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2020 Q1 & and now Q2 TV DISCUSSION


RIPPA

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Damon Lindelof gave an interview to Collider and claimed Lost was supposed to run three seasons.  When ABC threw out the idea of more, Lindelof thought maybe they could squeeze a fourth season out of it.

Lost ran 10 season, folks.  This is why we don't get better writing in TV.  Too much money in production for shows to end when/how they should.  I wonder how many shows end by telling the ending the creators had in mind.  I doubt it's even 1 in 10.  1 in 40, maybe?  Either your show gets canceled prematurely, or the network extends the deal well past the point the creators wanted to stop at.  Or you have to replace actors.  Whatever.  

J Michael Straczynski used to claim that everything that happened in Babylon 5 went according to the plan he laid out before the first season filmed.  I'm sure that's true up to a point.  But it's an absurd claim to make unless the plan was was to write the lead character out entirely a season in because the actor was mentally ill and cast and crew didn't want to work with him.  Or to write another of your core characters out a few seasons later because the actress wouldn't do another season for the salary that was offered.

(Straczynski has since backpedaled on that comment.)

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LOST also seemed to have more than it's fair share of actors having to leave the show for getting to Hawaii and acting like dipshits. Seasons 5/6 were phenomenal. It was 3 and 4 that cocked up the whole thing. Stretching that middle material out is what doomed that show. I thought the season 5 stuff where SPOILERS SPOILERS FOR SHITS SAKE SPOILERS Sawyer and the Gang were time skipping and ended up in the 70's was some of the best shit ever.

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4 hours ago, RIPPA said:

I will believe it just like I will believe an Uncharted movie

When I am watching it

shut upppp Rippa, you’re putting negative energy out there! I need this show to happen, especially if it’s from the Westworld people.

Fuuuuuuck.

Edited by Casey
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Lost is a weird show for me as I watched every single episode... except for the last 4. Absolutely no reason for that outside of sheer laziness.

Doc’s original point is correct though and it’s painfully obvious through the middle season how everything was just being stretched out to fill time.

Still might be the best pilot episode I’ve ever seen though.

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It would have been so much better using the British model not yet really employed on network TV then, letting it be a finite length with the creators knowing the whole story before they started. 

it was almost the TV equivalent of Vince constantly rewriting raw. 

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10 hours ago, odessasteps said:

It would have been so much better using the British model not yet really employed on network TV then, letting it be a finite length with the creators knowing the whole story before they started. 

it was almost the TV equivalent of Vince constantly rewriting raw. 

This assumes the creators knew the whole story; I believe Lindelof on the 3-seasons idea as much as Rippa believes in the Uncharted movie.  The first 2 seasons, outstanding though they were, were so black-box that another season probably wouldn't have been enough to explain anything, and even if it had, it likely wouldn't have been to anyone's satisfaction.  So, we wouldn't really get a significantly better opinion of it; just a differently populated group of disenchanted viewers.  Hell, look at what it took to flesh out Twin Peaks after 2 seasons of weird (and frankly, Twin Peaks had a lot less plot to follow and probably fewer questions to answer).

But, like Twin Peaks, it still altered TV forever; every two-bit producer out there does the premise of "Arc Plot told over the subplot of This Week's Central Character's personality flaws on display" now.

Edited by Contentious C
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Yeah, you presume a network would not just commission a show based on a cocktail napkin pitch like “castaway with monsters” or whatever exactly JJ had suggested. 
 

I guess GOT also shows what happens when you start a massive show without knowing the ending, even when you have the original creator on board. 

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You know how shows sometimes do time jumps and don't recast, just work on the assumption that we'll accept that all these people are five years older (now without anyone visibly ageing, just changing personal grooming slightly)?

I'm catching up on Outlander, and they did a time jump of 20 YEARS! They were 35 years olds playing 25, then a year later they were 36 year olds playing 45. Crazy.

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About Lost: I watched about half the pilot, and was just utterly hating it, and never finished that episode.

