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"Lost" marks 100 episodes as an unlikely hit
Wed Apr 29, 2009 10:54pm EDT
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By Todd Longwell
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - It was four-and-a-half years ago that Oceanic Flight 815 went off course over the South Pacific and crashed onto a seemingly deserted beach.
Forty-eight people (and a dog) stumbled from the smoking wreckage to discover an otherworldly tropical isle inhabited by polar bears, smoke monsters and a mysterious band of human natives known as the "Others." The ever-evolving mystery made ABC's "Lost" the water-cooler show of the 2004-05 television season, helped revive the flagging fortunes of its parent network, and turned its cast -- all of whom were virtual unknowns, save for Matthew Fox (previously star of Fox's "Party of Five") and Dominic Monaghan (Merry in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) -- into internationally recognizable figures.
With the 100th episode airing Wednesday, the survivors still haven't figured out exactly where they are and why, but executive producer Carlton Cuse has a theory as to how they got there, creatively speaking.
"The fact that no one believed 'Lost' was going to be successful in the beginning was enormously liberating," Cuse says. "So we set out to make 12 episodes of what we thought was the coolest TV show we could come up with and in so doing we violated a lot of the traditional rules of television narrative. We had characters who were murderers and had done very bad things. We had incredibly complex serialized storytelling. We had lots of intentional ambiguity, leaving the audience lots of room for interpretation and those things that sort of violated the rules of television were the very things that the audience ended up responding to."
THE END OF "LOST"
But nothing lasts forever. In May 2007, it was announced that "Lost" would wrap in May 2010 at the end of Season 6. The reason was not the ratings, which have declined over the years as show has shifted time slots five times and taken long midseason hiatuses like the three-week break between Episodes 6 and 7 in Season 3.
It wasn't the high price tag of $4 million per episode. The decision was purely creative.
"We're fairly certain that, had we not been given an end date, the show might have been canceled by now, because we would've had to continue spinning our wheels and stalling," executive producer/ co-creator Damon Lindelof says. "It's a finite idea. Once Carlton and I had gotten through the first 30 or 40 hours of it, it became very clear to us that we were ready to take the show out of question/mystery mode and into resolution mode. And we couldn't do that until we knew when the show was going to end."
The show's beginnings can be traced to January 2004, when then-ABC president Lloyd Braun commissioned a script from Spelling Television that he envisioned as a narrative take on the unscripted hit "Survivor." Jeffrey Lieber wrote the initial drafts of the pilot, titled "Nowhere." Braun felt it wasn't working, so he brought in "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams and teamed him with Lindelof, a writer-producer on ABC's "Crossing Jordan."
Abrams and Lindelof met on a Monday. By Friday, they had written a 20-page outline, adding a supernatural angle. On Saturday, the pilot got a greenlight. Having started late in the 2004 season's development, they had less than 12 weeks to write the pilot and prep it for production. It would have been a daunting task under any circumstances, but this script had 14 major speaking parts, a downed jet and a remote setting. Abrams and Lindelof compounded the logistical challenges by revising the characters and story lines during the casting process, leaving the complex puzzle of its mystery with more than a few rough, unfinished pieces.
BUILDING BUZZ
"We didn't know that it was going to be successful, and when the ratings started coming out and it was doing well, we realized, 'Oh, my God, we're going to have to keep doing this,'" says Cuse, who stepped forward to run the show with Lindelof after Abrams departed to concentrate on other projects. "That's really when we really started working out the mythology."
The network started the buzz building by world-premiering the show's two-hour pilot at Comic-Con International in San Diego on July 24, 2004. Over the Labor Day weekend preceding the show's TV debut, bottles containing cryptic messages were scattered across several beaches on the East and West Coasts. Although cleanup crews were prescheduled to remove any undiscovered bottles, the network still managed to get tagged with several littering tickets. It also aired "pirate radio" spots on stations nationwide.
"All of a sudden it would sound like people were cutting into the radio saying, 'Help! We're survivors of Oceanic Flight 815,' then it would crackle out," says ABC executive vp marketing Michael Benson . "We actually got in a little trouble over that, too, because people thought it was really happening."
In the years since, the "Lost" team has made regular appearances at Comic-Con, including a panel discussion last year that attracted about 6,000 fans. The network has also commissioned spin-off novels, an official "Lost" magazine, an alternative reality game ("The Lost Experience") and various tie-in Web sites, including the Emmy-nominated Find815.com, as well as a line of action figures. Continued...
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