Every Tuesday night for the past few months, the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn has been having Lost parties. Billed as a "Weekly Therapy Session," it's free of charge (when you utter the arcane Lost reference "You all everybody") and often Previously on Lost, a Brooklyn-area band that sings Lost-related songs, will show up and perform. The Knitting Factory is decked out in Lost-themed decor worthy of a tropical island and specialty drinks are served that will turn even the most hardened viewer into a billowy plume of black smoke.But the parties will end, because in a week, Lost will be over, its six-year-run on ABC coming to a close.
Most television shows aim to be something – water cooler sensation, ad generating moneymaker, mild entertainment or survival until they reach that magical 100 episode mark, at which point the show can become syndicated, and everyone involved gets a whole lot richer. But as the show nears its close, it's become clear that Lost wasn't just going for something more. And in the process, it ended up changing the way we absorb and engage with popular culture.
Lost premiered on September 22nd, 2004. Already entrenched in a costly, bloody, and wrongheaded foreign war, it was still a little shocking to see a big American primetime drama open with a plane crash (ostensibly the reason we got involved in said foreign war in the first place). But the plane crash led to what, at the time, many viewers and network brass thought of as little more than a dramatized version of Survivor, the beloved reality show on CBS.
After all, how many prime time shows can be set on a tropical island?
Lost's two-hour pilot showcased a number of characters, introduced briefly at first and then, more lengthily, via flashbacks, and the characters would die off, one by one, a narrative version of getting voted off the island.
But then an unearthly roar shook the jungle. And everyone watching realized this was not a fictionalized Survivor. No, this was much, much weirder. Just how weird, however, was anybody's guess. Instead of being marooned on the island, in the course of the show's six labyrinthine seasons, the castaways would learn that there are other inhabitants of the island, some would leave the island only to be drawn back (a favorite phrase uttered by more than one character: "The island isn't done with you yet"), with an entire season being devoted to the science fiction-iest of all science fiction conceits: time travel.
One of the many joys of Lost was how it eased you into its oddness. It eventually revealed itself to be an out-and-out science fiction show, but when it started it was more about the people that wound up on the island. This kind of slyness has informed other shows that mix genres. Just this season a serial killer was operating on Wisteria Lane in otherwise melodramatic Desperate Housewives. Before Lost, this genre cross pollination wouldn't have been possible, or at the very least would have been met with much more nervous hand wringing.
Val Vinokur, the undergraduate director of literary studies at New York's prestigious Eugene Lang College, theorizes (theorizing is part of Lost culture after all) that the show's genre hybridization is a key to its success.
"One big reason it works so well, apart from being so well cast and well paced," Vinokur says, "is that it constant upends its paradigms. For example, it is a shipwreck-[Robinson] Crusoe tale - but then it's not, because it's not a desert island and because they leave and come back. It's like they are lost not on an island, but in a narrative-in-progress. And that narrative itself is fluid with respect to heroes and villains, good and evil, technology and theology, and mythical and historical time."
By episode 3 of the first season, "Walkabout," we saw a man who was previously wheelchair bound regain control of his legs. By the end of the first season, we had discovered a French woman who had been living on the island for sixteen years, been given clues that at least one of the survivors of the airplane crash had magical powers, were introduced to a nefarious sequence of numbers, and learned that the island was inhabited by a mysterious group of folks known only as The Others.
Carl Frisk, a recent Parsons Design graduate and devoted Lost watcher since day one, says that while the obsessive speculation is fun, it's not the primary reason he continues to watch.
"What is it?" Frisk asks. "What is the island? This is the one question that leads me to watch week in, week out. And while all that stuff that everyone talks about is fun - and it is a fun social act, talking about lost - the show had me hooked from the plane crash. It's just pure enjoyment."
Already, the show was more of an active puzzle than some passive experience that you simply watched, goggle-eyed, at the end of a long day. It allowed you to engage with it in some very profound ways. And its ability to mix culture references both populist (Stephen King's The Stand) and highbrow (a number of the characters are named after and embody principles of famous philosophers like Desmond Hume, John Locke, and Danielle Rousseu.)