It became wildly known as one of the greatest pilots of all-time, so I felt pretty safe in concluding the show just wasn't for me.

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6 hours ago, Brian Fowler said:

About Lost: I watched about half the pilot, and was just utterly hating it, and never finished that episode.

It became wildly known as one of the greatest pilots of all-time, so I felt pretty safe in concluding the show just wasn't for me.

If only Jack had been a blonde teenager... ? 

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I love every season of Lost and think the series got actively better the longer it went. The time travel season is my favorite one. I love most time travel things and the first time I saw the frozen wheel that caused the island to keep jumping through time gave me goosebumps. If I had to make some complaints, I would say that Lost is the perfect example of why seasons of TV should never be longer than 13 episodes. If Lost were made now with 10 to 13 episode orders per season running for 6 seasons it would be perfect. You cut out all the filler and keep the amazing shit like "The Constant" or "not Penny's boat" *sniff*.

I think the reason Lost hits close to home for me is that my dad died just before my senior year of high school. My bonds with the friends I had since my first day of high school grew stronger after that event and I wound up growing very close to another newer group of friends. So that's 99. Two years later and 9/11 basically destroys every aspect of the world I thought I lived in. I lived in constant fear of the next attack, but my group of friends were about the best support group I could ask for. And then they started moving. Two of them decided to leave college and enter the Navy, another left college to move out to NC. In the years since that I saw how all of their lives started becoming worse. None of us were close anymore and I felt like the bonds we all developed grew weaker. Around that time I started having this very idealistic thought of what the afterlife would be. If there were another terrorist attack and we were to die I imagined this "waiting room" place where no matter when we died, we'd stay in the waiting room until we could all be together again. My dad factored into that too. It just all felt like we would have all been stronger sticking together.

So Lost comes along and as the show progresses it really starts hitting home. All of these people wind up being connected in some way shape or form for something bigger than what they thought they were part of. They leave the island and feel that things would be better back there because life is just going haywire away from the island. Over the course of the show some of these characters die off and then in that final season we see them start popping back up. We eventually see that this is what the afterlife is for that show. For that group of people that grew such close personal bonds they wound up back together again before passing on. In the midst of all of that, Jack is finally able to have a final conversation with his dad and find closure with him.

I think it's one of the most beautiful and peaceful things I've seen out of a tv series. It tapped into these ideas I developed when I felt a sense of mortality after 9/11. I'm a lapsed Catholic, I wouldn't say I'm an atheist but I'm something close to it, but this idea that if I do die that I might get to have a final conversation with my dad and ask him so many questions I never got a chance to ask him or be with all of my friends one last time before passing on is, like I said, really beautiful. Scientifically, we more than likely die, the lights get shut out, and that's it, but if there were something more to life or the afterlife then I would like for it to be like how I described. Lost captured all of that for me. Yeah, the series is overly long, there's a lot of filler in there, but there's also a lot of good to be seen.

I think I've watched all of Lost at least 3 times and I watched the series finale more than that. At least I used to when it was on Netflix. There's few series I re-visit more than Lost. Adventure Time is one of those and it's something my daughter and I keep re-watching. There are aspects of Adventure Time that remind me of Lost and Adventure Time also hits me in the feels really hard. The Good Place and Parks and Rec are two others. As you can see, there's a common theme with these shows. I'm a big sap and love shows with ensemble casts that have close relationships. 

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I would also be totally down for a Lost comeback series, not a reboot. I don't know how you do it, but I would love it if Lindelof could take his experiences from the Leftovers and Watchmen and make a very, very tight 3 to 4 season long continuation series. Maybe 10 episodes per season or something like that. Put it on HBO Max.

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2 hours ago, Craig H said:

I would also be totally down for a Lost comeback series, not a reboot. I don't know how you do it, but I would love it if Lindelof could take his experiences from the Leftovers and Watchmen and make a very, very tight 3 to 4 season long continuation series. Maybe 10 episodes per season or something like that. Put it on HBO Max.

only if they could retcon the end. ?

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