“This isn’t Lost. We have no idea where we’re going” – Chuck Lorre on Two and Half Men
Now that Lost has finally ended and we’ve spent the past few days analyzing and critiquing and opining about the finale we can finally step back and look at the series as a whole. And though we're all still sifting through our feelings and our thoughts, and though they are this point still subject to change as the days and the weeks and the years go by, I think we each have begun coming to our own semi-definite conclusions about the series as a whole and our feelings on it. And out of all the thousands and thousands of words that have been written about Lost I think my feelings are, at this point, best summed up by a quote from Noel Murray of The Onion AV Club:
“When you think back on the details of Lost—when you toss them around in your head, as opposed to watching them on the screen—the writers have really answered most of what’s important that they answer, to tell the story they mean to tell. But when Bearded Jack gets a dramatic close-up and shouts, “We have to go back!” it’s only natural for we fans to expect there to be more to that backstory than there ultimately turned out to be. And I could come up with dozens more examples (at least), where the intensity of the tease was out of proportion with the ultimate reveal. But that’s the nature of the show Lindelof and Cuse chose to make. They wanted to make the best use of the commercial breaks and the episodic nature of television, and the result was a show that was more viscerally exciting and entertaining, but often wildly inconsistent as sustained narrative storytelling....What made for an entertaining hour often worked against telling a cohesive six year story.”
I thought the finale itself showcased this quality of Lost almost more than any other episode. It was a hugely entertaining and emotional piece of television, but in the end it spent nearly half its running time on something that had absolutely nothing to do with the main storyline of the show, and it doesn’t really hold up to any close scrutiny as a work of narrative fiction. And thats a shame. Because Lost, when it premiered, seemed to offer a new type of show. An involved complex new type of story that TV had never before really attempted. All the pieces, it seemed to promise, were part of some sort of epic, sprawling narrative whole. And while it was a thrilling and well-done ride, and one that I'm glad I went on, the ultimate irony was that in the end Lost was just television as usual. It may have had a different wrapper - a wonderful, beautifully done, exciting new wrapper - but on the inside it was more of the same old thing.
The show we fell in love with and the things that that show focused on and wanted us to care about - Dharma, the hatch, The Others, infertility, etc. - ultimately had almost nothing to do with the show that we just watched go off the air. And that’s because for all the bells and whistles, for its complex plot and mythology, the show ultimately didn’t know what story it wanted to tell. But that’s the thing with television. Story always takes a backseat to entertainment.
I was just hoping maybe this time it would be different.
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“We don’t start a story unless we know where it’s going” – David Simon
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If The Sopranos finale was like watching a friend get killed in a random drive-by shooting, then the end of Lost was like watching a friend finally succumb to a long battle with cancer. The friend in both cases was story. And the cancer was the American television system.
I don’t blame the creators of Lost for becoming infected with the cancer. They ate right, exercised, had regular check ups. They did everything they could. The fact that 75% of Lost wound up having almost nothing to do with the main plot, and the fact that the story that was ultimately told had at least three seasons of unnecessary padding on it, wasn’t really Darlton’s fault. They did what exactly was expected of them in the paradigm of American television production. And therefore I cant lay all the blame at their feet.
We're also largely to blame.
It was all very much our fault.
The fault of the way we view television as a medium and what we expect from it.
And the fault of the way television in this country is produced.
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"Well, we weren’t cynical about having been given ten, 12, 13 hours—whatever we had for any season from HBO. All of that was an incredible gift. The Godfather narrative, even including the third film, the weak one, is like… what? Nine hours? And look how much story they were able to tell. We were getting more than that for each season. So goddamn it, you better have something to say. That sounds really simple, but it’s actually a conversation that I don’t think happens on a lot of serialized drama. Certainly not on American television. I think that a lot of people believe that our job as TV writers is to get the show up as a franchise and get as many viewers, as many eyeballs, as we can, and keep them. So if they like x, give them more of x. If they don’t like y, don’t do as much y."
