Lost, The Leftovers, and the Problem of Over-Reading Television, pt 1: The Beautiful Failure

In some degree, Damon Lindelof kinda has it coming with The Leftovers. If you don’t recall, Lindelof was one of the minds behind Lost, which appears to be, despite its status as a failure, the most influential TV show of the last many years. In fact, it seems likely that it was Lindelof’s interests that chiefly drove the show’s interests — JJ Abrams directed the pilot and then noped out, the way he would do later with one of Lost’s progeny, Fringe; the other executive producer was Carlton Cuse, a more experienced TV producer whose previous (and subsequent) work lacks the tinge of mad genius that made Lost what it was. When it was announced that Lindelof was teaming up with Tom Perotta (author of Election and Little Children, among other pop-literary bestsellers) to turn Perotta’ s rapture riff, The Leftovers, into a TV show, I was both excited and skeptical. I hadn’t read The Leftovers — still haven’t — but I’d enjoyed some of Perotta’s other books, which tend to be satirical tales about class in white suburbia. They’re a little old-fashioned, but they don’t apologize for that fact. And Lindelof — well. I had loved Lost, and I had hated Lost, as one can only hate something one actually loves at bottom.

The results have been interesting, if not exactly great all the time. The show has been polarizing; it’s been criticized for being boring, or depressing, or overly focused on upper-middle-class white people, all of which were to some extent true of its first season — but if one assumes good faith and supposes that it’s depressing because it’s about depression, it takes on that tinge of genius that Lost also had, at least sort of. Another criticism of the show that I’ve seen more than once is that it’s too much like Lost, in that there are too many mysteries, and they’ll never get solved in the 30-40 hours of storytelling time the show has. And I think that’s off base — but I also think it’s kinda Lindelof’s fault that he’s receiving this criticsm. Because Lost taught us to watch TV like this. Lost was liberally sprinkled with mystery, and a lot of its MO seemed to be to keep us guessing about what the answers to those mysteries would be. That was its major mistake, if you ask me. It used the mysteries too often as the engines of narrative, leading us to expect answers to questions that were fundamentally unanswerable. While The Leftrovers has done a lot of work to avoid this pitfall, people who followed Lindelof over from Lost are primed to read it the way they read Lost. And that’s fundamentally the wrong way to watch the show. The mysteries here are set-dressing, metaphors — what fantasy enthusiasts call world-building. Leaving aside what Lindelof and Perotta have said publicly about the show, I think the evidence is there in what’s onscreen.

The Beautiful Failure

Here’s the thing about Lost: not only is it basically a failure, it was also a great TV show. It is, in fact, the only show I can think of wherein this was possible, at least up until the point at which it was released. How can a TV show fail and still be great?

I can tell you how it failed. After six seasons, Lost fundamentally failed to deliver on a lot of its promises. Not refused, but failed. The fundamental premise of the show is a question: what is this island, and why did these people come to be on it? Waves of portent crashed across the characters, as they are told over and over again things such as “the island wants you to come back”. There’s a foreshortening of free will on the island. Magical things happen there — people go mad, pregnancies end disastrously (except when they don’t!), the dead appear to the living in spectral form, polar bears wander the tropics, people travel through time — the island travels through time! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING CHARLOTTE! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING US ALL!!!! The show heavily implies that it’s going to tell us how and / or why this state of affairs came to be, not least by occasionally answering a question about such matters. It told us who the mysterious Others, who haunted the first season, were, even if it did ask several questions in answering one. It solved the riddles in the backstories of secretive characters, like the con-man Sawyer, or the fugitive Kate. And so it was natural, I think, for the viewer to expect answers. And the show just ran out of time to give them. I think on some level it never had answers for some of the questions.

I think the most emblematic of its failures is the character of Walt. In the first season, Walt is a 10-year-old boy who has the misfortune of being stranded on the island in the care of his estranged father. Like every character, his backstory is rife with complexity and secrecy, mostly centered around the custody battle his mother and father waged over him. But throughout, it’s heavily implied that there is some extremely bad mojo swirling around poor Walt. It appears that animals have a tendency to commit suicide around him. His stepfather gladly releases custody when his mother dies, and it seems that he’s as much spooked by the kid as he is unwilling to take on the burden of single fatherhood. The bad mojo around Walt would appear to be plugged into the bat mojo that is sort of ambient around the island. Walt is, the first couple of seasons heavily imply, Important. He might be The Key to Everything.

