it comes in pints?

Heaven forbid producers and writers conceive of a show with a definite run that has a cohesive beginning, middle and end.

An excellent example of that idea is Babylon 5. Worked great, although Straczynski had to switch networks to complete it.

But I think that TV producers are too lazy to plot out a 5 year series. Or is lazy the right word? At any rate, the long standing mode of open-ended series is what turned me off from TV....it got to the point that I could anticipate the endings of episodes.

I actually prefer DVD versions of the series because I can cheat, if an episode gets boring. Love that fast forward! On the other hand, I don't buy many TV series on DVD (Babylon 5, Firefly, a couple others).

I watched one episode of "Lost", and it left my jam hanging. Granted, I jumped into the middle of the second season, but even my disbeliever disconnect isn't that flexible. I can dig a Tropical Polar Bear (TPB) dragging a live person back to his lair for a follow up snack, even if the TPB did just kill another animal (who knows how cranky, or hungry, a genetically modified polar bear can get?).

But fighting off an aggressive TPB with a flame thrower improvised from a can of spray paint? Sorry, my disbeliever disconnect simply balked right there. I think it was the cumulative effect of other goofy points in the show that did that.

I agree. Even though I've never seen "Lost", I've gotten a bit fed up with the original CSI. It's become a glitzy commercial (for Cirque du Soleil, Townsend, etc.) with ridiculous plot lines (I knew it was in trouble when they did the stuffed-animal one. Puh-lease!)
That's why I miss imaginitive shows, like "Quantum Leap" and "Joan of Arcadia". It seems like the shows that are a little "different" are doomed.
That's why I've turned to alternative networks, like F/X, for shows like "The Shield". Chiklis is always dead-on, always fascinating, never stale. If Chiklis ever leaves, "The Shield" will be like "Law & Order" is now, without Jerry Orbach: a hollow shell of a show.

Sorry, "Lost" left my JAW hanging, not my jam. That would have been MOST inconvenient at the time.....

CSI.....argh! I watch that while on the road, just to see how inane the plot line gets. Makes me pine for the original "Lost In Space", as hacked up as it was. At least it was deliberately lame.

Jeff,
That's around the point where the show just got stupid. It was pretty decent to start with. The characters were well written and the drama wasn't forced or contrived. I can't imagine that it's a show you can really jump into in the middle and be all that absorbed.

I never really saw the beginning/middle/end thing as a result of laziness, but rather greed. Why stop production on a show that's making money when you can just indefinitely drive it into the ground until nobody can bear to watch anymore? Twin Peaks would have been a great show if it was one season long. But there's no way ABC will pull the plug on a show with high ratings. I doubt they'd even entertain the idea from the start if they thought they'd miss out on the extra dough.

Julie,
I've only seen a few episodes of "CSI" (isn't it like "Law and Order" now? Isn't there a "CSI" show for every city in America or something?), so I can't vouch for it, but from what I remember, it's still pretty much a cop show with self-contained episodes, right? With "Lost," they're just building on a serial idea that gets more and more absurd with every episode, until you've got characters being held captive in cages by a secret, reclusive commune of mysterious island dwellers that were there before the crash.

HUH?!?!?

//Why stop production on a show that's making money when you can just indefinitely drive it into the ground until nobody can bear to watch anymore? //

Yup. It is such a shame when that happens ... I hate having my interest peter away from a show that once was important to me. It's a bummer.

It is so cool when the powers that be know when to stop. I'm sure it's not easy to know when the moment is over, when you've passed the tipping point ... but those who are able to predict it, and who are able to bow out on the upswing, or right after it tips downward - are brilliant businesspeople, I think.

I can't imagine that it's a show you can really jump into in the middle and be all that absorbed.

Actually, I watched it with a friend, who took a few minutes to give me the outline. She's intelligent and observant (not to mention patient), with good taste in TV, and I grasped the basics quickly enough. And I'd heard good things about "Lost" from other people as well, so I was genuinely curious. But not absorbed, as you say.