The Lost creators (among them Damon Lindelof and uber-producer JJ Abrams) interacted with the fans in the most Lost-ian way possible: through the burgeoning viral marketing campaigns (which has since been used to promote big budget movies like The Dark Knight) and presentations at San Diego's mammoth fan convention Comic Con. The creators dropped bread crumbs at every possible location, urging fans to follow...
Everything in the Lost-verse was a game, something that could be figured out, theorized about, and then solved. Lost book groups, based on books either referenced directly or inferred from the show (everthing from King's Carrie to Philip K Dick's trippy sci-fi opus Valis to Charles Dickens' epic Tale of Two Cities), sprang up everywhere.
The creative principles of Lost were raised on computer games like Myst and stacks and stacks of comic books (Brian K Vaughn, a comic book luminary, joined the writing staff for several seasons), and structured the show as such. Much of seasons two and three were focused around mysterious "hatches" around the island, which brought to mind the dungeons in classic videogame series The Legend of Zelda.
And like a comic book, every frame of the show was packed with information and picked apart for future analysis. (It also doesn't hurt that the show developed along with the ephemera of home Digital Video Recorders and success of television shows-on-DVD.) In a season two episode called "Lockdown," a main character is trapped underneath a blast door. That blast door is painted with a map of the island. It was an incredibly comic book-y moment, with the blast door representing a large splash panel in a comic book. And instantaneously, it was on the internet.
People ate it up. Every bread crumble and intellectual tease was being lovingly dissected. Fan sites popped up like overactive dandelions. And legitimate press outlets like New York Magazine and Entertainment Weekly engaged with the show via lengthy, wordy, reference-filled columns, like Jeff "Doc" Jensen's labyrinthine musings on the EW website and frequent cover stories in the magazine proper. Countless fan sites too numerous to name have sprung up to discuss every bit of minutia, all correlated at the vast Lost wiki Lostpedia.
Joshua Zyber, who writes a weekly Lost column for High Def Digest, acknowledges the inherent nerdiness of Lost but says it's appeal is more universal. "In addition to its many cultural and pop-cultural connections, what makes the show so successful is that it's so rooted in the personal lives of its characters. Because so much time was spent making us care about the characters, we'll willingly follow them through any far-out concepts that the writers take us to."
Zyber says this is the reason that Lost isn't typically thought of as an insular sci-fi show, no matter how trippy it gets. "Most attempts to bring science fiction to television go straight for the niche audience," he says.
The show's mix of highbrow and lowbrow turned even the most seasoned pop culture columnist into a gushing reactionary fanboy. And without these initial Lost exegeses, then there would be the kind of detailed speculation and analysis that is met with every episode of more mainstream dramatic fare like Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Watching Lost has turned every television critic into a detective, willing and able to dispense not only analysis but hearsay and conjecture and wild speculation.
But it hasn't just warped those who watch television professionally. The DNA of our engagement with popular culture has been mutated by Lost. We were now constantly on the lookout for clues, foreshadowing, hidden symbolism, and inter-cultural reference. A cigar may only be a cigar (as Freud once pointed out) but any opaque bit of dialogue, oddly shaped leaf, or background character, was poured over for clues. Everything meant something.
Seized by the fans' reaction to the show (shocker – people like being challenged), ABC and the other networks rushed out to create similarly crackerjack pieces. All have faltered, whether because the interest just wasn't there (things like the recently-canceled Heroes and the short-lived body snatcher thriller Invasion) or that their conceptual booby traps proved too much for audiences (Joss Whedon's Dollhouse). None of these shows committed to the richness that their genre trappings afforded them. There were no philosophical quandaries, no meaty synthesis of high and low culture. They were just fluff.
At least one show, the currently airing Flash Forward, is entirely built around a device that Lost introduced in its fourth season – the flash forward. (It was just canceled.) Also, it's telling that ABC's Americanized version of BBC show Life on Mars, about a man trapped in the 1970s, aired during the same season where much of the Lost characters were trapped… in the 1970s.
But an abundance of imitators doesn't mean Lost will back down. It will keep viewers and critics guessing right until the bitter end.
