what made Lost so great?

[McCoy]

stj lol!

 

[stj]

^^^Thank yew, thank yew, I'm here til Friday!

Seriously, Lost was so marvelously inventive that the soap opera melodramatics in the character work could have just been a colorful approach. Lost is the current great example of open ended serialization wrecking a series. Endlessly recomplicating the plot and rewriting the characters/repeating their stories just to fill up time is what wrecked it.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Literally, the question is just wrong. Lost wasn't great. It was a disaster. The real question is, how did it suck in a fair number of viewers and keep them to the bitter end?

1.Start with a bang. Fan boys love shows where someone is sucked into a jet engine in the first episode. Don't know why TV producers don't do it more often.

2.Serialize. If you can't make it good all the time, at least keep them coming back. It's called intermittent reinforcement in behavioral psychology. Have no shame.

3.Mindboggling. Lost was genuinely creative in amazing twists. True, combining mindboggling and serialization destroyed the coherence of the plot but those who last til the end would be too embarrassed to say so. Have no shame.

4.Soap, more soap, Castile soap with distilled water. And a bubble machine, too. Lost's famous flashback structure was devised for the soap. (The flashforwards and the fake flash sideways were creative ploys in #3.) Do a love story, break the pair up, repeat. Have characters experience an epiphany, give them amnesia, repeat. Find an interesting back story for a character, then repeat with variations. Establish characters as supercool villains, then rewrite them as just stupercool. None of it adds up to anything, but the constantly paddling the plot churns up soap suds like you wouldn't believe. Have no shame.

5.Steal from the best. Example: Sawyer's backstory came from David Mamet's House of Games (starring Lindsay Crouse and, of course, Joe Mantegna.) Have no shame.

Summarizing it all: Gall.

Plenty of shows do most or all those things - FlashForward, V, Happy Town, The Gates, Persons Unknown, Haven - all craptastic ratings flops. So obviously there's more to it than your simplistic formula. Serialization usually does kill shows, making them too complicated for ADD viewers to follow and frankly too complicated for writers to write on the fly (eg, BSG). Lost managed to pull it off where most competitors failed abjectly.