I just finished watching Lost. I didn’t watch it in the previous decade, because everyone told me the ending was super bad. Now that I’ve finished it, I don’t get it. What was so bad about it?
As I recall, the main point of contention was that this was one of the first big “there’s a big mystery and the whole series is one big story to unravel it and we totally have it all planned out, honest” series. And then it turned out that no, they didn’t totally have it planned out, and they were just making crap up as they went and most of the profound “clues” people were trying to cobble together were basically meaningless.
Maybe the show runners managed to cobble something together out of them that was satisfying regardless, but still, it felt like quite the betrayal. History repeated itself with Battlestar Galactica, where the show kept insisting “they have a plan!” When no, they really did not.
This is all true but I think it was still a good show especially compared to what else was on non-cable TV at the time. There wasn’t any show that actually prompted conversation about it in my family the way Lost did. That they built its appeal on reckless overprinting of plot threads they could never satisfyingly resolve was a dirty trick, but everyone fell for it, so to me they still get credit.
One big issue, is even if they have a “plan” it goes out the window if the show is too successful(or unsuccessful). A 5 season arc now needs to last 6 or 7…
I know Buffy for example had been planned for 8-9 seasons. And then producers were like nope the 7th is it. So they had to try and wrap everything up in one season.
Twice, technically. Once when it was canceled with season 5, then again with 7.
