Pez Dispens3r wrote:King Author wrote:for as much insistence by the writers that Lost is a Deep, Philosophical story, the fact of the matter is, it's just a television show, and there is a real difference between that and, say, a novel.
This view amuses me slightly, because there was a time when novels were deemed unsophisticated, low-brow literature. The nature of television production does not lend itself to magnum opuses, but I don't think we can make broad generalizations about what a TV show can and can't achieve. Having said that, I think
Lost suffers in the same way
Babylon 5 suffered: what looked like the beautiful conception of an idea turned into an ugly mess that grew in on itself and fell apart in a mess of puss and bile. Partly this is because works always grow as they are made and when you try to design or plan something out too far in advance you're inevitably going to fall into issues of contradictions, abandoned threads, ass-pull retcons and rushed pacing ("ZOMG I only have two more episodes to resolve that arc I hadn't been paying enough attention to or had drawn out too long!").
The water gets muddied, though, by the fan community who insist everything conceived is brilliance. Luckily, I was burnt by
Sliders many years ago, and learnt not to place my faith in fiction.
I appreciate your broad view, but don't presume my ignorance -- I'm quite aware of how the novel was once considered a medium of dreck. In Walden, Thoreau tears apart then-modern literature as escapist nonsense, lamenting how the classical works of Plato, Aristotle and so forth go unread in a time of ... I can't remember what novels he cited off the top of my head.
Either way, you also jumped to conclusions -- I said there's a real difference between novels and television, and that's quite true. Television shows, no matter how ambitious, have to appeal to a much broader demographic than novels do. Executives and other higher-ups pressure writers to include characters and story elements that will appeal to the Neilson families, not to intellectuals and philosophers-among-men. And of course, television writing is a collaborative process, whereas most authors have complete control over their novels (editors notwithstanding). That's what I meant by "just a television show." The very medium has requirements upon it that make truly great writing impossible. There will never be a television show that compares to, say, The Illiad or Moby Dick, simply because of the nature of the business.
You bring up Babylon 5 and Sliders -- it's interesting, I started watching X-Files, another mythology-heavy show, in late 2005 or 2006. Never once did I feel frustrated by the central plot being danced around or things like that. Recently, I found out that during its run, X-Files was torn apart by diehard fans the way Lost was, and that surprised me. Another major factor that goes into it is probably timing -- since I started watching X-Files after it was completely over, I had the entire series available to me to watch back-to-back if I wanted, and I had no expectations set up by marketing, promotions or defensive head writers. I don't doubt I'd like X-Files less if I'd watched it while it was being broadcast initially, or that I'd like Lost more if I watched it for the first time ever starting today, but that doesn't mean the writers aren't responsible for their promises in either case.
Jesse wrote:Interestingly, I read an interview with the guy in charge of continuity on Lost. He wasn't brought in until the second season and he was bemoaning the fact that Lindelof and Cruse hadn't bothered to keep track fo anything at all fomr the first season, and kept introducing stuff that was going to contradict with what they'd said earlier. So yeah, I'd say they never really had a Grand Plan for everything.
As a writer myself (books, mostly -- nothing published), I always have to defend them on this front. The artistic process that goes into making a story is nuanced and difficult to put into black-and-white "here's when I thought of X character/plotline" matters, not to mention that a story can legitimately unfold over time within the mind of a writer (Stephen King had no idea where he was going to end up when he started his magnum opus, The Dark Tower, for instance). In any case, I do believe Damon and Carlton when they say they had the overall plot in mind from the beginning, which is to say that this group of people was pulled to the island by fate, and that the island was ... whatever they think they demonstrated it to be in the final episode (the gates of hell? purgatory?) and that there were these two dudes on the island, Jacob and some nameless guy with a beard who could turn into black smoke and was trying to get off the island to do...something bad (I was never convinced that the Man In Black posed any threat to the outside world, honestly), and that the closing scene would be Jack closing his eyes, mirroring the opening, and dying. All the minor details, like the fact that it was Desmond who physically caused Oceanic 815 to crash, the whole time traveling fiasco, the pregnant women dying, etc. were probably made up as they went, but I don't doubt that the major plot was always plotted out.
Of course, I'd happily watch a serial show that was being made up as went along if the writers were frickin'
honest and had realistic opinions of themselves and the quality of their writing.
JayDee wrote:King Author wrote:So how, I thought to myself, can I reconcile enjoying a work such as The Book of the New Sun, with all it's strangeness and open-ended questions, and roll my eyes at someone who complains "no answers?!" while at the same time, I watch Lost and bemoan "no answers?!"
Hypocrisy. All the cool kids are doing it.
Judging by the rest of your post, you don't have any real problem with Lost itself, but don't like the creators. Don't like their insistence that the show is more intelligent than it is, or whatever. Feel that they betrayed promises they made. A fair thing to consider, if you are talking about the reaction to the show. But it's got nothing to do with the quality of the show itself. (
And why yes, neither does this post...)
Heh, well, I
am pretty cool.
But to answer my own topic more directly, I don't think Lost was all that great. The first season was some of the most superb writing in television history, and the acting remained top-notch throughout, but the writing nosedived beginning with the Season 2 premiere, and never got back up consistantly (there were just a few good episodes after the first season -- all the Desmond-centric episodes and "Dr. Linus"). Not to mention that they absolutely
wasted the character of John Locke. A really amazing character, an even more amazing actor, and they completely dropped the ball with his story. That alone is almost worth all the contempt towards Lost one could muster up.
