Lost, Serialized Drama and The Sandman

This morning, Erin Martell over at TV Squad threw up a post about how it might be a good thing that the Lost producers may be working toward a planned endpoint. Apparently I missed this announcement from their TCA coverage a couple of days ago, but what surprised me was the implication that it was ever okay if the show didn't have some preplanned endgame.

After season 1 ended, most viewers probably would have agreed that Lost was a great show. Now, in the middle of season 3, you'd be hard pressed to argue it as anything better than just good. Maybe I was being naive, but I always gave the benefit of the doubt to the creative staff behind the show that they knew what they were doing, they knew where things were going and that eventually, we'd all get swept back up into their grand design.


Of course, the news that now they are considering working towards a "planned endpoint," indicates that in fact that was not the case. On one level that makes me a little angry, for having bought into the show under the assumption that I wasn't just along for some wild ride filled with one red herring after the next (Martell makes mention of the four-toed statue). But what it has done more than anything is destroy a lot of the mystique that the show had built up.

That's really the problem with any of the serialized dramas. To keep things tight and to keep viewers interested and excited, they really need to be completely scripted from day one. Now I've heard that when Abrams pitched the show, he did so with a completed arc, but that would be impossible without some sort of endpoint. Now maybe he told them the end, said it would run 5 seasons, and they decided after the first that they wanted to make it 7. I can see that happening, and I'm sure the writers and probably most of the producers had absolutely no say in it. But either way, in that kind of money grab, the viewers are the folks that really lose out.

It was a conversation that I had with a friend and former professor, Jim Thompson, that really pulled this into perspective for me. We were talking about Neil Gaiman's Sandman, which I just completed a couple of weeks back, and he made the point that Gaiman had the whole thing planned before he wrote the first page. Having read the series, that much is pretty clear. No one creates what he created, no one produces a piece of literature like that, without knowing every step (or virtually every step) before setting out.

If anything, the shear scope of Sandman is much larger than that of Lost. The plot arc might be shorter, it's impossible to say, for reasons made clear above. But what's important is that Gaiman showed that creating a massive yet tightly wound serial fiction was very possible. It's all a matter of biting off enough, and having the foresight and talent enough, to be able to spit something out the other end that is capable of sustaining an audience's attention. If we look at Nielsen ratings, we can see that Lost has been losing steam, and at something of a quick pace, considering the fever the show originally induced. Maybe viewers have been getting a little tired of feeling like their being jerked around.

I guess, in the long run, this announcement can, as Martell argues, be seen as something of a win for viewers. But to get to that point we have to let the creators of Lost off the hook for the ride they've already taken us on. If they come back strong after this most recent break, maybe forgetting won't be all that much to ask.