Still, I'm sure that I had started at the beginning, like you, I would be crushingly disappointed in that episode, and with the series in general. The basic premise was cool, and the actors decent. I could see the potential draining away into the sand. A real pity.

And, yeah, greed is the better word. I suppose we need more genuine artists in the entertainment industry, not untalented dweebs posing as Something Special™.

The kind of show that's built on mounting suspense cannot go on indefinitely raising questions, creating mysteries and accumulating character coincidences without giving any answers that aren't downright preposterous.

That's the heart of it right there. I still like LOST, and I'll forgive any silly plot contrivance. The four-toed statue has me intrigued.

My problem is that they never solve anything. They just conveniently kill off a character or a plot line to introduce even more questions. I've decided to wait out the end of this season. If I haven't had some sense of fulfillment in some of the questions they've raised, I won't be back next year.

I tell you, Heroes has done much of what LOST did, but has actually given answers! along the way. Imagine that.

I don't think it's quite fair to say that producers aren't willing to plot out a five year series. They don't get that kind of commitment from the networks. I think the shows that do best are the ones that have mostly self-contained episodes (Scrubs, MASH, Mary Tyler Moore, Soap, etc...). If I'm going to get hooked on a series with a continuing story, it's going to be HBO.

Heroes looks interesting. One might also give Battlestar Galactica a try. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. In fact, Galactica is about the best thing going.

Emily,
CSI has some story arcs -- they're starting to have more -- but you're right. They tie most episodes up in a neat little package (and use about $500K worth of equipment per show), unlike real-life CSI work.
I liked "Joan of Arcadia" and "Quantum Leap" because they kept building on the original story, because in each episode, the characters learned more about themselves and about "God" (or whatever they conceived their 'controlling entity' to be).
Oh well. I guess that ship has sailed, eh?

I loved the first season of Galactica. I missed season two and haven't been able to get into it w/out seeing that season. I'll catch up eventually, I'm sure.

Cullen,
Yep. That goes back to the cheap thrill of having these people pass through each other's lives in their flashbacks. Eventually, the writers are going to have to either let this go, which would be totally annoying, or EXPLAIN IT. The longer they put it off and just keep piling on new questions, the more unlikely and stupid the explanation is going to be.

But even the plot twists are getting too much for me to handle. The end of season two literally left me PISSED OFF.

That goes back to the cheap thrill of having these people pass through each other's lives in their flashbacks.

What I want to know is how can this many people coincidentally pass through each other's lives without us having seen them with Kevin Bacon at least once?

Rob,
I wasn't really all that clear. It's not that producers and writers aren't willing...it's more that they're not ALLOWED. Networks don't give five year commitments because they don't know how audiences are going to respond. But if the writers of this show went to the network execs and said they didn't have it in them anymore and wanted to wrap things up, they'd be fired and new writers would be brought in. There's no way they'd stop production as long as the show is a cash cow. Which is why they wouldn't entertain the idea of a show with a beginning, middle and end. If it's making money, they'll squeeze the middle dry.

I don't mind the open ended series, for the most part, because they are much like life - no clear beginning or end to the stories. Granted, if your looking at something like Days of Our Lives that has been on air since before television, it can get to be a problem.

The key, I think, is to keep the story moving. And that is something that Lost has had some trouble with, because of 4.7 billion subplots, it seems like they aren't moving.

I could get behind a limited run show - actually liked a couple that had that basic feel on the now defunct WB - but it has to be done well, and there has to be a commitment from the network that they'll let it play out. There's nothing more annoying to me than getting invested in a good show only to have it cancelled halfway through the third season, leaving everything unresolved... pisses me the fuck off. On the other hand, when a show knows it's going off, the "final seasons" always get interesting because they try to tie up every loose end possible.

It's not the open ended series that bothers me so much as the open ended series that devolves into the shit that "Lost" has become. Honestly, when I think about it, my dislike of the show has less to do with the increasingly absurd scenarios than the character's human reactions to them that are just completely contrary to reality.

