BALL: It’s heroic.

GILLIGAN: But I don’t think such good work gets done versus what’s on cable. I love cable, but not because you can show boobies and say the F-word. I love it because you have more time to think. That’s the blessing of it.

CUSE: It’s so much better. You don’t realize it until you’ve left that world how many aspects of network television kind of conspire against quality and success. In cable, you do have time to be more thoughtful, and there’s this entirely different approach to the storytelling process.

LINDELOF: I’m working in cable with HBO now, and we’re just in the pilot phase, but if they pick up the show, then the big debate is whether to do 10 episodes or 13 episodes—both of which are 11 or 12 less than we did on Lost at our high point. It sounds so good—it makes me want to cry. So I do feel, as Vince said, that when you’re doing that many episodes, just in terms of the speed at which the conveyor belt is moving and Lucy and Ethel are having to do what they do, it’s amazing that everything doesn’t result in cataclysm. And this is nothing against my colleagues who are in broadcast TV, but why anybody would want to do that when given the choice …

CUSE: Another aspect of it is that all of us have been involved in shows that I think are really more stories than franchises, and with that kind of show, you want to know what the end point is. If you do a more traditional cop show or a medical show like Grey’s Anatomy, then you can always have new doctors and new patients coming in. But in the case of something like Bates Motel, there’s an end to the story. You know that Norman Bates is going to become some version of the guy that we all know from the movie and that his mother is probably not going to have a very good fate. There were always certain kinds of contrivances that were a part of television that the audience accepted—most notably, that you had to have very clean-cut heroes who didn’t do bad things. But now, that has gone away. You have an audience that is utterly compelled right now to see what happens to Walter White—not exactly a good guy. And then there was also this idea that television should just be this open-ended experience, which was another contrivance that is going away. As a storyteller, whether you’re writing a TV series or a novel or a play, your story has a beginning, middle, and end. The audience deserves the end and they also deserve to know when they’re going to get it—and that, for us on Lost, became a huge part of it. As people started getting invested in Lost, there was this palpable fear of that kind of contrivance of television, which is that it’s open-ended—like, “How are we going to invest in this thing? It’s not going to end well. How much time do we have to put in? Where is it going to go?” But we knew very early on that we really wanted to end the show. Of course, that was a complete anathema to everyone at ABC, because that wasn’t how television was done—it was more like the Pony Express, where you ride the horse until it drops dead beneath you. So we really had to threaten to quit and walk away from the show in order to get them to take us seriously and actually engage in negotiation.LINDELOF: And this was all happening around the middle of the third season which, if memory serves, was around the same time The Sopranos was ending. But with the exception of maybe Friends and Seinfeld, both of which were enormously popular comedies that went off the air with huge ratings and could have continued, dramas just weren’t going off that way. The way that they ended was usually more a by-product of, “Well, your audience is slipping away …” So when Carlton and I were finally told, “You’re going to get to end this thing three years from now,” it felt like a huge victory for us. It’s funny, too, because we also both thought the ending of The Sopranos was the greatest thing that we’d ever seen. We’d been talking about it all week—we just were completely and totally creatively enlivened by it. Then we went to New York for some conference that the head of ABC marketing made us do. It was a Q&A moderated by Matt Roush, who is TV Guide‘s leading critic. So we were talking to him about how much we loved The Sopranos finale and he said, “Well, there’s a lot of divisiveness about The Sopranos finale. In fact, many of the most diehard fans feel that the finale retroactively ruined the entire series for them.” Carlton and I looked at each other and in that moment felt like, “Oh my god, what have we done?”—like, “How can this thing not be empirically realized as brilliant?” Some people apparently felt like the cut to black at the end of The Sopranos was robbing them or cheating them or anything other than what your interpretation of that might be. But anybody who said that a single episode could retroactively ruin the brilliance that had preceded it was just a complete and total moron in my estimation. It also made me realize that we were going to be experiencing the same thing—and lo and behold, we have. Divisiveness really haunted our show from the word “go.” It does feel like one of the good things about having a smaller audience in a cable space is that you can just let the show be what it is. It’s not like we were writing Lost to pander to the masses, but with the idea of 20 million people watching the show when it first started, there was a sense of, “They’re not all going to stick around when we start the time-travel stuff.” I’m hard-pressed, though, to think that somebody watched the third season of Six Feet Under or Breaking Bad and didn’t stay all the way until the end. So it does feel—at least in the pop-culture bubble—like there’s a much higher sense of consensus about the awesomeness of those shows and, like, your endgames, even though the Breaking Bad finale hasn’t aired yet. Whereas the consensus opinion—whether it’s a small but vocal subset or not—is that the Lost finale was highly divisive.