“Lost” Was Only To Run For Three Seasons?

Much like FOX’s “The X-Files” in the decade before it, ABC’s “Lost” was a high-profile mystery drama with serialised elements that was driven in part by a central mystery that was made up as it went along. As there was no real plan beyond a basic outline, both shows ended up spinning their wheels a bit and ultimately ended in a fairly unsatisfactory way.

Showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse became famous for their work on the series, and in a new interview with Collider, Lindelof has revealed the show was originally pitched as a three-season series and both he and Cuse almost stepped aside as showrunners after the third season.

Lindelof says conversations were being had around the time of the pilot about when the show should end. Then the show premiered and became a huge hit, and the network didn’t want to cancel it because they were a TV network desperate for hits and need it to continue:

“Lost was like, ‘What’s in the hatch? What’s up with the monster? Who’s the original Sawyer? How did Locke get in the wheelchair? What is the nature of the island? Why does it appear to be moving? Who are the Others?’ There were all of these compelling mysteries and so we were saying, ‘We wanna have this stuff answered by the end of Season 1, this stuff answered by the end of Season 2, and then the show basically ends after about three years.’

That was the initial pitch, and they were not even hearing it. They looked at particularly me – Carlton came on about midway through Season 1 and he joined the chorus of me – but they were just like, ‘Do you understand how hard it is to make a show that people want to watch? And people like the show? So why would we end it? You don’t end shows that people are watching.'”

After the end of the second season, Lindelof and Cuse met with the network again to discuss how they wanted to end the series, but execs once again pushed back. The pair then started planning to leave the series altogether after the third season, while at the same time “Alias” ended and so “Lost” absorbed some of its famed writers like Drew Goddard and Jeff Pinkner who were being groomed as their replacements.

But ABC held fast, demanding to know why they wanted to end the show. Lindelof explained to them “These flashbacks are finite” and it would feel like “treading water” after a while. Then things changed – the first six episodes of the third season were met with a mixed reception as the writers struggled to get a story out of it. Then a real conversation happened:

“They were like, ‘We have agreed to let you end the show.’… I just said to [ABC President] Steve McPherson, ‘Thank you. This is what’s best for the show,’ and he said, ‘We were thinking 10 seasons.’ Mind you, we’re halfway through Season 3, so first off how do you even think we’re gonna get to 10?… I was like, ‘I was thinking more like four [seasons]’… And they were like, ‘How about nine?’ (laughs). So the agreement was we landed on six [seasons] with less episodes to give us more time in between seasons to plan things out.”

The fourth season got cut short a bit by the writer’s strike, but otherwise everything else went to plan, delivering final seasons that remain contentious to this day and makes one wonder what the show could have looked like had it been more concise as originally planned.

Head over to Collider for the full interview which has a lot more.

The post “Lost” Was Only To Run For Three Seasons? appeared first on Dark Horizons.

from Dark Horizons https://ift.tt/2BVmEpM
via Whole story