’s get more in the can for reruns.
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Mystery box shows that are tightly planned out from beginning to end over the appropriate number of episodes and seasons are a joy - see Dark for a perfect example.
But then the same creators get the opportunity to do the same kind of thing on a Netflix budget, and Netflix axes it a third of the way through. 
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Dark at least got the whole thing out, unlike their second series, 1899… I’m still salty about that…
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I read an article about American TV writing which said that the objective was to get to 7 seasons, because if you managed that it was popular enough to keep playing somewhere in the world forever. Thus the residuals would always be rolling in. Friends is a good example.
That doesn’t necessarily make for the creation of a great story.
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