Co-creator Damon Lindelof, talking to the Hollywood Reporter, said of the series finale: ""The series finale has to fit the show. We're trying to end lost in a way that feels 'Lost'-ian and fair and will generate a tremendous amount of theorizing. We're going to be as definitive as we can be and say this is our ending, but there's no way to end the show where the fans aren't going to say, 'What did they mean by this?' Which is why we're not going to explain it."
Expect the gang at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn to go bonkers and the theorizing to drift long into the night...
1806 words. Completed Sunday afternoon, May 16th. Thanks for the memories, Intro to Journalism!
Lost premiered on September 22nd, 2004. Already entrenched in a costly, bloody, and wrongheaded foreign war, it was still a little shocking to see a big American primetime drama open with a plane crash (ostensibly the reason we got involved in said foreign war in the first place). But the plane crash led to what, at the time, many viewers and network brass thought of as little more than a dramatized version of Survivor, the beloved reality show on CBS.
After all, how many prime time shows can be set on a tropical island?
Lost's two-hour pilot showcased a number of characters, introduced briefly at first and then, more lengthily, via flashbacks, and the characters would die off, one by one, a narrative version of getting voted off the island.
But then an unearthly roar shook the jungle. And everyone watching realized this was not a fictionalized Survivor. No, this was much, much weirder. Just how weird, however, was anybody's guess. Instead of being marooned on the island, in the course of the show's six labyrinthine seasons, the castaways would learn that there are other inhabitants of the island, some would leave the island only to be drawn back (a favorite phrase uttered by more than one character: "The island isn't done with you yet"), with an entire season being devoted to the science fiction-iest of all science fiction conceits: time travel.
One of the many joys of Lost was how it eased you into its oddness. It eventually revealed itself to be an out-and-out science fiction show, but when it started it was more about the people that wound up on the island. This kind of slyness has informed other shows that mix genres. Just this season a serial killer was operating on Wisteria Lane in otherwise melodramatic Desperate Housewives. Before Lost, this genre cross pollination wouldn't have been possible, or at the very least would have been met with much more nervous hand wringing.
Val Vinokur, the undergraduate director of literary studies at New York's prestigious Eugene Lang College, theorizes (theorizing is part of Lost culture after all) that the show's genre hybridization is a key to its success.
"One big reason it works so well, apart from being so well cast and well paced," Vinokur says, "is that it constant upends its paradigms. For example, it is a shipwreck-[Robinson] Crusoe tale - but then it's not, because it's not a desert island and because they leave and come back. It's like they are lost not on an island, but in a narrative-in-progress. And that narrative itself is fluid with respect to heroes and villains, good and evil, technology and theology, and mythical and historical time."
By episode 3 of the first season, "Walkabout," we saw a man who was previously wheelchair bound regain control of his legs. By the end of the first season, we had discovered a French woman who had been living on the island for sixteen years, been given clues that at least one of the survivors of the airplane crash had magical powers, were introduced to a nefarious sequence of numbers, and learned that the island was inhabited by a mysterious group of folks known only as The Others.
Carl Frisk, a recent Parsons Design graduate and devoted Lost watcher since day one, says that while the obsessive speculation is fun, it's not the primary reason he continues to watch.
"What is it?" Frisk asks. "What is the island? This is the one question that leads me to watch week in, week out. And while all that stuff that everyone talks about is fun - and it is a fun social act, talking about lost - the show had me hooked from the plane crash. It's just pure enjoyment."
Already, the show was more of an active puzzle than some passive experience that you simply watched, goggle-eyed, at the end of a long day. It allowed you to engage with it in some very profound ways. And its ability to mix culture references both populist (Stephen King's The Stand) and highbrow (a number of the characters are named after and embody principles of famous philosophers like Desmond Hume, John Locke, and Danielle Rousseu.)
The Lost creators (among them Damon Lindelof and uber-producer JJ Abrams) interacted with the fans in the most Lost-ian way possible: through the burgeoning viral marketing campaigns (which has since been used to promote big budget movies like The Dark Knight) and presentations at San Diego's mammoth fan convention Comic Con. The creators dropped bread crumbs at every possible location, urging fans to follow...
Everything in the Lost-verse was a game, something that could be figured out, theorized about, and then solved. Lost book groups, based on books either referenced directly or inferred from the show (everthing from King's Carrie to Philip K Dick's trippy sci-fi opus Valis to Charles Dickens' epic Tale of Two Cities), sprang up everywhere.
