The 20 Best TV Dramas Since ‘The Sopranos’ | The New York Times
DAMON LINDELOF, co-creator and co-showrunner:
I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time talking about the beginning of “Lost” — the pilot and first season — and then the final episode, an ending for which I still make no apologies. But I now have more perspective on the 119 hours that happened between those two poles.
After the pilot, the thing that most people were saying, myself included, was, “How do you keep these people on an island, and make that interesting to watch?” The lesson is to keep running, and I give myself a little latitude for just finishing the marathon.
As for my favorites, it’s a tie between the pilot, “The Constant” [from Season 4] and the Season 3 finale — right now, the Season 3 finale [which introduced the flash-forward concept, and revealed that the survivors make it off the island] is in the pole position. That was one of the most exciting things we ever did, and it was at a time when the show was starting to get written off as having its best days behind it.
So that was like the moment in the “Rocky” movie where Rocky gets up, and you realize he’s still got some fight left in him. Just that idea that we were able to still pull off a satisfying emotional twist, with the shifting out of flashbacks and into flash-forwards. The line I hear quoted most at me is, “We have to go back!” It’s an indelible moment in the show, and it seems to have stuck. It definitely stuck with me.
I get tickled when a show like “Manifest” comes along in 2018 and people describe it as, “It’s like ‘Lost.’” I was inspired by so many shows — “Twin Peaks,” “The X-Files,” “The Twilight Zone,” “The Prisoner” and a billion other things were in that stew as well. So the idea that “Lost” gets to be an ingredient in somebody else’s stew is immensely gratifying.
The theory that continues to drive me bonkers is the idea that they were dead the whole time. That makes no sense to me because in the finale, as the characters all come together in this church before they move on to whatever their next life is, there are characters there who were not on the plane — Desmond and Penny, Benjamin Linus, Juliet. If they were dead the whole time, how would they have met characters who were not even on Oceanic 815?
It definitely creates some brow furrowing. But I’ve decided that on my tombstone it will say: “Here lies Damon Lindelof. He was dead the whole time.”
kianamaiart
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
titsay