While I reject Havrilesky’s theory about Lost‘s influence and disagree with her low opinion of Lost, I do find myself sympathetic to something of the point that she was trying to make. I, too, want less Lost-ishness from TV. In fact, if such as a thing as “the next Lost” is even possible, I don’t think it should be anything even remotely like Lost. I say this as a Havrilesky rat who loves chasing after mystery pellets (although I, too, was let down by The Killing), as a voracious consumer of dark fantasies, puzzle narratives, and epic-sized pulp fiction that dares to reach for profundity when maybe it shouldn’t. But I don’t need any more of them. Not right now, at least. I hunger more for something unique and challenging, something that clever variations of a cherished classic can’t provide. I want a mold-breaking, genre-expanding, zeitgeist-capturing storytelling machine that looks and feels unlike anything else on television right now. In other words: I want a show as original as Lost was when it captured our imaginations and colonized our brains back in 2004.
So what should “the next Lost” look like? I have no idea. That’s kind of the point when you crave risk and ambition and the shock of the new, isn’t it? However, there are a few things I don’t need from my next cult pop obsession, simply because they’ve been done sufficiently and well by Lost and its loosely related kin, or have become so commonplace as to now be clichéd. I like stories with “mythology” — but I don’t want another divine/diabolical conspiracy saga spanning decades, centuries, or millenia. I like supernatural and sci-fi elements, though they’re not essential, and I don’t need them to facilitate another meditation on the tension between religion or science. I like “complex” and “flawed” and “morally ambiguous” characters as much as any other pretentious pundit, but I don’t need more cultural avatars of redemption or vengeance. Similarly, while I yearn for the next zeitgeist show — one that knowingly or not captures the spirit of the times, that calls or expresses the moment — I’m tiring of 9/11 aftermath-recovery allegories. Unless a writer has something new to say on the subject, it’s time for TV to grapple with our post-Osama, post-Iraq world.
Do I want another show that attempts to tell a series-long saga, one that tracks character change over time yet defers the resolution of its core conflicts and key mysteries to the very last season? I love the ambition, but I’ve seen enough flawed work and failure over the past couple decades to wonder if it’s something that television — broadcast television, at least — just can’t do very well. The mandate of any TV show is to stay on the air for as long as possible by any means necessary, not to produce artful cohesion over time. I am among those who accept and admire the final form of Lost, however messy and fuzzy. Still, if “the next Lost” wants to be a multi-season telenovela with a beginning, middle, and end, I do hope it has the support of its network from the get-go, and better, gets a customized format that serves the integrity of the story, not work against it. (I am intrigued by the example of FX’s American Horror Story, whose producers announced last week that each new season will feature a new setting, new characters, and (mostly) new actors, making each year’s set of episodes a complete, wholly unique, hopefully well-realized serial.)
Having said this: Watch me wind up falling hard for something that gives me everything I think I don’t want. Like I said: I don’t know what “the next Lost” will look like. We’ll just know it when we see it — if “we” see it at all. The truth is, when people talk about wanting “the next Lost,” I think what they’re really talking about a kind of big, buzz-y water cooler show (scripted-drama category) that is becoming increasingly hard for broadcast television to develop, the kind that can compel 15 to 20 million people to watch in real time each week and get them debating it and discussing it and dissecting it to pieces in the days between episodes. I miss that cultural energy. It’s one thing to discuss Games of Thrones with my Comic-Con pals and readers of George R.R. Martin’s books. The Lost conversation — at its height — was bigger, broader. Back in 2005, it seemed like everyone wanted to know what or who was inside that damn hatch. Even people who didn’t watch Lost. Those kinds of moments, from those kinds of shows, seem to be increasingly rare in today’s fragmented, niche-oriented, target-market media environment. But never say never again. I once thought I’d never get another geeky enterprise as daring and engrossing — and popular — as The X-Files. Yet the truth was out there — waiting to be found on a trippy tropical island. Now take me somewhere else.
Read more:
‘Once Upon a Time’ I found this ‘Lost’ candy bar
Doc Jensen on ‘Lost’ One Year Later: Keeping the Faith?
Photo Gallery: ‘Lost’: Catching Up With the Cast