- David Simon
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Almost since the beginning television has been viewed primarily as a diversion. As merely a source of entertainment. An opiate of the people if you want to get extreme about it. In many cases nothing more than background noise or a distraction. You always hear that watching too much television is bad for you. You never hear that about watching too many movies or reading too many books. And as more and more people I know give up their televisions its becoming harder and harder for me to make a case in its defense. Sure it’s entertaining, but is that entertainment any more than empty calories? Sure candy tastes great but is it essential to my life? Does television add anything of real value?
Now of course all television doesnt need to provide me with rich fullfilling susbstance any more than all movies or all books or all theater or all of anything does. The problem with television isn’t really that mindless shows predicated around simply the idea of providing entertainment exist. It’s that they are all that exists. It’s as if in the film industry every movie released was a potential blockbuster. Not that there’s anything wrong with a big blockbuster if it’s done right. But there is also room for things like Greenberg, or Please Give, or Solitary Man just to name a few very recent examples that have no prayer of ever getting a large audience yet are still made anyway. Television shows like that are few and far between. And even when show creators attempt to create stories like that, they almost always wind up failing in the end.
Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Dexter, Friday Night Lights - there are many great shows on the air now that are striving for excellence. For complex storytelling, for complicated characters, for interesting plots. And they are all on the air even though their audiences might not be large because of the quality of their product. But ultimately each of them will (if they haven’t already) start introducing new characters without knowing what to do with them, begin plotlines that will go nowhere, introduce ideas that they don't know how to effectively develop, and generally do whatever they can to keep people watching whether it ultimately serves the greater story or not. They will eventually become less and less great until such time when their creators finally feel that they have completely run out of ideas or they lose enough of their audience, at which point they will go off the air. How do I know this to be true? Because it always has been. Always. (Almost). Lost seemed to promise that it would be different. But in the end it wasn’t. It ran into the same problems that all teh afermention shows will eventually run into as well despite the brilliance and best intentions of their creators. So what if it’s not the shows? What if it’s the system?
What if there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium?
Look for example at the creation of Lost. An ABC executive wanted to have a show about people trapped on island. That was the whole idea. And then he commissioned people to develop that idea. And thus Lost was born. That story has been told a lot in the past few weeks as an interesting antidote. But it’s really a story that best illustrates the entire problem with American television development. It’s concerned with ideas, not with story. With concept not with content.
So is it any wonder that in an industry predicated on pitching ideas that the supposed most complex narrative of the medium wound up being nothing more than a bunch of interesting ideas strung together?
No one ever stopped to ask what all these ideas mean, what they all add up to, just will they engage the audience. “Should we tell this story” and “what is this story”, were revealed in the end to have been given a backseat to “can we tell this story in an interesting and entertaining way”? And though Lost had a set end date, that didn’t come until the show started hemorrhaging viewers. And even then, the show went on far longer than it needed to tell the story that it ultimately wound up telling. And that’s because when a show is going well no one ever stops to ask should it continue, simply how can it continue. Sure this is a problem in all artistic mediums but it’s most endemic to American TV production.
But what would happen if someone completely rethought the very concept of how a television series is created and produced?
What kind of show would someone make if they knew nothing about how television was supposed to work?
What if there was another way?
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“We were not interested in sustaining a universe merely for the sake of continuing to have a show”
-David Simon
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One of my favorite books is Peter Biskand's Down and Dirty Pictures about the Hollywood revolution of the 1970s. A set of circumstances came about to create a major paradigm shift in the film industry and the types of stories that films could tell and how those stories were made. Blockbusters and spectacles and mindless entertainments weren’t abolished (in fact they ultimately became bigger than ever) but at last there was a system by which auteurs could fully realize the unique storytelling potential of the film medium and get these new types of stories made on their own terms and seen by audiences who were interested a better quality and more fulfilling product. And even if the movement ultimately imploded on itself, it paved the way for new types of movies to be made and for audiences to be able to change their expectations of what movies could be and possibly should be. It was a movement that seemed to come out of nowhere and happen almost overnight. But that isn’t entirely the case.
