they really don't get it and the show is going to completely go in the tank for it.

""All the questions we get asked are about the mythology," Cuse says. "But when we sit down and we work on the stories, we're primarily spending most of our time talking about these characters and how they interact. And I think that if the characters became focused on the mythology, a lot of people would drop out. I think there's a much larger audience that's much more interested in who is Kate going to choose than the details about who Alvar Hanso is.""

this is what they think about you lost-watcher, repeated for emphasis: "I think there's a much larger audience that's much more interested in who is Kate going to choose than the details about who Alvar Hanso is."

http://www.ctnow.com/tv/hce-lost.artjan30,0,1840481.story?coll=hce-headlines-ent-features

Is 'Lost' Losing Its Way?
Creators Struggle With How To Keep Fan Interest In Serial With Complicated Story Line
January 30, 2007
By ROGER CATLIN, The Hartford Courant

As the TV drama "Lost" readies its midseason comeback next week, it faces challenges as formidable as polar bears, smoke monsters and other mysteries of the island where Oceanic Flight 815 crashed two seasons ago.

Once the buzz show on TV, the expensive serial fell to No. 2 in its time slot behind "Criminal Minds" during the first six episodes of a season when what was once a sprawling ensemble piece became trapped with the fortunes of three characters, just as the trio was imprisoned in the Others' makeshift jail.

The "Lost" influence brought a number of serialized mysteries to network TV - many now canceled, including the one designed to fill the spot for "Lost" during its hiatus, "Daybreak."

Now, as "Lost" prepares for the season's final 16 episodes, it has been bumped an hour to 10 p.m. to avoid something that has never before frightened it - "American Idol."

Amid all these shifts, there may be a fear among core fans, and viewers slowly dropping away, that "Lost" may itself be lost.

"There is a natural attrition due to the fact that this show requires sort of vigilant maintenance," executive producer Carlton Cuse, during a session at the TV critics press tour earlier this month in Pasadena, Calif., said of the 14 percent drop in the show's audience.

"There are people who fall away because it does require you to really keep up on the episodes. It's a complicated show. It's hard to drop in and out."

It may be more difficult to drop into "Lost" than it is, say, "24," says another executive producer, Damon Lindelof, because that saga at least resets its story every season. "Lost" just builds on its single mystery.

But, he says, "We as writers are constantly trying to make it easier for audiences who have left to come back in by writing exposition into the show."

That said, he promises that "this next burst of episodes, once the season premiere sort of resolves the escape story, is in many ways a return to Season 1, with "more character-centric storytelling that is not as mythologically driven until we pick up the next story line."

And characters, they say, is what the show has always been about - not the mystery or the mythology of the strange island.

"From the beginning," says executive producer Jack Bender, "the show has always been much more about the monster inside our characters than the monster outside our character."

"All the questions we get asked are about the mythology," Cuse says. "But when we sit down and we work on the stories, we're primarily spending most of our time talking about these characters and how they interact. And I think that if the characters became focused on the mythology, a lot of people would drop out. I think there's a much larger audience that's much more interested in who is Kate going to choose than the details about who Alvar Hanso is."

It's something show co-creator J.J. Abrams had learned from his previous show, "Alias."

"He specifically said, `Don't make the mistake of having the characters talk about Rambaldi all the ...time.'" says Lindelof, referring to the ongoing mystery of "Alias."

Therefore, "we approach every episode as: This is a Jack episode: We're going to explain a little more why the guy needs to fix things all the time and let the island story support that obsession," he says. "Unfortunately, the side effect of that is that the audience doesn't feel they're getting answers to mysteries in the time allotted."

Deciding how many answers to put in each episode isn't part of the recipe, Lindelof says:

"We start from saying, `This is a Sawyer episode' or `This is a Sun and Jin episode, and this is the flashback story we want to tell. Now, what's happening on the island that will emotionally sort of activate the telling of this story?'

"And then we say, `Is that a story in the context of which we can answer or advance, like, a mythological question?' So some mythological questions are expressly character-related, like `What is it that Kate did?' or `How did Locke get in a wheelchair?' or `How did Jack get his tattoos and why?'

"Those answers are not satisfying to the audience that is on the message boards. They want to know what the monster is, what the island is and where The Others come from."

But those can't be told all at once, he says. And it isn't part of the plan for this season.

"Coming into season three, our mission was: We're going to answer the question in these first six episodes of why the Others have kidnapped Kate, Jack and Sawyer," says Lindelof.

"Then, obviously, the next level is: Who are these people? Why have they been taking kids? Why were they abducting people? How long have they been on the island? Why were they having book clubs? Who is Ben in relation to Juliet?"

And in the return episode Feb. 7, "we answer a very significant mystery about Juliet, at least in terms of how she came to the island and why. And that begins to posit sort of new questions, some of which will be answered by the end of the season and some of which won't."

Not that they're being coy, Cuse says. But because you really don't want to know everything right away. "If we started really giving answers about what is the nature of this island, what is the sort of innate underlying meaning of the numbers - those things are sort of series-ending questions. I think once the mythology of those is made explicit, I think the mystery goes out of the show."

Those complaining about the current season, says Cuse, are doing so with a very narrow focus.

"There's a distorted sense of the season in its totality because we only showed six episodes," he says. "If we only showed you the first six episodes of last year, you'd probably be saying, has the show just become about the tail section people. Those characters are basically now all dead."

By the end of last season, though, Cuse says, "we feel like we covered everyone's story" and "the same will be true when you see the entire third season in its totality."

The producers are often asked if they had planned every second of "Lost" so they'd know they'd be where they are now and, more important, where it will end.

But Lindelof says, "without rehashing the ugly story, `Lost' came together very, very quickly. During that period of time it was all we could do to write the outline, write the pilot, put the cast together and begin to have preliminary conversations about: What is this island? Who are these people? If Kate's in handcuffs, we need to know what Kate did. If Locke has a secret, we need to know what that secret is. If we show a polar bear, we need to know where the polar bear came from."

The obvious concentration this season is on the Others - the group whose existence was first hinted in the seventh episode, Lindelof says, "when they first realized this guy Ethan was not on the plane with them."

That may be a long gap, he allows.

"Basically, the audience had to wait through essentially 35 more hours of the show to see the scene where Ethan is initially dispatched. So how we told the story and in what order we tell the story is not something that is specifically planned out from the pilot on."

There is more planning now, Lindelof says, but, he adds, "To say we know everything we're going to do in advance would be completely disingenuous and probably stupid as a writer/producer because you have to be able to adapt to sort of the changing currents."

One way to really give the narrative shape, Cuse says, is by setting an end point for the series - a notion at the press tour that sent shock waves to fans.

"I think that once we do that, a lot of the anxiety and a lot of these questions like, `We're not getting answers,' a lot of those will go away," says Cuse.

Such concerns, he says, "represent an underlying anxiety that this is not going to end well or that we don't know what we're doing."

Among TV shows, Cuse cites "The X-Files" as "a cautionary tale for us in that it was a great show that probably ran two seasons too long."

Likewise, he says, "Lost" is a show that has what he calls "a short half-life."

"`Lost' has broken a lot of rules of television in its run," Cuse says. "It's set a standard for the way shows that could be made that were different large, sprawling cast complicated, complex storytelling.

"I think that actually being able to determine an end point and an ending for the show on our own terms would, I think, be actually the appropriate and right finish for this as an experience."



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