The New York Times recently interviewed the makers of LOST, writer Damon Lindelof and executive producer Carlton Cuse. They discussed the pitfalls of writing a serial drama.
CUSE: Twin Peaks looms large to me as cautionary tale. That was a show where the mythology sort of overwhelmed everything else, principally the construction of believable, plausible characters.
LINDELOF: It’s all about character, character, character. Everything has to be in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show.
Supposedly, the creators do know how the series ends. “The survivors will not learn they are part of some dastardly experiment, or discover they are in purgatory, or wake up from a bad dream.”
CUSE: These guys get off the island.
LINDELOF: If it’s an island.
X-Files + Twin Peaks + Weekly World News + Stephen King = Best Show on Television.
Ugh, fuck that.
Twin Peaks is still enjoyable because the mythology loomed large. The first two episodes of Lost’s current season have been… okay, I guess. Occasionally awesome (Mama Cass!), occasionally really awful (look, Michael’s still an annoying dick! Sawyer’s macho sharkbait!).
What bugs me is that they claim a grand master plan, when they clearly came up with it during the course of last season (note the sudden inclusion of new, unnecessary characters and the tying-together of characters’ storylines — this indicates to me more a worry that they’re going to alienate viewers than anything which was dictated by the story). To me, the best TV shows ever in these genres were successes largely due to their lack of resolution.
Take The Prisoner — only 17 episodes, but we got a resolution without ever knowing why Number 6 was taken to the island, without ever finding out (well in any intelligible way) who Number 1 was, and it was totally great.
Metaphor and artful narrative sleight of hand are often more enjoyable than answers, at least to me.