Is anyone else Lost?
I chuckled when I saw the ad on the inside flap of one of my recent DVD deliveries from Netflix. It was a reminder for the upcoming premier episode of the final season of Lost. It included a version of the image above showing only 27 of the most important characters of the now seemingly thousands of personalities introduced by the five previous seasons of unconstrained, dead-end plot excursions. This image does more to explain what is wrong with the show than any amount of exposition on the topic can accomplish.
Now, don't get me wrong – I have always been and am still today undeviating in my viewership of the show. But I stop short of calling myself a fan. During season 1? Yes, without equivocation, I would confess that I was a complete and devoted fan of the series. But now, my enthusiasm has waned and devolved into more of an attempt to give meaning to the many hours of my life I have not-so-wisely entrusted to the creators of this program. I've still got Lost right up there at the top of my Season Pass list on my Tivo. And, yes, I did watch the much anticipated season premier. I have to say that I was pretty disappointed. Several times during the 2 hour opener my wife and I found ourselves questioning, "Now, who is this guy again? And, perhaps more importantly, why should I even care anymore?" I literally yelled at the TV screen when Hurley, Jack and crew made it to the temple in an effort to bring Sayid back from the dead (yeah, I know) only to reveal the other other other Others. Stop introducing hordes of new and uninteresting characters that I don't care about! Didn't you get the memo? This is the final season. I want to hear about the characters I've spent the last five years invested in. It's pretty easy to look at the show and identify its missteps. The question why one of the most innovative and creative prime-time dramas went completely off the rails in a matter of a couple of seasons is a much more interesting one to me. I'm pretty convinced that the show is a victim of its own immediate success. As a result of that early and overwhelming success, the creators of the show encountered fewer and fewer constraints. It was precisely this lack of constraint that killed the show. All too often people in creative endeavors are trained to despise the constraints that inevitably help to shape their work. In reality, constraints, when properly understood and managed, can be one of the biggest boons to creative success. Constraints keep you honest and help you focus on what you're really good at. Constraints push back on you and force you to look for better solutions. Without constraints, everything starts to look like a good idea. Without constraints, you stop asking "is this really the right thing for us to be doing right now?" and instead fill the void left by the absence of that question with "there's no reason why we shouldn't do this."
