OPINION: The past month I’ve been re-watching Lost, and yes, I can probably guess the first thing you’re going to say is “worst ending ever”.
I’d disagree with that sentiment, mainly because after a few seasons I realised Lost was never going to reconcile its mysteries in a way that would please everyone. You’d probably look at the headline for this opinion piece and also wonder, what is it on about?
But I think in the age of streaming, TV shows simply aren’t as good as they used to be. I wrote about how The Acolyte never really got up and running, and that felt emblematic of many TV series in the last few years – lots of spectacle but not much in the way of interesting characters or an engaging narrative.
It’s been twenty years since Lost hit our screens (we in the UK actually started watching it on Channel 4 a whole month before it debuted in the US), and watching it now reminds me of how different these two televisual eras are. Lost emerged on TV as an original idea – not a series based on a known property or a spin-off. It was new and fresh, and not something we’d seen before.
This was back at a time when TV shows were twenty episodes plus, which meant you could tell stories and character acts without having to rush. Sure, there be ‘Bottle’ episodes, but series felt better paced than film-like narratives streaming shows are going for today.
Remember how well the Netflix Marvel shows started and then started to sag around the mid-point? And they were only 13 episodes.
And this was a time when people would congregate around one main screen and watch TV together, back when “water cooler” series were a thing, and a sign of how popular (or controversial) a series could be. In the era of streaming, people don’t watch shows at the same time, and even worse than that, some series are so middling that people would rather talk about something more interesting like how bad the British summer has been.
TV needs fresh new ideas
So while Lost wasn’t a perfect TV show, I do wish we could go back to a time when TV series could take their time in terms of pacing, focus more on the characters and less on spectacle, but, importantly, tell original stories.
With streaming, the emphasis has been on trying to draw people in with recognisable worlds and characters initially, and the hope (at least for me) would be to eventually pivot back to telling original, riskier stories. Those stories are still happening – Baby Reindeer is one example, but they also feel few and far between.
We haven’t reached that point and we may not – perhaps times have changed so much that things won’t ever be the same, but to paraphrase a sentence Jack said to Kate in season four, “we have to go back”.
TV needs fresh new ideas, not more of the same, to get it out of the rut it’s currently in.
