Distractions

In Which a Cast of Thousands Appears and Disappears from Television in Six Years

or:
Lost VS Victorian Literature (kottke)


Films like Ben Hur haven't been made for a few decades now. Smart crowd simulation supplanted the cast of thousands for reasons of cost and logistics, gone are the films that spend millions on real horses and sets and real people. Ben Hur is an epic in every consideration, story and scale of the production. It is the product of a long dead studio system that could support such efforts. Now some movies are more expensive than ever to produce, but that cost mostly reflects the technology behind it. Hundreds of millions of dollars gets you several truckloads of CPUs and a crew of hundreds of lighters, modellers, and animators. All of this money goes to films that the risk averse studio thinks is a sure-thing. The wide appeal of Cameron's mix of cheese, melodrama, and spectacle is one of those sure-things, though the over-advertising of the Cameron's blue cat people film made Fox look nervous.

Lost is the most expensive television show ever produced by a broadcast network. It employed over 400 cast and crew members, split between Disney studios in Los Angeles and Oahu, Hawaii. It boasted a large ensemble cast and was shot entirely on location. The money sunk into the pilot alone must have been a pretty penny, having procured a plane and CGI passable enough not to be distracting. On paper, Lost does not seem like something that would fly for as long as it has. It was brought into the world riding the ratings of shows like Survivor and with the graces of JJ Abrams, popular entertainment extrordinaire, but it was also a show with bizarre underpinnings. When I first heard of it, coming across the initial promos channel surfing, I thought, how stupid is that? I could watch Survivor if I wanted to see people stranded on an island. And how far could anyone take the Lord of the Flies angle? Lost dodged this by almost immediately showing just how strange an island the castaways were on, throwing in an invisible Monster that roared like a combination of the T-rex in Jurassic Park and a piece of heavy machinery. But that move also put it in dangerous territory. How willing was the audience to take this journey? How could something so strange survive with the budget it has? A show as expensive as Lost needed to maintain its audience if it was ever going to survive let alone keep up its operating budget.

How exactly Lost stayed on air is unclear to me. Against everyone's expectations the show was a hit, and the writers who had resigned themselves to one season were suddenly called back for another. The audience had stuck with the show through hallucination stories and ghosts and whispers and crazy French women and the hatch, and had proved that they were willing to go further.

Once the show ends, it would be interesting to see a graph of how the ratings fluctuated over the series. As Lost delved deeper into its mythology, there was a lot of nervousness through the audience and the crew. The spectre of the X-Files hangs over shows like these, how it teetered and fell into a meaningless spaghetti tangle of half-explained alien plots and mediocre episodic stories, burdened by what it had set up before and unable to bring anything to a conclusion. The second and third seasons show this strain, an uncertainty as to how long the show could spin its wheels, how to pace itself. Lost still commanded high ratings, and the producers took the opportunity to ask for an end date.

A successful television show has the expectation of it running as long as there is interest for it. The X-Files ran for the better part of a decade before petering out. But the X-Files existed in an uneasy state between Monster of the Week and Overall Story, and Lost is completely Overall Story, and therefore can take no diversions. Having a end in mind basically solved the X-Files issue, giving both the writers and the audience something to hold onto as the story twisted and turned.

The last couple of episodes one could take as a sort of meta-apology for how the show kept people hooked. Lost trafficked in endless cliff hangers and dodged answers and blind-alley mysteries. The penultimate episode ended with Jacob, the benevolent and dead protector of the island, sitting the last few survivors around a camp fire and telling them directly (if a little vaguely) what they were there for. Jacob, and the show, had run out of time, and had to stop avoiding questions. There's a large set of questions that will never be answered, but if you value your sanity like I do you take that with a little infuriating Jacob-esque smile. 

As Lost now comes to an end on Sunday, the likelihood of any television show like it in scope to be made again is slim. ABC took a big risk producing this series, a risk that is increasingly unlikely to be taken in the future. Television has existed for 50 years now, and has only just gotten to the point of producing epics like Lost or tightly scripted series like Breaking Bad or the Sopranos, but as the media landscape shifts it might just lose all of the progress it made. Lost began a year before YouTube became as popular as it is now. The money that Lost commanded isn't really in the game any longer. Television's foray into the epic comes just as movie studios move towards producing many and cheaply made films, and for the film studios that move may result in more varied films, for television that more likely means more seasons of Wipeout.