Waiting for the New LOST

Everybody’s waiting for something to take the place of Lost, and despite many attempts, nobody’s been able to pull it off.  Most attempts have crashed and burned in one season or less.  And obviously it’s difficult to recapture magic, but there are certain things that any show with aspirations to be “the next Lost” should do.

1. Give us the premise as quickly as possible – Before it even started, people knew that Lost was about survivors of a plane crash.  That’s a good start.  Did you know what The Event was about based on the marketing?  Probably not, because the whole point was that they couldn’t tell us what the titular Event was, but we’d find out.  You can’t sell an audience on a show by making a point of not telling them the premise.  Go back a couple of years – what was Invasion about?  Aliens, probably…  Surface was about water, or something.  FlashForward actually did a really good job of getting a complicated premise across before the premiere, but so many of the Lost pretenders fall down on this fairly simple point.
2. It’s more important to have a plan than to convince us that you have a plan – So many shows have tried to frontload their mythology, as if to say “Hey, we’re thinking long-term here!”.  Those shows never make it long enough to have their thinking pay off.  Remember, the first episode of Lost had a plane crash and a monster that we didn’t see.  Second episode gave us a polar bear and a radio transmission.  It’s not like they put the four-toed statue in the pilot – Lost caught you up in the storytelling and once we learned about Hurley’s numbers and we realized that they were there all along, well, that’s when we realized something was really happening.  We had to care before the weird stuff mattered.  Jack’s little speech about counting to five had to be there because we had to get to know him.  If that screen time had instead gone to Jacob looking into his lighthouse magic mirror, Lost wouldn’t have made it past the first season.  By the time things started getting crazy, we knew who the characters were and what their lives were like before the Island – we cared about them, which let us care about the world where they lived.
3. Tell us who these people are, for crying out loud – This is really pretty simple.  All of the Lost wannabe’s have had huge casts.  I don’t want to pick on FlashForward unduly, but the series started with a host of characters, all of whom already knew one another.  There was some nice characterization in the premiere, but it was hard to keep track of anybody and how they were related to one another.  Throw some strangers in there who have to introduce themselves.  Even if we walk away from the first episode knowing a handful of people, that’s enough to get us to the next one.
4. If you have a mythology, figure it out ahead of time – This is one where people will pick on Lost, because there are quite a few false starts in six years.  Plot threads were dropped, things were introduced that never came up again.  But that’s going to happen when a team of people tell a story over six years.  I still contend that the series as a whole was surprisingly consistent and cohesive, and I’ll fight and die on that hill.  Now, most of the Lost imitators didn’t make it far enough to see their plans collapse, but there were a few.  FlashForward had to go back on established facts a couple of times, and once they started to determine that the glimpses of the future weren’t set in stone, they never managed to answer the question of why it mattered.  “Hey, you had a vision that might or might not be true!  How did that change your life?”  And then we sort of ended up with the idea that the future could be changed, except when it can’t.  Or look at poor Heroes, which started out with hints of some sort of Grand Unifying Theory that turned out not to exist.  They had a more or less firm plan for Season One, but no further.  Season Two already started to retcon major plot elements, and by the fourth season, various characters’ powers could change from episode to episode, there was no clear idea as to how time travel (a major element of the series from the beginning) works, and the history was completely broken.  (A murder from a previous season was revealed to have been committed by a character using powers that she didn’t have until much later.)  There’s nothing wrong with episodic fiction, but if you’re going to present the idea that there’s a plan in place and this is all leading up to something, you’d better actually have figured out the broad strokes at a bare minimum.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that the Next Big Drama won’t be something like Lost.  It could be a genre that we haven’t seen in years.  It might not be genre fiction at all – maybe just a well-told story about a family that clicks with viewers.  But as we head into the traditional Lost season, it’s impossible not to wish for something that will engage so many people in that same way.  And if it stars everybody from Lost, well, I certainly wouldn’t complain.