A man wakes up in the jungle. He’s bleeding. He has no idea how he got there. He twists his head from side to side but sees nobody, save for a friendly-looking dog wandering past. Gradually, he registers noise: screams. He staggers to his feet and heads towards them.
Suddenly, he’s on a beach. There is smoke, flames — people injured and disorientated. The man stumbles through the debris and finally focuses: he’s been in a plane crash and people are dying... On paper, Lost doesn’t sound such a big deal: a plane crashes in the Pacific, the survivors struggle to, well, survive. So far, so 1970s disaster movie. But Lost has proved itself so much more than that: a huge hit in the States, pulling in about 17m viewers a week, it’s credited (along with its studio stablemate, Desperate Housewives) with saving ABC. Currently, it’s been sold to more than 180 countries worldwide.
It’s already more than a mere hour-long episode per week. You can download Lost desktop wall-paper, a ferociously tricky website has been created for the fictitious airline the plane belongs to (www.oceanic-air.com) and, starting in the autumn, Lost the fanzine will appear on newsstands bi-monthly.
Channel 4 will be happy to piggyback onto the show’s trans-atlantic success and is busy gearing up for its biggest launch ever, with the starry photographer David LaChapelle reprising his Desperate Housewives role and directing the C4 trailers and promos. It will have to be a very hot Indian summer to dampen the hype that has been planned.
A Lord of the Flies for grown-ups (heck, there’s even a wild boar), Lost throws a group of disparate personalities and cultures together in the jungle to see how they cope. It also pitches up some scary beasts (even a polar bear) to add to the tension. But unlike Lord of the Flies, these are not young minds and bodies discovering a latent capacity for cruelty: these characters all have pasts — some they would rather for- get — that feed and fester under such gruelling conditions.
Character-wise, it’s a writer’s dream. There are no rules here: anybody could have been on that plane. And, pretty much, anybody is. There’s the heroic doctor, played by Matthew Fox, whose calm head in a crisis may be masking a deeper turbulence; the bickering posh brother and sister (Maggie Grace); the single father with his sullen kid; a really weird, wheelchair-bound bald bloke (think of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now); a Korean couple who appear to speak no English; a former member of the Iraqi Republican Guard... Oh, and the mystery castaway who escaped more than the crash when the plane went down: breaking free from the US marshal they were handcuffed to (handily putting a loaded gun in the frame). It’s a mixed bag all right.
Co-created by the US television wunderkind JJ Abrams (Alias, Felicity), Lost cleverly plugs into current trends in the small screen. For a start, it takes on the enormously popular reality-TV shows such as Survivor and wrenches back the notion that fiction is where the real drama lies. It does acknowledge reality-TV’s hook, however, playing with real time to stretch out the detail and build up the suspense. But unlike 24, it isn’t beholden to rigorous self-imposed rules: each week, the action moves on by a day or two.
“I got a call from ABC,” recalls Abrams. “They said they wanted to do a show about a plane that crashes on an island, and I said, ‘How do you do a series based on that?’” Nevertheless, he was sufficiently intrigued to bash some ideas around with co-creator Damon Lindelof. “We came to the same conclusion,” says Lindelof. “That if the island was really, really cool and mysterious and, more importantly, that the survivors were even more cool and mysterious, people might actually want to watch it.”
Abrams butts in: “Damon said, ‘We start with a man in a jungle. He wakes up...’ I would have gone anywhere with that.”
Eleven weeks after that first meeting, the pair handed ABC the two-hour pilot. “The finished film,” smiles Abrams, “not just the script.” Which is impressive, considering they had to cast some 40 or so parts, pick an island — Hawaii — find a plane they could trash... But then they did spend $10m (£5.6m), which makes it one of the most expensive pilots ever made.
Lindelof laughs: “I think if we’d had time to sit around and second-guess ourselves, we never would have done it.”
They realised early on that spending an hour a week on a desert island could quickly use up their plot points — it also didn’t offer much in the way of variety of on-screen faces. To combat this, they split the episodes into two parallel story lines. Each week, we continue to follow the action on the beach, but we also take a trip back with one character to their former self, gradually piecing together their past to make sense of present behaviour. Even then, the trick is to keep us hanging on: one episode never tells the whole story.
Clearly, the hook is the mystery. UK fans will have to resist the temptation of the internet if they want to be kept in suspense. The jungle scenes are souped up with hand-held camerawork, the dense foliage making sure we never quite know what’s going on. Forays into the island’s danger zones never provide answers when they can generate another clutch of questions instead. The format owes something to the old Saturday-morning serials, with Flash Gordon hurtling into a meteor just as the curtain falls, only to be revived the following week to face yet more life-threatening adversity.
Initially, in the States, press and public alike were naturally obsessed with the beast — to the point where Dominic Monaghan, the British former Hobbit, who plays Charlie, a rock star with some very bad habits, took to going out in public sporting a T-shirt emblazoned with “I don’t know!” “Everyone was always going, ‘What’s the monster? What’s the monster?’,” nods Abrams. “That’s all they cared about...”
“But it’s like the beginning of Jaws,” interjects Lindelof, excitedly, “where that girl is swimming and you see her get pulled under. If you saw that huge, fake shark that eventually comes up at the end of the movie, it wouldn’t be frightening any more. But as long as it’s the fin, it’s supercool.”
They are hoping to avoid what they describe as the Twin Peaks effect: “Once you find out who killed Laura Palmer, the show has nowhere to go,” shrugs Lindelof.
“When a show relies on answering one big question, there is never a satisfying resolution,” concurs Abrams. “I mean, Pulp Fiction was great, but anything anyone could tell me that was in that briefcase would disappoint me. It doesn’t matter.”
Abrams may have more of a taste for the unexplained than his fellow countrymen. Many critics and fans were quite vocal in their disappointment when season one ended in May in the States and, after six months and a two-part, three-hour finale, they were still struggling with big, fat question marks. What’s surprising is that they should have been surprised: how many successful US television series are wrapped up when they’re ahead, let alone in one season? British producers may wax lyrical about Fawlty Towers or The Office, but no American company would call a halt when they could be milking a cash cow.
“It’s like a marriage,” says Abrams when asked how long he sees Lost running. “You can’t plan how you will sustain it. And I have to be honest with you, there are times — all the time — when I doubt the fact that this marriage is going to last. They’re on an island... But,” he adds after a pause, “I believe you could have them rescued at the end of season two and people would say, ‘Well, now what’s the show going to be?’ And we would just have to figure it out.”
Lost starts with a double episode on Channel 4 on Wednesday
