Why, New York Times, why? Last week the Grey Lady published an article about TV’s increasing reliance on social media and GIFs, which never once mentioned Dan Harmon, probably the only showrunner who’s ever said the word “GIF” in an interview. (Kurt Sutter might have said it, too, but he probably thinks it means something inappropriate even for this website.) Now there’s: “Clues That Lead to More Clues That Add Up to Nothing.”
I agree with most of the first half of the article, which argues that the creative team behind “Lost” was so involved with laying out clues in the first three seasons of the show that the final three were an absolute mess, the writers involved in an “ever-growing pile of unsolved mysteries, madly skimming Wikipedia entries on space-time geometries and black holes.” But when the Times writer claims, “Lost” was like a dirty bomb that made the world unsafe for serial dramas to this day,” she began to lose me. And she totally lost me at:
In the wake of “Lost,” network and cable executives seem to crave ever bigger (and emptier) televisual thrill pellets. Forget that the very best dramas of the current golden age — “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “The Wire,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad” — build suspense through careful character development, restrained dialogue and meticulous storytelling. “Lost” produced a dangerous addiction to spectacular, heart-stopping pilots with very little clue where to go from there.
Sure, networks pretty quickly began emulating “Lost,” and they pretty much all sucked. Remember “FlashForward” and “The Event”? Terrible. But two of the examples she gives, “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” came three and four years after “Lost” premiered. (She also later refers to the quality of “Mad Men” in the past tense, even though season four was its best yet, with its greatest episode, “The Suitcase.”) “Lost” clearly couldn’t have done that much damage because while it was still on, two of the greatest slow-paced dramas ever, “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” premiered. To further prove her point, she offers up three more “twist-and-turn-packed sloppiness” series in “The Killing,” “Homeland,” and “American Horror Story.” Yes, two of those are sloppy (not “Homeland”), but at no point are “Game of Thrones,” “Justified,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Sons of Anarchy,” or “The Good Wife” brought up. And that’s not to mention “Battlestar Galactica,” “Pushing Daisies,” “Veronica Mars,” etc. all of which took major dramatic risks, and mostly succeeded.
There are always going to be dumb dramas on TV, just as shi*ty music and movies will always be sold and released. But to claim “some of us have been burned too many times to head back into that jungle maze yet again” is to ignore some of the greatest dramas of all-time, all of which premiered after “Lost” supposedly destroyed the genre. One more thing: when you say “Lost”’s “toxic stain…threatens, even in death, to kill the current golden age of television,” are we just ignoring the fact that we’ve never had such a plethora of quality sitcoms as we do right now. Like, ever, in the history of television.
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