Only 15 Stinkers

I’m waiting for the second last episode of Lost to air and just read a great interview with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse in the NY Times - The Men Who Made ABC’s ‘Lost’ Last. I love that Lindelof is so candid about some of the weaker episodes:

So the mistakes had to happen, but we actually like talking about the worst episodes of the show because at the end of the day we made 121 hours or something like that of “Lost,” and I would say that probably only like 15 of them were subpar/stinkers. That’s not bad. If you’re going to have 15 stinkers, that means that 15 of them are actually going to be awesome. You cannot have awesome episodes without stinkers.

I was surprised to find out that the writers spend 85% on the characters and only 15% of the time on the show mythology. The strong characters and storytelling have led to the show’s success but I have to disagree with Cuse when he says:

I think that a lot of people care much more about what’s going to happen to Kate. Is she going to end up with Jack, is she going to end up with Sawyer?

I don’t care who Kate ends up with. I want answers about the mythology of the show. Explain the light in the cave, the time travel, the smoke monster, the whispers, the zombies…

Posted in Television at 8:19 PM