In 1940 a young man named Orson Welles who knew next to nothing about filmmaking decided to get many of his talented theater friends together to create a fictional movie about largely real people and real events. He wanted tell a story in a way that would only be possible in the specific medium of film. And in doing so he wanted to test its storytelling powers. And he wanted to use the tools of the medium in new and interesting ways. And he wanted to do it all on his terms. Combining concepts he had seen elsewhere and also inventing some new ones of his own he combined a fractured narrative structure with subtle acting, nuanced writing, and innovative lighting, camera angles, and visual compositions to tell a story in a way that only film could. It wasn’t a filmed play, or part of a serialized radio-style film anthology, or a film that played like a novel. It was something else entirely. It maximized the storytelling abilities of the still evolving new medium of film. And he had written, produced, and directed it himself all outside the traditional studio system. The movie was of course Citizen Kane, and it is generally accepted to be the greatest movie of all time. A title it holds not just because of its quality but because of the way it rewrote the rules of what a film could be and what the film medium could do. And ultimately the new rules it helped create were an inspiration and a large influence on the film revolution of the 1970’s. The auteurs of 70’s were only able to do what they did because Orson Welles had shown them not only how to do it, but that it could be done at all.
Which brings us, of course, to The Wire.
To anyone has ever seen The Wire (which really, at this point, should be all of you) it doesn’t seem like hyperbole to call it the greatest TV show of all time. In fact it would seem almost heretical to call it anything other than that. Because The Wire, it’s safe to say, is the Citizen Kane of television. It rewrote the rules of what a television show could be. It told a complicated and challenging story that at all times knew exactly where it was going and what it was trying to say. It never introduced a character or a plot point or a question if they didn’t have some ultimate purpose in the larger story at hand. It was a show that demanded a lot of its audience, but always respected that commitment. Because even if some episodes seemed to meander and even if it was somewhat boring at times and even if there wasn’t always a ton of action and things didn’t always make sense, it was always worth watching because everything would always pay off in it end. On The Wire everything mattered. Everything. And that’s because David Simon took advantage of the unique properties of TV as a storytelling medium to tell a new kind of story, one that wasn’t concerned with simply keeping people tuning in and helping them pass their time in an entertaining way. He used the visual nature of the medium and the amount of time that it affords to tell an important and relevant and richly layered story in a way that had never been attempted before on TV. And that sadly, despite appearances to the contrary, has never successfully been attempted since.
And that’s because television doesn’t really allow for shows like The Wire to get made. You cant reduce what The Wire is to a simple pitchable idea. Were it not for HBO and the success of The Corner, The Wire would have never seen the light of day. And of course once it did see the light of day it got terrible ratings and was shunned by the mainstream TV establishment, never winning or even being nominated for a single major Emmy (just like Citizen Kane didn’t win Best Picture). And that’s because it was too far ahead of its time. What The Wire offered isn’t what we demand from our television shows or even what we expect. We watch television shows that pose tons of questions, introduce tons of characters, open up tons of plot points without ever paying any of them off and then we say, "oh well, we can’t expect a television show to answer everything or have purpose behind everything they do or a reason for every decision that they make. It was an entertaining ride and that’s good enough. We can’t expect them to have had it all planned out from the start." But here’s the thing. The Wire has proved that we can. We can demand more from our television shows. There’s no reason they can't deliver on all of their promises. There’s no reason we can’t expect Wire-level greatness from people who are seeming to promise us just that. We've been to the moon. We can go back. We just have to change the way we approach TV. And the way it gets made.