Soaps have just the opposite effect on me, KG. Having seen maybe two whole episodes of Y&R in the last 25 years or so and had it on as background noise (The wife has been addicted to it since childhood) while I do something (Anything) else, I'm unfortunately pretty sure I always know what's going on.

Nice post, Emily.

Had to laugh about the bit about "I can't keep my shit together enough to remember to tune in to a weekly program on a given night..." I have the same problem. I keep asking for TiVo at the holidays, but to this point, nobody's helped a brother out.

At this point in its run, I can take or leave Lost. But then, I've watched each of the last couple seaons on DVD almost exclusively, for the reason that my schedule and my shoddy memory work against watching teevee regularly. But if I were able to watch Lost on a week to week basis, it'd probably not be worth my time...I'd lose patience.

Having the schedule that I do has really made me appreciate a storyteller or group of storytellers who can make a series that can simultaneously tell a great story in a 30-minute or 60-minute window, and have that story alone, as a self-contained entity, bring you back, without resorting to the Saturday Serial cliffhanger of the week EVERY GODDAM Week. Like Lost.

Also, I'd have no tolerance for Lost, if I were just jumping in. And it's the same with most shows--just don't have the time to invest in backstory.

And I'd have the same respect for a creator who put out a 13-week or 24-week finite series, I think. Make a self-contained story. If it's quality, then bring that creator back to tell another, different story. If it's in them. That'd make the money, right?

Tommy,
Hahaha. You know, with my experience for the first two seasons of the show being on DVD, commercial free and at my own leisure, I didn't have the slightest patience watching it on regular TV for the first part of season 3. I hate waiting. I hate sitting through commercials. I think I only watched one of the episodes as it aired on the network and caught the rest on abc.com.

And I don't really mind the continuing cliffhangers, it's the way they've got this model of mounting suspense without ever letting a little air out of the bubble. When they finally do, it's just stupid. The characters do things that don't make any sense.

Another thing I cannot stand is the way the writers assume the audience is stupid. They say that this is all leading somewhere and they've planned it out. Fuck you. I know flying blind when I see it. I think David Fury even said something to that point. The show is just too friggin' sloppy to have been planned.

Amen, Emily.

I'd love tv novellas - I'd love to have some kind of well-written show that has a definite beginning and end. But it seems like the writers are so prone to milk anything that starts out good until it's such a dry husk of its original self that most of the people who watch it have totally forgotten that it was good in the beginning.

shark, meet jumper.

There was a list somewhere - maybe it was on the Jump the Shark site - of the lame contrivances that are used when a show seems to get stale.

Like the "very special" episode (where some "issue" like molestation or anorexia is dealt with on a normally lighthearted show)

or bringing in a new child actor who is usually anything BUT winsome and is alienating to the long-time fans.

or introuducing a new character for a season and then killing them off.

Why can't people accept that a lot of stories just have a natural end? Why keep playing things out until everyone is totally sick of them and the story no longer makes sense?

(That said? I never even watched Lost. It was on on a night when I was rarely home and so I figured there was no sense in getting hooked into it when I might regularly be unable to watch.

unfortunately my version of 'not having my shit together enough to watch regularly' is 'I have so many people who have claims on my evening time that I can't 'commit' to a show that has an ongoing narrative storyline')

Rob, that was my point about soaps... the women of my family watch Days and I can sit down and within 30 seconds know whats happening, usually making snarky comments about it along the way. They basically tell the same story over and over.

Emily, I think we more or less agree - it's about quality writing and advancing the story. Two things that are soarly lacking on Lost.

I have an idea for continuing arc shows. Come up with an arc that will be resolved in two seasons. Plan a new arc to begin in the event that you get a Season 3. Sometime in mid-third-season you'll find out if you get a Season 4; have contingency plans to stretch the second arc into that season. Plan a third arc during Season 4 in case there's a Season 5. Keep repeating the process.

