(I apologize for no jokes and no content this week, but I’m not in a position to do any of those things for you. I’m barely even Twitter-based until Monday.)
***This is 100% spoiler free, in case you haven’t seen lasterday’s Season Five finale yet.***
One of the many reasons I love Lost is because you could hand that concept to another set of creators – even with a lot of the pieces in place – and it would be a completely different show.
It’s creative-bankruptcy-proof.
Take the base idea – a group of strangers crash land and are stranded on a mysterious island – and it still doesn’t really tell you what the show is about.
What’s interesting is this goes against every rule of Hollywood, ie you could hand the high concept to almost any Adam Sandler concept to ten writer/director teams, and while the quality/jokes/characters will vary, you’ll probably get more or less the same movie. (That’s not a criticism, by the way.)
If you’ve read me for a long time and lived through one of my tantrums, you know this is something I strive to emulate – I rarely fear telling people my ideas, because I don’t think most people would know what to do with a “dead snake/magic basketball movie” or an “epic, pretentious, and stupid 47-story airplane reading book“.
The other thing I love is that the shows creators have absolutely no fear of turning the entire thing on its ear every season. If you watched the season finale lasterday, you know it’ll all be different next year again.
And just like the Season Five ender, there will be many theories and predictions, none of them will be right, and yet whatever they do will seem to fit right into the mythology.
Go Cavaliers and WORD UP.
(Follow me on Twitter here.)
(Download the first 55 pages of my epic, pretentious, and stupid book, Prelude to a Super Airplane, here.)