And luckily for us that early 70’s-like window of opportunity to rewrite the rules of an artistic and entertainment medium is now upon us. Because we seem to be at a sort of crossroads now with television. It’s a medium and an industry that is changing at an incredibly rapid pace whether it wants to or not. From HBO and niche cable channels, to the advent of TV on DVD and Hulu and DVR, to independently produced series and series created strictly for the internet, seismic shifts seem to be hitting the industry constantly. And the type of content that is created, the way it is watched, how it is produced, and who it is produced for are things that are changing every day. Shows like 24, and Arrested Development, and, well, Lost would have never seen the light of day on network TV, or any TV really, just 15 years ago. And people forget that something as basic as a show starting its run in January so that it could run uninterrupted was unheard of even five years ago. The way that our grandkids consume television and think about television will likely be radically different than the way we do currently. So while we’re changing television, let's change it for the better. Let’s write better rules.
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“We were building toward the last 15 minutes of the show—and doing so for a long time.”
– David Simon
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Now I hear your complaints. Sometimes it’s good to have TV that doesn’t ask too much of me, you say. I like to have something that’s not too hard on my brain that helps me unwind after a long day. Or that I can watch with my friends. Or that I don’t have to stress about missing an episode of. Or that’s just good old-fashion fun. Well that’s cool. I agree. Television can still be all of those things. The existence of The Godfather didn’t mean that Jaws couldn’t get made. Television will always turn out shows that are entertaining for the sake of simply being entertaining. I’m just looking for a way that it can also make other shows. Shows like The Wire. Because right now there's no apparatus in place for shows like that to get made. And if we have an example like The Wire of what television can be capable of why not have an avenue available for pursuing that?
Also, I’m not just referring to strictly to dramas here. I could just as easily have used as my example of television storytelling perfection the British version of The Office. Or really most BBC comedies. Because we’re not about genre here. We're about making television be as good as it can be. Allowing it to realize its true potential as a medium. We've gone from viewing it as a collecton of vaguely related episodes to, at its best, thinking of it as a collection of loosely related seasons. I'm just looking for a way to allow television to take the next step.
So how does that happen?
Well, obviously it will require having a new structure in place. Guidelines for what these new types of shows should look like and how their creation should approached. Rules if you will. Rules which reality shows and competition shows and game shows and talk shows and all other non-scripted shows are obviously exempt from. And rules which do not have to be followed if network executives and a specific show’s creator BOTH agree that their show would be better served by disobeying them. These rules may not in reality be that practical, enforceable, or even reasonable. But they are rules that I think should be strived for and ones that are good points of reference for changing what think of as a successful television show. And also, they are rules that I have spent an absurd amount of time in my life thinking about. So without further ado I present…
The New Rules of Television (or, What David Simon Would Do)
*All shows must have a predetermined end date
Two of the biggest new shows this season are Glee and Community. Both of which logically should end with the graduation of their characters. But if both are still successful four years from now I would bet my life savings on the fact that the networks and producers of those shows will find a way to keep them going. Even though it makes no logical sense from a story perspective to do so. Because as we’ve established, people that create television view story as secondary to simply having a show. A television show just becomes this self-propagating entity. It keeps producing new ideas simply to sustain itself, whether those ideas will ultimately add up to a larger whole or not. When you don’t have an end date you start writing about the meaning of a character's tattoos. When you do have an end date you can bring in a bunch of new characters from a frigate who ultimate have nothing to do with anything and won’t even be in any way a part of the larger story at hand. Okay, so bad example, but you get my point. With an end date creators can decide what story they are going to tell and make sure everything adds up to a greater whole. Storytelling will get stronger and series will be tighter and more entertaining without all the needless filler and plot threads and characters that go nowhere. The value of this rule seems pretty obvious and the number of shows that would have benefited from it endless. And now that Lost has done it there's precedent for it. It’s been proven to be something networks are willing to consider. As they should. Because it makes as much sense for them as it does for show creators and audiences. As the ABC learned with Lost setting an end date kept the audience from fleeing in droves. And it kept the show relevant and it's quality high. And by maintaining the audiences of their existing shows it means that the networks will have less schedule holes to fill and therefore less new shows they have to develop and promote each season. In fact promotion cost across the board would go down because it’s cheaper to keep someone watching something they like than it is to try and convince them to watch something new.