Actually I can't see Lost done in less than three seasons. If I were doing Lost, I might make these changes to the first two seasons:

Season 1:
1. Hatch discovered earlier, is blown in late season.
2. Dual cliffhanger is now the kidnapping of Walt same as before, and exploration of the pit where Smog Monster tried to drag Locke.

Season 2:
1. Spans the events of actual Season 2 and the first six episodes of Season 3.
2. Early in episode the Losties gain many clues about Smog Monster.

Re: Lost, I don't see how you can call a show absurd if its premise is that bizarre, inexplicable things happen (and things like the polar bears are explained by the Dharma Project). My problem with Lost this season is that I'm really sick of seeing the Survivors as victims. I want to see a couple of the Others killed. I want to see the Survivors fight back, instead of let things happen to them.

And I disagree with the quoted author's point about the X-Files. The X-Files died because it was NOT an arc show; it only pretended to be an arc show. The antepenultimate season advertised itself as the season that would "answer all the questions" and "tie everything together," but it didn't -- and the reason it didn't is because the writers never had an arc. They had no idea what was going on. They flew by the seats of their pants every week.

Anyway, by far the best X-Files episodes were the ones that had nothing to do with UFOs or space aliens.

Agreed on X-Files; that's why most of the standout episodes were the stand-alones (I especially liked Peter Boyle's guest turn).

This isue is one of the main reasons why most of my TV watching became anime runs on Cartoon Network. It's somewhat hard to get past the giant robots, nymphatic heroines, and meaningful eye-quivering gasps; luckily, the first show I'd seen was remarkably devoid of such conventions. Even the goofier ones like "Big O" dealt with some serious philosphical issues; and they are nearly all designed to run 13 or 26 episodes and end. "Thanks for coming, and now for something with a completely different robot!"

In other words, at their heart these shows weren't afraid to make reasonable demands of the audience, and then get out in time. And for the most part, they stay out - the pressure on Sunrise to do another Cowboy Bebop run must be tremendous but so far, aside from a feature-length, they've stayed true.

RWP,
I already said I can write most of that stuff off. Did you actually read anything I wrote or just skimmed over the word "absurd" and jump into the comments? I'm not stupid. I am actually capable of computing the premise and storyline of a network television show. I know there's a "Dharma Project."

That apparently has a complete line of their own food and bottled beverages. That is STUPID and absurd. Why would they go through that much trouble?

It's not just the scenarios, but the human reaction. I understand parents can get desperate when their children have been taken from them, but I'd like to think they'd stop just short of shooting innocent people to death. As much as I was glad to see Ana Lucia bite the big one, Micheal's little killing spree was STUPID. And then to have Jack and Sayid go on their little suicidal death march after they KNOW something is up is STUPID. The fact that they did it after they had a friggin' BOAT at their disposal launches the scenario into the ultra-retarded. Tell Michael to stuff it and sail out bringing back the army of New Zealand to liberate the kid.

And if these "others" are so smart, why would they have Michael bring the fat guy as the one they sent back to the survivors with a message? In a situation where everyone pretty much understands and expects to be going into a battle situation, a person the size of Hurley is nothing less than a liability. That was STUPID.

The "others" are totally native, can trod through the jungle without leaving behind any sign and follow the survivors anywhere they go undetected, but they never once noticed that Desmond had a BOAT parked off the shore for three bloody years?

Why in the world would Henry Gale put himself at Jack's mercy anyway, especially without any kind of assurances? You'd think they'd have a gun on the guy at the least or some kind of leverage so he wouldn't pull exactly what he did. And why would he do that after Juliette, aka the most annoyingly condescending television character of all time, told him she wanted Henry dead anyway? Why would she care if Jack let the guy bleed to death?

And what's up with adding that Paolo and other chick to the show totally random-like? There are enough damn characters on the show already.

