In Search Of Lost Clones
A century ago, when I was in college, the TV show Lost was a very big deal. It was a big enough deal that I took a college class about the show, which included assignments to write fan fiction and to plant metatextual clues about a TV show in viral promotional material. I have such a distinct memory of the day in class when we viewed the opening scene of Lost's second season:
At the moment he drops the needle on the record, I shouted out "Put on the Mamas and the Papas!" but the music that started playing was some techno song that whoever had posted the video online subbed in due to either copyright concerns or personal preference. My classmates, who generally didn't specifically remember what song played in that moment and certainly didn't know who the Mamas and the Papas were, were not as enthusiastic about my contribution as I'd expected. Or maybe they all knew that it was a Cass Elliot solo record, which I just learned while writing this, so fuck me I guess.
Anyway, Lost was important for a few important reasons. For one, it was a pretty good show! I have no idea if it holds up but maybe check it out if you've somehow never seen it! For another, the pilot was ridiculously expensive and drew a huge audience - this is discussed in some interesting detail in Bill Carter's book Desperate Networks. To wit: it led to a big wave of networks spending huge amounts of money on expensive pilots and canceling shows immediately if they weren't highly rated by episode two. It was a kind of crappy time to watch network TV and we all had to learn not to get attached to shows we enjoyed.
One very silly outgrowth of Lost-mania was the batch of shows that completely ripped it off. Every network needed its own version of "a big diverse ensemble who are connected through something mysterious, which will be slowly revealed over a long stretch of time." The one I tried watching was The Nine, which ABC put on after Lost, and was about a bunch of people who were hostages in a bank robbery but something happened during the robbery that they all are keeping secret. I didn't watch long enough to find out what it was, but I bet it was stupid. For the record, a lot of Lost turned out to be stupid too - once it turned out that every character had the same dad and the strange and mysterious things about the island weren't started by a science experiment/hippie commune (?) but in fact by feuding mythical brothers, one of whom was both a guy and a smoke monster (?) it was really a mess. By the way, small piece of trivia - the Lost series finale aired the same night as a Frightened Rabbit concert in LA; I stayed up past 3am to watch the show after the concert and later TV critic Emily VanDerWerff wrote about how it pained her to have to miss that concert because she had to write about Lost. I was like, sucker, I caught both.
Possibly the most successful Lost ripoff was Heroes, and that was successful largely because it had enough idiosyncrasies to feel less like a Lost ripoff and more like its own show. Granted, Heroes also turned out to be an absolute mess. It also gave us one of my all-time favorite TV writer quotes, when executive producer Tim Kring said, “You can watch it when you want, where you want, how you want to watch it, and almost all of those ways are superior to watching it on air... So [watching it] on air is related to the saps and the dipshits who can’t figure out how to watch it in a superior way.” A hilarious attack on network television at a time when the platform was terrified of DVR's commercial-fast-forwarding abilities. But Heroes kept adding more characters to its cast and that bubble couldn't last and eventually we all agreed we were sick of it.
There are two shows now that I'm loving that seem to understand better than any previous shows what we actually enjoyed about Lost: Yellowjackets and Station Eleven. If you aren't watching either show I recommend both! And I'll be discussing both below but I'll do my best to avoid spoilers, if that's your thing.
Yellowjackets is a show about a group of high school soccer players whose plane to nationals went down in the mid-90s, stranding them in the Canadian wilderness for like a year and a half. The show mostly toggles between that time period - being stranded in the woods - and the present day, where some of them have survived to adulthood but shared with no one exactly What Happened Back There. It's tense and scary and anchored by tremendous performances, including Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, Melanie Lynskey and Juliette Lewis as four of the women who were stranded as teens (casting by my brilliant friend Josh Ropiequet!). Yellowjackets is also extremely mysterious. There's some indication that the teens resorted to cannibalism at some point. Of course one of the joys of the show is watching its complementary mysteries unfold - what really happened in those woods, and what the heck is going on now (among other things, these survivors are being blackmailed by someone who seems to know a great deal about what happened in those woods)?
While Yellowjackets takes place in the past and present, Station Eleven takes place in the present and future. On Station Eleven, a virus has swiftly wiped out most of mankind (it's, uh, really difficult to watch). The show takes place roughly within the first handful of months and years after this event, and twenty years later as society is beginning to rudimentarily form. A child we meet in the present is, in the future, an adult performer with a traveling Shakespeare company. They perform for small sort-of towns, including a golf club that's occupied by several professors and their families, who demand a take on Hamlet rather than a straightforward performance. They also face the creeping threat of a cult devoted to eliminating all trace of the world before infection, not unlike the way no one who lived in Egypt was allowed to enter Canaan in the Torah. Though it's gotten a little bit more plot-heavy as the season's gone on (it's based on a book I haven't read), a lot of the early episodes felt almost like pastiches in a world that had been rebuilt.