Of course in this new system shows will end sooner than they likely would have otherwise, but since we live in a world now where nearly all new shows get canceled in one year or less, in the end having a television schedule full of somewhat limited-run yet successful and high quality shows that will likely do well in DVD sales is surely preferable and more profitable than a small handful of long running hit shows that slowly lose their audiences over time mixed in with a whole bunch of forgettable and quickly cancelled filler.
Seems like a win for everyone.
Now naturally all involved are going to want their shows to run for, like, 20 years and therefore claim that that’s how much story they have to tell. Which leads us to....
*No show’s run is to exceed four years unless a strong overwhelmingly compelling reason can be given as to why it should
Four years is not just the length of high school and college (usually) but it’s also a presidential term. And, if you do 24 episodes in a season, it's also almost exactly 100 hours. I can’t think of many stories that would need longer than that to be effectively told. I also can’t think of any show that wouldn’t have been better served by lasting four seasons or less. Sure I still enjoy watching The Office six seasons in, but it would have been an infinitely better show if it had ended after four. My life wouldn’t be in any way lessened if I hadn’t been able to experience Michael Scott working for Sabre. And if there are any lose ends or the creators feel overwhelming compelled to return to the characters and the material they can always make a movie, ala The Office Christmas Special. But even then be careful. Those almost never work. For example, there is at least a 90% chance the Arrested Development movie, if it ever gets made, will be woefully disappointing.
Now sure, The Wire was five seasons, but they would have been one of those special cases. They had a strong and compelling reason to have a fifth season. Even if it wasn’t their strongest season it attempted to tackle topics that still needed to be addressed to give the full picture of that city and the reasons for why it was the way it was.
And also the exemption allows for shows like Law and Order which are completely self-contained. Not every show has to be as serialized story. There still room on television for more episodic fare. We’re not trying to put an end to The Towering Inferno or Smokey and the Bandit. We’re just trying to create a world The Conversation or Dog Day Afternoon can also get made.
*All shows should only be the number of episodes that is necessary to tell that season’s story
With there now being both the cable and broadcast models I think we are all on board with the idea of television seasons of varying length. This idea seems pretty self explanatory in both its purpose and practicality, and in fact its pretty much already being implemented. I guess the only major change would be with the networks and their marriage to the idea of a twenty-something episode season. Time to let that go you old fogies. Sure you’d have to produce a greater number of overall series to fill your year-round schedule, but you’re already basically doing that now anyway. And if The BBC can do it so can you.
(Okay, okay, I realize that’s an apples to oranges argument but this piece is already running WAY too long so let’s just move on)
*Every season of a show must be shot in full before airing, including the first season.
It's key to mention here that an entire series doesn’t need to be written entirely in full before ever airing. Just each individual season should be filmed before that particular season begins to air. At the end of each season a show’s creator can assess things that aren’t working like he or she thought they would. They may want to change their mind about certain choices or certain elements. New ideas or ways to tell the story might occur to them. Television is a collaborative endeavor and one that for various reason needs to have some flexibility built into it. I get that.
But I do think that always filming an entire season before airing is valuable. If reshoots or tweeks are needed, fine, but if nothing else, that kind of commitment and faith by a network and a creator in a specific vision would certainly change television; likely for the better.
First of all, if someone had to make that kind of commitment to something they would think a lot longer about what it is they want to produce. They’d be less hesitant to put crap on the air. Like a GM in sports, people in television often make decisions with short term interests in mind even if those short term interests might be to the ultimate detriment of long term whole. I propose we call this concept the “Tail Section Survivors Theory” (Okay so maybe the “tailies” weren’t a detriment to Lost but ultimately they served absolutely no purpose whatsoever. It’s pretty much impossible to argue otherwise.)
