In my list of weird coincidences, this has got to rank pretty high: earlier this year, I’m flying to London to do the publicity tour over there for Everything Bad. I’m sitting next to a British guy, and and an hour or so into the flight, we start chatting. He asks if I’m flying over for business or pleasure, and I say business, and he asks what I do, and I say I’m promoting a new book.

Him: Oh really? What’s the book?

Me: It’s this funny little thing called Everything Bad Is Good For You.

Him: [smiling] Ah yes, I’ve read it.

Me: No way! It hasn’t even come out in Britain yet!

Him: Actually, the paper where I work bought the first serial rights.

Me: How amazing. So you worked at the London Times? What do you do there?

Him: [somewhat sheepishly] I’m, um, the editor-in-chief.

Crazy, huh? I said later that not only was he the first person I’d randomly sat next to on a plane who’d actually read one of my books — he was also the first person I’d randomly sat next to who had bought the first serial rights to one of my books.

I say all this because during the flight I was also watching episodes of the ABC show Lost on my laptop, and I brought it to my seatmate’s attention because there are often shots of the original plane crash interspersed through the episodes, and I didn’t want him looking over and thinking I was some kind of a freak who liked to watch footage of plane crashes while actually flying in a plane. So we got started talking about Lost, which had not made it over to the UK at that time. And then three months later, I get an email from an editor at the Times saying that the show is now airing over there, and that his boss recalls me saying something interesting about the show and did I want to write a piece about it.

I thought it sounded like a great idea, because in many ways Lost embodied a lot of the themes I was exploring in the book, but I didn’t get around to seeing it until the manuscript was done. (As is so often the case, I was prodded into watching it by my longtime pop culture confidant, Alex Ross, who was a huge help when I was writing the book.) So I wrote a nice little column for the Times, which for the life of me I cannot find on their website. But about half of it will be familiar to most of you who have followed the Everything Bad discussion. Given that ABC is about to start airing season two of Lost next week, I thought I’d quote a little from the Lost-specific parts of the piece:

By genre, Lost is a disaster narrative — closest in spirit to the airplane disaster movies over the seventies, which were as a genre so awful that they spawned an entire sub-genre of parodies. But Lost’s creator J. J. Abrams — who co-wrote and directed the show’s breaktaking two-hour opening episode — announced in the very first seconds of the show that this was no Airport 77 remake. If the networks had made Lost thirty years ago, it would have followed a fixed narrative flight path: introduce all the passengers and the pilots and the feuding stewardesses; learn each of their backstories; and then have the engines fail. Abrams did away with that entire prologue: Lost begins seconds after the crash, and so from the very beginning of the show, the twenty-odd survivors that we focus on are complete mysteries to the audience. We know nothing about them, and so the narrative pleasure comes from watching these interlinked histories being slowly revealed over the course of the season, in flashbacks and reminiscences.







Thirty years ago, of course, no American show would have dared to put twenty recurring characters into a network drama. (Even the socially complex prime-time soaps like Dallas tended to max out at around ten primary characters, while the sitcom’s sweet spot seemed to be at around six: just enough for a nuclear family and the wacky neighbor next door.) But no show back then would have dreamt of submitting the audience to so much deliberately murky narrative information. Only the notoriously opaque Twin Peaks — a minor network hit in the early nineties — compares to Lost’s entanglements. And indeed, Lost came very close to disappearing off the map itself: executives at ABC and its parent company Walt Disney had so little faith in the project that they fired the network chairman who had originally proposed the idea of a plane crash epic to Abrams. Only the lavish budget already spent on the pilot — $12M, several times larger than television norm — persuaded the network to give the show a chance.







Mystery, of course, is a staple of much serial drama. (Dickens, after all, compulsively ended his installments with a tantalizing cliffhanger.) But when American television has withheld information for the purposes of suspense, it has historically focused on a single unanswered question, who shot JR? being the canonical example. As uncanny as it was, Twin Peaks itself would have never attracted a mainstream audience without a central, catchphrase mystery at its core: who killed Laura Palmer?







The genius of Lost is that its mysteries are fractal: at every scale — from the macro to the micro — the series delivers a consistent payload of confusion. There are the biographical riddles: why was the beautiful Kate accompanied by a federal marshal on the flight? There are geographic riddles (why have the rescue teams missed the island, and why does it appear to have a history of attracting castaways?) and historical ones (why has that SOS signal been playing for so many years?) And then there are existential riddles: are these people even alive at all? Perhaps there were no survivors, and these characters are just ghosts haunting an island of lost souls. Or does Abrams have up his sleeve an elaborate homage to The Island Of Dr. Moreau?







These are only a handful of the unanswered questions that arise in the first six episodes. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and came up with roughly thirty genuinely mysterious plot elements that season one offers up. I won’t give anything away, but each of the main characters turns out to be, well, more complicated than they initially appeared, and the island itself turns out to be the most complicated of all. Narratives by definition work by withholding information about future events; you tune in to find out what will happen next. But with Lost, the mystery lies in the present tense: half the time, you have no idea what’s happening right now.