The Laws of the Jungle
By LORNE MANLY
Published: September 18, 2005
LOS ANGELES
ON "Lost," one of last season's most successful series, some four dozen plane crash survivors confronted a Pacific island infused with mystery.
A monster devoured a pilot. A polar bear rampaged through the jungle. An enigmatic paraplegic could walk again. The first season ended last May with dual cliffhangers: two characters peered down a hatch they had found, only to be greeted by the spooky darkness of an unending vertical shaft, while another group of characters, attempting an escape by raft, were thwarted by scary strangers who sailed off with a child.
But the biggest puzzle the producers of "Lost" face as they enter their second season this Wednesday may well be how to avoid alienating the audience that has made it one of ABC's first water-cooler hit dramas in more than a decade.
The creators of shows like "Lost" - serialized dramas steeped in their own elaborate mythologies - face a dilemma. Audiences compulsively desire, even demand, answers. But reveal too much, too soon, and they might just bolt, as "Twin Peaks" discovered in the early 1990's.Or dole out only tiny hints about how the pieces fit together, and viewer obsession can curdle into frustration or even disdain, as happened in the latter years of "The X-Files."
"If you get to the point where you're just vamping," said Mark Frost, who created "Twin Peaks" with the filmmaker David Lynch, "just to withhold the trump card about the central mystery, you will start to see the series slipping."
"An audience will put up with being toyed with for only so long," he added. "But if the audience responds to the characters, the rest will take care of itself."
"Lost" is not your typical network drama, either in its genesis, its large and international cast or its fondness for deliberate ambiguity. The idea for the show was hatched in the summer of 2003 by Lloyd Braun, then the chairman of ABC Entertainment. Sitting at a clambake at his hotel on the Big Island of Hawaii, waiting for his family, he gazed out the beach and began thinking about how to translate "Cast Away," the Tom Hanks movie the network had just shown to good ratings, into a television series.
But a lone man and a mute volleyball on a deserted island do not make for compelling television, so Mr. Braun applied some Hollywood high-concept formula and came up with a hybrid of "Cast Away" and "Survivor."
The first attempt at a script, however, did not satisfy Mr. Braun, and neither did the rewrite. So Mr. Braun turned to J. J. Abrams, the creator of ABC's "Alias." and offered him a writing partner: Damon Lindelof, a longtime fan who worked on NBC's "Crossing Jordan."
"Basically, we had a two-hour meeting where we both came to the same exact solution to how to do the show, which was it had to have a lot of characters, the characters had to be really mysterious and the island itself had to be even more mysterious than they were," Mr. Lindelof said.
They started writing, and by the end of that week handed a 23-page outline to Mr. Braun, who then did something he had never before done - he approved a pilot based on nothing more than a treatment.
The gamble for ABC was immense. Compared to shows like "Law & Order," in which stories usually don't span more than one episode, serialized dramas - like "24" - are harder to re-run or syndicate. "There was nothing I wasn't worried about," said Mr. Braun, from the show's remarkable price tag (more than $10 million for the two-hour pilot) to its dark, moody tone to the ever-growing cast. "And don't forget, it was not like my position at the network was very secure at this time." (Mr. Braun was fired in April of 2004, and is now head of the media group at Yahoo.)
What's more, everyone remembered what had happened to "Twin Peaks": when it made its debut in April of 1990, the country quickly became wrapped up in the mystery of who killed Laura Palmer and the catch phrases of the F.B.I. special agent Dale Cooper ("damn good coffee"). Yet, just over a year later, the show was gone.
"The trick of these series is you've got to keep all of these balls in the air, resolving some stories while revealing others," said Mr. Frost. "Our problem was we really just had one truly compelling story line." Once Laura Palmer's killer was revealed partway through the second season, all that was left was a show that had descended largely into camp, a mere procession of dancing dwarves, inscrutable owls and log ladies. Mr. Frost said if he were to do the show again, he would have the later, more compelling mysteries begin immediately after the unmasking of the killer.
'Twin Peaks' looms large to me as cautionary tale," said Carlton Cuse, who joined "Lost" as an executive producer early last season to jointly run the show with Mr. Lindelof. "That was a show where the mythology sort of overwhelmed everything else, principally the construction of believable, plausible characters. It's constantly a presence in my mind about something we can't get sucked into doing on this show."
That fear of getting too wrapped up in the intricacies of the show's mythology keeps Mr. Cuse from trolling the numerous Web sites that fans have constructed to revere, obsess over, debate and criticize the show, like Lost-TV (
www.lost-tv.com). "The genre aspects of the show are cool, and we have fun doing it," Mr. Cuse said. "But I am much more engaged by the people on the show, and I think that is fundamentally what we try to do."
Mr. Lindelof added, "It's all about character, character, character." (That's also the mantra Stephen McPherson, president of ABC prime-time entertainment, said he has impressed on the producers.) "Everything," Mr. Lindelof concluded, "has to be in service of the people. That is the secret ingredient of the show."
ON a sunny California day earlier this month, Mr. Lindelof, 32, and Mr. Cuse, 46, dropped in on their fellow writers, in the "Lost" writers' room on the Disney lot in Burbank. Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who also serves as a supervising producer, brought the two men up to speed on the team's progress at an early stab at the conceptual framework for the season's eighth episode. The working theme: forgiveness.
On a white board, below head shots of the cast and pages ripped from The Weekly World News ("Time Portal Found Over South Pole" reads one scoop put up by Mr. Lindelof), the writers had taken a shot at the trademark teaser that opens the show and attempted to map out the other five acts that make up each episode. But they have become tangled up in the various story lines, and are struggling to decide which character will get one of the show's hallmarks, the detailed flashback into his or her pre-island existence.
