David Fury

Finding Lost

Co-creator Damon Lindelof and season one scribe David Fury sound off on the once and future ABC hit

ABC’s Lost shoots its dazzling location footage on the shores of O’ahu, Hawaii, but its writers slave away in the considerably less romantic locale of Burbank, California, where the show is written and edited on the Disney Studios lot. Lost Co-creator Damon Lindelof doesn’t feel like he’s completely missing out on all the tropical beach action, however. “I only journey down there five or six times a season,” he says. “Just because it’s Hawaii doesn’t mean it’s all siestas on the beach but there are worse places to shoot a show.”

ABC must think there are also worse shows to have in their lineup than Lost . Since it debuted in the fall of 2004, Lost and Desperate Housewives have turned the once-fourth-place network’s fortunes around and rehabilitated the moribund reputation of fictional, serialized storytelling on television. The concept was originally conjured up by ex-ABC President Lloyd Braun as a dramatic version of Survivor , with luminaries like Aaron Spelling reportedly involved. But when the series concept proved difficult to crack Braun called in producer J.J. Abrams of Alias . “J.J. was working on another pilot called The Catch and was still working on Alias and movie stuff so he had no time to do that,” Lindelof says. “He said if they could find another writer with a take he’d be happy to supervise the process.”

Both Lindelof and Abrams independently came up with the same approach: “I thought the only way the show could be a show would be if it were a mystery show, that is you didn’t know anything that was going on at the outset, you didn’t know anything about the people and you certainly didn’t know anything about the island, and that both of them had to be weird. I came in Monday and before I could even open my mouth J.J. said basically the same thing, that the key to make it work would be to make it essentially a genre show.”

Lost consequently launched its pilot with the aftermath of a horrendous jet airliner crash, with survivors discovering that the tropical island they’re now stranded on has some unusual properties: a marauding, unseen predatory monster, peculiar visions, strange radio signals, a mysterious French castaway named Rousseau, and an even more mysterious enclosed metal hatch sticking out of the ground. But what really gave the show its resonance were meaty character turns by a large cast and flashbacks that showed the starcrossed lives of the passengers before they arrived on the island. “We knew early on that the flashbacks were going to have to be a prominent aspect of the series but we didn’t use flashbacks in the pilot other than to tell the story of the crash,” Lindelof says. “We knew as we were shooting the pilot though that the only way to do the series would be to use the art of the stall. In any given season of 24 there’s not that much happening, but they give the illusion of constant suspense. On Lost if every episode were about discovering the mysteries of the island than we would be sunk, because there’s an inevitability to that where if the characters decided ‘we’re going to explore this island and figure out what this place is’ whereas if it’s ‘we’re going to figure out how to live with each other and figure out what this island is’ and we’re going to learn about the characters before the crash so that they’re emotionally compelling, that was the only way we saw to do the show.”

One dividend of this approach was the ability to have characters cross paths before they reach the island, or encounter important figures related to their fellow castaways in flashbacks, adding layers of meaning to their relationships and activities on the island. “That was in the DNA of the show from the beginning as well,” Lindelof acknowledges. “We were very subtle about doing it at first but it became more and more prominent as the show went on. The big question about the show to me has never been ‘what is this island they’re on?’ It’s more ‘why these people? Why this plane and what does it all mean in the grand scheme of things, and then why this island.’ The only way you can tell that story is in their pasts.”

As to the island’s mysteries, the major networks have proven themselves to be as hostile an environment to genre shows as anything the Lost characters have to live in. Writer David Fury, who helped develop the direction of the show and wrote pivotal episodes like "Walkabout” and “Numbers,” saw the show as a struggle to advance its genre ideals. “The network and the studio hate the supernatural elements of the show,” Fury says. “They won’t admit to that but that’s the thing that scared them the most and what they thought would alienate the audience the most. They don’t understand that that’s what’s intriguing to people. According to Fury, the network mandated rational explanations for every potential fantasy element of the show as a fallback position. “As the show became a success the network was even more protective of the notion that we don’t want to alienate anyone, and by the time we got to episode six where Sayid is torturing Sawyer, they were terrified of that-they just said people are going to be appalled by that and I went ‘but that’s really interesting.’”

