The Iron Yuppie

Great article in the NYTimes a few weeks ago (did I mention I was busy and catching up?) interviewing the creators of Lost. Thanks to the NYTimes stupid archival policy (so you're telling me that news, which is relevant today, is worth less to me than archived documents?), I'll copy it all here.

Despite the efforts of Mr. Lindelof, Mr. Cuse and the rest of the creative team to keep the show from "juming the shark," ultimately the biggest challenge may come from their very success. Unlike J. K. Rowling, who can take comfort in knowing the Harry Potter series will wrap up after seven books, the "Lost" producers do not have such a luxury; as long as the ratings are good, it will run.

The implications for story telling are enormous. "If we knew this series was 88 episodes, we could plot out exactly where all the pieces of mythology were going to land, and we could build very constructively to an endgame," said Mr. Cuse. "But we don't know and we can't know. For ABC, this is a very financially successful enterprise, and righfully their goal is to have it go along as long as they can have it go along."

Mr. Lindelof quickly interjected: "It's the equivalent of, if you get the ratings back for Episode 4 of 'Roots' and you call up Alex Haley and go: 'Look, this is doing huge. Does Kunta Kinte need to be free? Can he be freed in Season 3, or even 4 or 5?' "

YES. I could not agree more. Authors, journalists ... in fact EVERYONE gets to say when something can end. Yet TV is one of the only things where there is no sense of closure. Horses are ridden until they die. I was trying to think of a counter example of this for television and the greatest example is sports. You have 17 or so "episodes" of Sunday football, then the playoffs and then the Superbowl. It's easy to script the marketing, advertising, etc ahead of time because you KNOW how important everything is going to be. And there's limited overhyping random less than meaningful games, which happens all the time, because you know at some point in the future there actually WILL be an important game.

Imagine if TV execs just said, we're going to give this 88 episodes and then be done. Imagine how much better it would be! One could optimize and pre-plan how much salaries, spend, marketing would go on at the start of the series and set it all in motion. And the creative types would love it, because they wouldn't just randomly have to come up with two extra episodes of filler because they don't know what's going to happen next season. Plus, then one could repurpose those creative types and give people something new... which, if I'm not mistaken, is always a good thing. New = positive. If it's still a ginormous hit, make a movie out of it.

While I'm talking about mass media stories, please please please go see Serenity. It's getting 81% and it's really good. And I'm really sad but if it doesn't gross ~$60 M or more, it's probably not coming back. Maybe if the DVD goes nuts.