STUPID - Henry Gale is fatally ill with a spinal tumor, yet he waits for two months to snatch the spinal surgeon? He takes everyone else but him in the meantime? That doesn't make any sense.

I don't even know where to start on Kate's backstory, except to say that the island must truly have healing powers enough to cure her mental retardation. Let's see, first she takes out an insurance policy on a house and blows it up shortly after. Uh-huh. Nobody's going to ask any questions there. Then she gets her childhood sweetheart shot and has a "gee, how did loverboy end up taking six in the chest? All I did was plow through a police blockade with ten officers opening fire directly at my car" moment immediately after. Then she robs a bank to get a little plastic plane that used to belong to the guy out of a safety deposit box in a potentially suicidal/homicidale rampage. Sorry, even the softest of human hearts are not that sentimental. We find out later from the Marshall that she located it because he TOLD her that he was putting it a bank in New Mexico. And she went anyway, like the guy's not watching the place. Uh-huh. Then, after all of that, being on the run from the law wanted in connection with numerous cross-country crimes, she MARRIES A COP? WTF?!?!? That is stupid. Nobody is that friggin' dumb. It's sloppy, cheap writing.

And what's up with every friggin' person on that island being a murderer anyway? Apparently Oceanic Airlines has some policy that refuses passengers whose life stories can't serve as the inspiration for bad daytime television from flying. With the exception of Rose and Bernard, practically nobody else on that plane wasn't a criminal of some kind. What are the odds?

The romance between Shannon and Sayid - which was, by the way, conceived of on the suggestion from the actor Naveen Andrews that it would "shock middle America." Screw that turdball. Middle America can handle inter-racial couples just fine, thankyouverymuch. It would be one thing if it were just the two of them getting on with the nookie, but it was played out like they were in this great love affair. Right. The intense Iraqi soldier on the way to find the love of his life before the crash is going to just blow that off and fall deeply in love with the airhead bimbo that is so bithcy and selfish that it's obvious from the very first show that she was only written in to be killed off without upsetting the audience too much? The whole thing felt contrived and ABSURD.

It's not the bizarre, inexplicable things that happen. It's the way the humans deal with them that gets me.

I could go on and on (and I already have), but I'll end this here and say that there's plenty more that's pretty much covered by this guy.

Sayid has bad taste in women. Shannon was a plastic Barbie doll.

Sun tops the babe-o-meter. And she's emotionally strong. And smart. AND WILLING TO SHOOT THE BAD GUYS WITHOUT MERCY.

The show does have a lot of fun and intriguing characters. That makes the contrived plot devices bearable.

For grins, here's my Gilligan's Island theory of Lost characters:

Gilligan - Charlie
Skipper - Locke, Jack
Mr. Howell - Hurley (rich, built golf course on the island like Mr. H.), Sawyer (avarice), Boone (entrepreneur)
Mrs. Howell - ?
Professor - Sayid (Jack's too hotheaded to be the Prof)
Ginger - Shannon (good looking and useless)
Mary Ann - Sun

Wrong-Way Feldman - Rousseau
Duke Williams, the surfer - Desmond
Dr. Boris Balinkoff - Ben "Henry Gale" Linus
Igor - Danny Pickett (the guy who beats up Sawyer)
Norbert Wiley, the kidnapper - Tom ("Mr. Friendly")
Japanese Sailor, another "Other" to be named later
Jonathan Kincaid, big game hunter - the smoke monster
The radio announcer - Dr. Marvin Candle

"Sun tops the babe-o-meter. And she's emotionally strong. And smart. AND WILLING TO SHOOT THE BAD GUYS WITHOUT MERCY."

Yes, and why haven't we seen them this season? As for the "new characters," I suspect that they're red shirted ensigns to be. Course, we won't find out until February.

Actually, I read somewhere that Rodrigo Santoro ("Paolo") has been signed on for at least three years, so he's not going anywhere.

Part of the reason why I don't like the direction of this season as well is because of the way the cast has been split up. We hardly get to see any of the characters anymore.