But the show had a problem: the kid who was playing Walt was aging way faster than the character was. One of Lost’s many innovations was its telescoped timeline: over the course of its first three seasons or so, only a few months pass, as the Lostaways (as we used to call them in the chatty rooms) grapple with the many challenges of being not only marooned, but marooned on an island that may or may not be evil and is certainly populated by malevlolent forces.* That was all fine as long as your actors were adults — a little bit of makeup, a certain suspension of disbelief, and it was always possible to buy the idea that Kate was 25, Hurley was 30, Jack was 40, and Locke was 50, no matter how much real-world time had passed. But Malcolm David Kelley, who played Walt, hit puberty hard, and had visibly grown several inches and become much less cute by the the end of the second season. The idea that he was 10 years old was preposterous on its face. And the show had no answer for this dilemma, really. The only real solution was to write him off, and then pretend that pretty much none of his storyline had ever happened. What do you mean, there was a kid who was supposed to be at the center of this whole narrative? His father remained an intermittent player (until being spectacularly greased), but Walt was shipped off to the mainland to live a fairly normal, bird-suicide-free life.

* This was one of the ways in which the show taught us to watch television. I remember when I was watching early seasons being baffled by the glacial pace at which time seemed to be moving in the narrative. In some measure this was thematic — Lost was always about time and its vicissitudes — but in another it was simply a compression tactic, meant to create claustrophobia. Many shows, notably Breaking Bad, would employ this tactic in ensuing years. Other than stunt productions like 24, TV to that point had usually either existed in a suspended land of no-time (eg any sitcom you ever watched) or generally tracked with real-world time, meaning that there would be an Xmas episode around Xmas, and Buffy’s birthday is in the dead of winter, etc.

Malcolm David Kelley as Taller Ghost Walt, not that long later.

But still, the show was addictive, compelling watching, in part because it was doing stuff that no TV show had really dared to do before. I still remember when I was watching the first season — which I did on DVD, back when that was how people binge-watched stuff — and I realized, Hey, this is kind of a sci-fi show. Of course that seems absurd now, as the show really leaned into its sci-fi trappings as it went along, but it was actually possible to miss that for its first several episodes, as it mostly seemed to be a sort of high-class soap opera with arty film-school trappings and a shipwreck narrative. Its genre bending can seem a little bloated in retrospect, that that was part of what was so cool about the show when it started back. Its unusual structure (now so common as to be almost conventional), with present action stitched through with flashback, allowed it to be a slightly different show every week, if it wanted. When Hurley was the focus, it was a delirious dramedy about a man on the edge of sanity. With Sawyer it was often a funny crime story with a certain Butch-and-Sundance flair (with the gifted Josh Holloway playing both Butch and Sundance). Kate’s stories were cat-and-mouse fugitive stuff. Charlie’s were rock-n-roll redemption. Sun and Jin were a mob drama. Claire and Jack — perhaps fittingly, given that they turned out to be siblings — were basically soap opera. In fact, all of them were soap opera, really, but they had spooky, thrilling trappings.

And the show boasted whole, huge characters — an overabundance of them, really, such that one of its main sins was to rob its viewer of time with one character by spending too much time with another. It knew these characters well enough that hilarity could be milked by pairing opposites, as win Korean mobster Jin and Mexican-American lottery winner Hurley end up in a sort of Marx brothers routine after Hurley steps on a sea anenome. It dropped these characters into roles where they would be expected to act strangely, just to see what they would do. Unlike a lot of sci-fi shows, which often feel like they’re struggling to stuff actors into scenarios without coming up with characters first, Lost teemed with compelling stories about interesting people.

But its failures seemed to be part-and-parcel with its strengths. You couldn’t just divorce the drama from the trappings; part of the show’s genius was the way it used a sort of waxing sense of threat from the past as a way of creating its atmosphere. On some fundamental level, Lost plugged into a force that you would call nostalgic if it weren’t, you know, destructive: existential nuclear angst. Much of the show’s drama takes place in concrete bunkers, buildings that recall 60s suburbs, and quasi-military testing facilities. Once it really engages in its core mythology, there’s always the possibility that some ill-understood force will be unleashed and kill everybody. There is, in fact, a nuclear bomb, which plays a critical role in the show’s best season, its fourth.* The lapse in time between the construction of these structures and the show’s current timeline, which took place mostly in 2004, was also the source of a lot of the mystery. That 20-year lacuna between the show’s Cold War past and its Millenial present is both its most potent weapon, atmospherically speaking, and one of those many mysteries that never quite got solved.

* Not coincidentally, I think, this was also its shortest season, interrupted as it was by the writers’ strike.

And so Lost was a beautiful failure. But it it also asked us to watch TV in a certain way, a way that was also highly symbiotic with the internet age, when people had a space to come together and obsess over its minutiae.

See this space tomorrow for pt 2, about LIndelof's new show, The Leftovers