The creative principles of Lost were raised on computer games like Myst and stacks and stacks of comic books (Brian K Vaughn, a comic book luminary, joined the writing staff for several seasons), and structured the show as such. Much of seasons two and three were focused around mysterious "hatches" around the island, which brought to mind the dungeons in classic videogame series The Legend of Zelda.
And like a comic book, every frame of the show was packed with information and picked apart for future analysis. (It also doesn't hurt that the show developed along with the ephemera of home Digital Video Recorders and success of television shows-on-DVD.) In a season two episode called "Lockdown," a main character is trapped underneath a blast door. That blast door is painted with a map of the island. It was an incredibly comic book-y moment, with the blast door representing a large splash panel in a comic book. And instantaneously, it was on the internet.
People ate it up. Every bread crumble and intellectual tease was being lovingly dissected. Fan sites popped up like overactive dandelions. And legitimate press outlets like New York Magazine and Entertainment Weekly engaged with the show via lengthy, wordy, reference-filled columns, like Jeff "Doc" Jensen's labyrinthine musings on the EW website and frequent cover stories in the magazine proper. Countless fan sites too numerous to name have sprung up to discuss every bit of minutia, all correlated at the vast Lost wiki Lostpedia.
Joshua Zyber, who writes a weekly Lost column for High Def Digest, acknowledges the inherent nerdiness of Lost but says it's appeal is more universal. "In addition to its many cultural and pop-cultural connections, what makes the show so successful is that it's so rooted in the personal lives of its characters. Because so much time was spent making us care about the characters, we'll willingly follow them through any far-out concepts that the writers take us to."
Zyber says this is the reason that Lost isn't typically thought of as an insular sci-fi show, no matter how trippy it gets. "Most attempts to bring science fiction to television go straight for the niche audience," he says.
The show's mix of highbrow and lowbrow turned even the most seasoned pop culture columnist into a gushing reactionary fanboy. And without these initial Lost exegeses, then there would be the kind of detailed speculation and analysis that is met with every episode of more mainstream dramatic fare like Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Watching Lost has turned every television critic into a detective, willing and able to dispense not only analysis but hearsay and conjecture and wild speculation.
But it hasn't just warped those who watch television professionally. The DNA of our engagement with popular culture has been mutated by Lost. We were now constantly on the lookout for clues, foreshadowing, hidden symbolism, and inter-cultural reference. A cigar may only be a cigar (as Freud once pointed out) but any opaque bit of dialogue, oddly shaped leaf, or background character, was poured over for clues. Everything meant something.
Seized by the fans' reaction to the show (shocker – people like being challenged), ABC and the other networks rushed out to create similarly crackerjack pieces. All have faltered, whether because the interest just wasn't there (things like the recently-canceled Heroes and the short-lived body snatcher thriller Invasion) or that their conceptual booby traps proved too much for audiences (Joss Whedon's Dollhouse). None of these shows committed to the richness that their genre trappings afforded them. There were no philosophical quandaries, no meaty synthesis of high and low culture. They were just fluff.
At least one show, the currently airing Flash Forward, is entirely built around a device that Lost introduced in its fourth season – the flash forward. (It was just canceled.) Also, it's telling that ABC's Americanized version of BBC show Life on Mars, about a man trapped in the 1970s, aired during the same season where much of the Lost characters were trapped… in the 1970s.
But an abundance of imitators doesn't mean Lost will back down. It will keep viewers and critics guessing right until the bitter end.
Co-creator Damon Lindelof, talking to the Hollywood Reporter, said of the series finale: ""The series finale has to fit the show. We're trying to end lost in a way that feels 'Lost'-ian and fair and will generate a tremendous amount of theorizing. We're going to be as definitive as we can be and say this is our ending, but there's no way to end the show where the fans aren't going to say, 'What did they mean by this?' Which is why we're not going to explain it."
Expect the gang at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn to go bonkers and the theorizing to drift long into the night...
1806 words. Completed Sunday afternoon, May 16th. Thanks for the memories, Intro to Journalism!
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