''Lost'': Who is Jacob? Jeff Jensen offers a couple new theories, and gets Damon Lindelof's reaction to the show's new Wednesday-at-10 slot
SURF'S UP Could assumed castaway Paulo (Rodrigo Santoro) be an Other in disguise?
Attention,
Lost nation: In case you haven't heard, you're going to need to reprogram your TiVos.
Lost is moving to 10 p.m. on Wednesdays, putting it out of harm's way of
American Idol (which squashed it like a bug last spring) and saving the show from the embarrassment of placing third in the time period it once dominated, behind
AI and this season's weirdest success story, the inexplicably ratings-surging
Criminal Minds. Millions and millions of people are allegedly watching this thoroughly undemanding Mandy Patankin crime drama, even though I don't know a single one of them. Or maybe I do, and they know that they should keep their hideous shame to themselves, and rightfully so.
Here's my long-promised two cents about
Lost's season 3 ratings decline: Personally, I don't buy the theory that the blasphemous growth of
Criminal Minds is a kind of referendum on
Lost. For starters, the audiences for those shows seem totally different. But if there are the kind of people who would choose to abandon a show like
Lost in favor of some assembly-line widget of murdersploitation coporatetainment like
Criminal Minds, my hunch is that they were never really serious
Lost fans, anyway. Clearly, it wasn't bland enough. Or maybe the only reason they ever started watching
Lost was that scruffy Sawyer sure was darn cute... at least, until those mean old Others started messing up his pretty mug.
So if
Lost's lost viewers haven't been sucked into the mindhole that is
Criminal Minds... where have they gone?
Here's my theory: I don't think they're watching anything at all. Not really. I don't doubt there are some former
Lost fans who've become
Lost haters — who believe the show has ''lost it,'' who seriously doubt the producers know what they're doing. But what I do hear from those who've given up watching
Lost on a weekly basis — and I know more than a few — is that
Lost has let its urgency slip away, most likely as a result of what TV writers call ''The Stall.'' The Stall is what happens to ongoing TV shows that are trying to tell a story that has an ending when the storytellers don't know when or if they'll be allowed to actually ever end it.
Lost has definitely moved into Stall mode, atomizing storylines into tiny bits and strewing them across manymanymany episodes (like Jack/Kate/Sawyer's stay in Othersville) in order to fill the time. Kinda like a football team that's jumped out to a big lead, then adopts a prevent defense that allows an opponent to gain yards and maybe put up a few points, just to burn off the clock, which can be risky, because you also allow your opponent to gain momentum or wrest control of the game. Or something like that.
Tortured sports analogies aside, for people irritated by The Stall,
Lost has surrendered its must-see status. For them, the watercooler conversation has lost its boil. At the same time, what I've noticed is that these people are still invested in the unfolding story of
Lost. Yet they also know that there are other options available to them that would allow them to experience the show without having to put up with its glacial pacing and its ''answer a question with new questions'' tactics. They can bank a bunch of episodes on TiVo, then watch 'em all at once, to get the kind of full-meal deal they wish every episode could deliver. Or they can just wait until the entire season comes out on DVD and binge. In fact, I know of two people who just recently became fans of the show via the DVDs. They loved what they saw and decided to become weekly watchers when the show began its third season. By the third episode, they were burned out. One of them popped into my office and said, ''How can you stand to watch the show this way? It's so... slow.'' He decided he was going to jump off the riverboat and catch up with it downstream, when it docks at his local Best Buy. (Again with the tortured analogies!)
There are other options, as well. Scary options, if you're ABC and you need the eyeballs and revenue. For example, lapsed viewers don't have to watch the show again, in any of the forms available to them — they can instead just visit EW.com every week and read
our summaries.
Anyway. This was all to say:
Lost is moving to 10 p.m. when it returns to ABC's Wednesday-night airwaves in February. I asked executive producer Damon Lindelof what he thinks of the move, and he shot me this e-mail:
''I personally am thrilled. Now I can watch
American Idol without feeling guilty.
''Oh. Wait. I still feel guilty.''
ew.com