As they brainstormed, the pop-culture riffs came fast and furious. In an effort to guide the team's storytelling path and technique, Mr. Lindelof tosses out references to movies as varied as "Pulp Fiction," "Death and the Maiden," "Dog Day Afternoon" and "Red October."
Mr. Cuse suggests they keep in mind the Biblical notion of forgiveness, adding, "That will have a lot of resonance."
He and Mr. Lindelof prod their writers to simplify. Figure out what's happening on the island, and the focus of the flashback will become clear, they add. "The story needs to play on a character level, so forgiveness is more than an arbitrary decision," Mr. Cuse said.
The two men have an easy rapport. Mr. Cuse gave Mr. Lindelof, who refers to him as C. C., one of his first staff writing jobs, on "Nash Bridges," the Don Johnson vehicle. And when J. J. Abrams found himself too tied up with "Alias" and preparations for the movie "Mission Impossible 3," Mr. Lindelof returned the favor, and asked Mr. Cuse to help oversee the staff of about 400 on "Lost."
They both believe in the necessity of a long-range plan for the show, but they both also like to venture off the beaten track. "It's sort of like a road trip from California to New York, and these milestones are cities on the way," said Mr. Cuse. "But on a day-to-day basis, when we get up in the morning we have to make a decision: Are we taking the Interstate, or are we taking the rural byways?"
The writers had planned, for example, to ratchet up the animosity between two characters, Michael Dawson (Harold Perrineau) and Jin-Soo Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim), while developing a romance between Michael and Jin's wife, Sun (Yunjin Kim). But they became invested in the married couple's relationship as they developed their back story in Korea. Meanwhile, as Mr. Perrineau and Mr. Kim became good friends on the Hawaiian set of "Lost," the creative team sought to exploit the chemistry between them, even though their characters did not speak the same language. "When we see stuff we like, we write to it," Mr. Cuse said. "We're viewers with control."
One way they exercise that control is by hewing to the science-fact - as opposed to science-fiction - model they see in the novels of Michael Crichton. "There can be things that are happening that are quote, phenomenal, but there's always a scientific answer to it," said Mr. Lindelof. So when Jack Shephard, the surgeon and supposed voice of reason played by Matthew Fox, has visions of his dead father, care is taken to let the audience know he has gone without sleep for three days. Of course, the ghost does lead him to desperately needed water, so maybe he's not a hallucination after all.
The two men also share an admiration for the storytelling prowess of Stephen King. " 'The Stand' was a book that really informed the idea of 'Lost,' " Mr. Lindelof said. "Thematically they're about the same thing, which is this fundamental 'Live together, die alone' philosophy."
And they both delight in playing mind games with their viewers. Last season, when they introduced the character of Arzt, the annoying, know-it-all high school teacher based on a physics teacher Mr. Lindelof detested, they intentionally had him survive a run-in with the monster. "We let him play for three episodes so we could really convince the audience he was going to make it and not die," Mr. Cuse said. "And then we blew him up."
But some attempts to confound viewers' expectations can boomerang. Convinced that viewers would expect them to avoid a conventional cliffhanger, they went ahead with one, the sight of Jack and John Locke, the paraplegic character (played by Terry O'Quinn) mysteriously cured - if indeed he ever truly was handicapped -staring down into the hatch. Fans felt they were being toyed with and responded with virulent criticism. So at the beginning of this season, the writers have taken pains to be fairly explicit about what's found in the hatch and its implications for the people on the island, particularly on the ongoing and unpredictable battle between faith and reason exemplified by the characters of Locke and Jack.
DESPITE the efforts of Mr. Lindelof, Mr. Cuse and the rest of the creative team to keep the show from "jumping the shark," ultimately their 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 storytelling 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 rightfully their goal is to have to 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 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?' "
Frank Spotnitz, who worked on "The X-Files" for eight of its nine years as a writer and eventually as a executive producer, said that series' creator, Chris Carter, did not think the series would go past five years and planned accordingly. When ratings and financial success demanded otherwise, the producers had to improvise. Originally, the plan was to reveal the fate of the sister of Agent Mulder, the F.B.I. agent played by David Duchovny, in the fifth season. Instead, the explanation was held back until Season 7.
"The longer you tease people along, the more hooked they become on the mythology of the show and the more disappointed they'll be by however it's resolved," Mr. Spotnitz said. The emotional resolutions among the characters are more important than fitting the past piece into an ornate jigsaw puzzle, and Mr. Spotnitz is plotting his new ABC show, "Night Stalker," accordingly.
Both Mr. Lindelof and Mr. Cuse embrace Mr. Spotnitz's theory that the show is about the journey, not the ending, and sound resigned to mixed reviews no matter how they resolve the various mysteries. One thing is certain: they won't go the route of the "Matrix" trilogy, in the second installment of which one character took a seemingly interminable amount of time to tell Keanu Reeves's character just what the Matrix was, his role in it and what was going to happen to him in the final movie.
"It's unsatisfying on every level to me as a storyteller, and to most people who saw it," Mr. Lindelof said. "The fact there is someone there to definitively tell me that I was wrong, that my imagination was wrong, is uncool."
But the creators do know how the series ends. The survivors will not learn they are part of some dastardly experiment, or discover they are in purgatory, or wake up from a bad dream. "These guys get off the island," said Mr. Cuse.
Then, nearly in unison, both men add, "If it's an island."