Lindelof doesn’t see the situation as quite so confrontational. “The network is primarily interested in the most accessible storytelling you can possibly do,” he says. “In some cases that means they want to push the genre element, in other cases they want to scale it back. I wouldn’t say they’re consistent about the genre aspects of the show, but it’s a network show and they want it to be accessible to the broadest audience possible. If you look at the movies that are big hits, they’re all genre movies, so the network has never taken the approach that genre doesn’t work. But there’s genre where people are zipping around on a spaceship from planet to planet and there’s genre like The X-Files where it’s functioning in the real world that we know, they’re FBI agents but there are genre elements on the fringe. And one of those characters is constantly saying ‘I don’t believe in vampires’ so it gives a portal to audience members who are not genre savvy, and it’s always been important to us that there’s always that Scully explanation.”

The “art of the stall” approach probably showed its seams the most in “Exodus,” the three-hour wrap-up to the season that ended with Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) and John Locke (Terry O’Quinn) staring down into the maw of the mysterious, finally-opened .” “We decided early on that the end of season one would be opening up this thing,” Lindelof says of the hatch. “We felt that would be a fantastically compelling cliffhanger. As frustrated as an audience might feel, there wouldn’t be a single person who saw the finale that wouldn’t come back to see what was inside. Our feeling was, knowing what was inside there, to have them descend and just give people a taste of what was down there would be infinitely more frustrating then not having them go down at all. That would have created a hundred questions to have them see just a little so we stuck with the original plan. As a viewer of the show I understand the frustration, but frustration is inherent in the equation of a good cliffhanger-if the frustration was the feeling that we didn’t know what was in there and we were just stalling until we figured it out we would have broken a trust with the audience, but that’s not the case and once we begin to show what’s in there to the audience hopefully they’ll feel satisfied with what it is.”

“Exodus” planted numerous threads to be explored in season two. There’s the kidnapping of Walt from his father Michael by “the Others,” a ragged, piratical crew of thugs with their own boat (and the subsequent destruction of the raft, leaving Michael, Sawyer [Josh Holloway] and Jin [Daniel Dae Kim] adrift on the ocean), the opening of the hatch, the discovery of the galleon Black Rock and its load of dynamite and dead slaves, and perhaps the discovery of other survivors on the island. “Michelle Rodriguez is joining the cast this year as a regular so extrapolate what you will,” Lindelof says. “We know that she was on the plane in the back, so the idea that she’s been living this Castaway-like existence Tom Hanks-style somewhere on the island, thinking she might be the only survivor, is kind of interesting.” Since the death of Boone (Ian Somerhalder), his sister Shannon (Maggie Grace) also will find her character moving in a new direction. “Obviously, step one was pairing her up with Sayid in a romance-like scenario and we’re going to continue some of that this year, but primarily her role on the show this season has been interesting to explore. All I’ll hint at is that as a result of the responsibility she’s been granted by Walt in terms of taking care of his dog, there’s a genre connection that begins to manifest itself over the beginning of this year.”

While he expects the show’s explorations of backstory and deep character development to continue, Lindelof says he expects the opening stories of season two to focus on the action on the island. “We’re finding the show is inherently different in a lot of ways and it’s just a byproduct of the fact that a serialized TV show like this is always moving forward- 24 is serialized but every season they reset. Lost , season two literally starts approximately five seconds after season one ends so you’re inheriting everything they know about the island. One storyline we’re pursuing is you have these three guys, their raft has just been blown up, Walt has been taken and they’re in the ocean somewhere, and the other storyline is that they’re going into the hatch. So immediately the show kicks off with a bang and it takes a while to slow down and get back into the kind of storylines we were doing last year.”