There are some satisfying and less-satisfying answers to the questions each show raises (though Yellowjackets apparently has many more seasons worth of stories, and Station Eleven is as far as I know a miniseries ending soon), but in both cases, the series know that these questions aren't as important as one central one: are we the same person we would be even without this catastrophe? Lost touched on this, but the show was arguably more about the surprise of reinvention - we'd meet a character and be surprised to learn how different they were before they came to the island (like the guy who couldn't walk at all before the plane crash, or the woman who'd been pretending not to understand English, or the father and son hanging out for like the first time ever). On Yellowjackets and Station Eleven, we get more direct questions about identity and character. Some of the women on Yellowjackets, may have discovered their essential selves in the woods; others insist it was more of a blip in what could be an otherwise normal life. On Station Eleven, a people with no medical training become de facto doctors (and I become a sobbing mess). On both series, treatable mental illness takes on higher stakes and there are wolf attacks.
I was thinking recently of a few relationships in my life that have been severely damaged because of a difference of opinion on Covid safety. These questions are, to me, life and death, but I also could have lived my whole life without these issues coming up if not for Covid. I don't know what life looks like on the other side of the pandemic, or if such a thing really exists, but I'll always wonder what we would have been like if things had gone differently.
I wonder if these feelings are relatable, and if so, if that partly explains why Yellowjackets and Station Eleven can do what so many Lost clones couldn't (not that either show is a Lost clone; they're not). Late in Lost's run, when the show stopped trying to answer all the mysteries it had set up, there was a run of "sideways" episodes, where subplots involved characters living a life completely different from their own e.g., a con artist and a medium as buddy cops, or a guy who grew up on the island is a high school teacher feuding with a principal). These sideways stories had some plot significance, but they were also fun in the way AU fan fiction is fun - by taking these characters and putting them in completely different circumstances, what are the essential elements of their character that remain, and what changes completely? Is who we were in there - the island, the woods, the post-apocalyptic future - who we really are? It's a question that's more interesting than many that can be answered successfully.
SCREEN TIME: SOME THOUGHTS ON AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF CHILDREN'S MEDIA:
I may begin including a small section at the end of these messages about children's media, because I happen to be spending a lot of time with it right now. As I mentioned in my last broadcast, I really want to read Street Gang, and now I am reading it. It's great and incredibly thorough. It'll take me a while to finish. I think next up is G is for Growing. Street Gang so far is providing a lot of great background on the kids' TV landscape before Sesame Street - it makes me want to learn more about Captain Kangaroo, honestly.
Tags:
Did you ever miss a TV event to do something else? Or miss a big gathering to catch a TV event?
Remember when cast members on Lost kept getting DUIs and getting kicked off the show? It happened more than any other show I can think of!
Last broadcast I asked what movies about TV history you'd like to see. My friend Rebecca came up with two great ones:
The Ellen Degeneres Story, from The Puppy Episode to "Actually, no, that's not the truth, Ellen." Rebecca writes, "It would be kind of a reverse 'Love & Mercy where she becomes a worse person... It could be interesting to contrast how culture turned on her two different times."
The story of how Emily in Paris brought down the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, possibly done Spotlight-style following LA Times journalists.
I have another idea for a movie about TV history but I'm not ready to discuss it here yet. Let's just say it takes place almost entirely in the month of October 1993 and I think Janicza Bravo would direct it.
This broadcast's theme song is The Bold and the Beautiful's, which is in my opinion the best theme song of the American daytime English-language soaps still on the air: https://youtu.be/H88FuPrgMy8
I really would love more seasons of Station Eleven, exploring more of this world. OH WELL
Yellowjackets season 2 should change their title sequence to more obviously indicate which teenagers grow into which adults. I don't not remember, but it would be courteous.
Some streaming platform should buy the rights to Marclay's The Clock and air it 24/7! Free idea! Do it already!
For one project in my Lost class, we had to come up with a TV show idea. Our class was divided between two: "a show about a college, with supernatural elements," and my friend Miles' legitimately intriguing idea of a show about a cult deprogrammer. I stood up and pronounced, "After all folks, I think we can agree there haven't been enough shows about college. I mean besides Undeclared and Veronica Mars and Greek and Felicity and Gilmore Girls and Buffy." My sarcasm didn't land and everyone agreed that yeah, there aren't enough shows about colleges, and that won out. Miles, I'm still sorry about this.
I'm working on a post that involves interviewing a few people, so we'll see when I can get that out to you. Thanks for reading!