And secondly with every show automatically getting a full season pick up writers can make smarter more long range, big-picture type decisions without having to constantly worry about simply keeping an audience tuning in. The worst thing that happens is that their show gets cancelled, and even then, since it will already all exist on film it can live on on DVD and lead to future jobs if it’s good enough. This also obviously benefits audiences and it benefits networks as well by allowing them to get at least some sort of return on their investment even for shows they wind up cancelling.
Also, by taping entire seasons in advance of their airings show runners wouldn’t be so susceptible to the whims of fans. In the age of the internet this is becoming increasingly problematic. As Chuck Klosterman has said, I do think that there’s something very detrimental about trying to be a creative person and constantly interfacing with the audience you’re creating for. And thats because listening to too many opinions and trying to please too many people never leads to anything good. You know what was created by committee? The atomic bomb. And I think we all know how that worked out. It bombed. (Cue rimshot)
So with Nikki and Paolo, for example, who gives a fuck if people don’t like them? If they are integral to the story you want to tell then it’ll all pay off in the end. If they aren’t integral enough to the story you want to tell then you shouldn’t have introduced them in the first place. I feel sure back when Season Two of The Wire was airing people on the internet bitched about the focus shifting from the drug trade to the dock workers. But David Simon didn’t give a fuck. Because establishing that world was key to the larger story he wanted to tell. Nikki and Paolo were the producers throwing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. I would say they didn’t have the power of the conviction but the real problem is they didn’t have any convictions. Only ideas.
Which brings us back to my original point- the supremacy of story.
(For someone so obsessed with story I’ve had a pretty hard time creating and maintaining a thru line)
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“Q: I’ve always wondered how much of a character’s ultimate arc was known to you and how early it was known. For instance, did (SPOILER) always have to die? Did (SPOLIER) always have to become (SPOILER)? Was it just built into their DNA as characters?
A: It was. It was built in. You have to know where you’re going and one of the things that television in particular, more than film, certainly more than prose, suffers from is that there’s so much money in the product that once you get an audience, once you achieve an audience, your job is to stay in that audience ad nauseam.”
– an interview with David Simon
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Now I know most of these rules will never be implemented or never even considered. And not just because no one reads this blog. But because the central problem with television, as with pretty much all things in this country, is money. The profit motive runs TV perhaps more so than any other artistic medium. And if the system they have in place now is able to produce the profits they desire then why mess with it?
Well because as I’ve said the old structure of how TV is produced is and consumed is changing radically. Whether they like it or not. And when the old rules no longer apply, its best to fall back on the oldest rule around – make a quality product and people will buy it. Now how to make that quality product or even what it should look like is certainly open to debate. It’s a discussion I’ve been having a lot this week when talking with friends about the Lost finale. And a debate that, as this insanely long blog post should demonstrate, I’m pretty passionate about. I’ve laid out my ideas here, but certainly my proposals don't have to be the ultimate answer. Nor, maybe, should they be. They certainly aren't or flawless or even necessarily realistic. In the end, they're simply a different way of thinking about television. They're the difference between looking at television as a story that you write as you go, and looking at it as a story you write largely in full and then slowly release in segments. The second method isn’t a perfect system, but it seems to me inherently better than the first. And if it seems impossible and radical and heretical then that's because we’ve never really looked at television that way. But if we want to hope for more Wires, more satisfying Losts, less of that gnawing feeling that the time we invest in our favorite shows is time that’s not being well spent, time that’s not being respected, time that could be better spent elsewhere, time that’s ultimately for naught, then these new rules would make a great jumping-off point. A great starting point for important discussion. A discussion about what we want out of our television programs.
Because ultimately it all goes back to the opening two quotes. To David Simon saying that the ultimate goal has to be story. And to Chuck Lorre admitting he has no idea what story he is trying to tell. And although we may disagree about how to tell stories using the medium of television, I think we can all agree with David Simon that stories are what it should be all about.
And also that Two and Half Men is a fucking terrible show.
