This jives with my theory of what makes bad TV: bad writing. It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again.
Oddly, Battlestar Galactica has provided a pleasant rewatch every year or two for me for the past decade. It has good writing within each episode, and even though it doesn't hold up in the final season, the writing is overall satisfying enough that I don't avoid it entirely.
I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1. I'm sure the writers would have built satisfyingly on the world established in season 1 instead of jumping off the rails and expanding into unnecessary niches of convoluted storytelling.
Lost was one of a breed of "mystery pilots," where high-concept pilots imply deep and complicated backstories to explain that concept, by filling themselves with surreal non-sequiturs. If the pilots get picked up, the writers have to come up with a story to connect the nonsense. In the worst case, which I believe is the case with Lost, the people who wrote the pilot have actually moved on to the next project once it gets picked up, and a completely different set of people have to interpolate some kind of sense out of the pilot to continue the series.
The continuing story of Lost (and similar series) was a desperate improvisation being written by hired guns of whom there's no reason to think that they would have any more affection for the show than a random person off the street.
I avoid anything by Abrams or Lindelof at this point because they are emblematic of this writing formula. You can see it in Lindelof's The Leftovers, Abrams' Star Wars, and of course LOST. It's also present in any pilot they help create, for example Once Upon A Time.
I agree with your deconstruction: these shows are optimized for selling an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show. The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made.
I'm very excited by writers like Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese who are able to write interwoven plots comparable to LOST, but with cohesive endings. Check out Dark for an example.
I really don't think that's a fair take on The Leftovers. It was adapted from a novel, which season 1 follows the plot of pretty closely and completely. The remaining two seasons are entirely new plot but iirc the author was involved.
The novel doesn't resolve the core mystery. I won't spoil whether the show does, but it's kind of beside the point anyway. One of the core themes is how people grapple with sudden loss, something beyond their control, something unknowable. In any case the show resolves itself with a satisfying amount of closure in three seasons. Much fewer open threads and plot holes than LOST. The unresolved aspects of The Leftovers are genuinely thought-provoking and deep.
I wholly agree with Wikipedia's summary: "The first season received mostly positive reviews. However, the second and third seasons were highly acclaimed, with many critics referring to The Leftovers as one of the greatest television series of all time, with particular praise for its writing, directing, acting (particularly Theroux’s and Coon's) and thematic depth."
You say "The finale comes only when there's no more money to be made" ... that doesn't jive with a final season having a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and 98% on Metacritic!
The Leftovers is indeed aware of the show formula I'm critiquing, it's even in the theme song: "guess I'll just, let the mystery be." This is Lindelof indoctrinating the viewer to accept his style of writing, which doesn't burden plots with conclusions. He's still frustrated we asked 'why' of the LOST plot, to which there was no good answer. The Leftovers similarly offers no good answer to 'why'. Making that the point doesn't stop me from asking.
If the show was doing well HBO would have signed a fourth season and they'd have left enough room in the third for yet more surreal diversions headed nowhere. Online review aggregators are meaningless.
You asserted the show had "an engaging pilot episode with only a back of the napkin roadmap for the rest of the show", which clearly isn't possibly the case for a show whose entire first season was adapted from a novel.
The third season was written as a final season. Regardless of whether the mystery is resolved, the show's plot and character arcs firmly concludes in the finale. Professional tv critics nearly universally view it as one of the best seasons of any television show ever made.
Yes, there are unanswered questions. This is obviously intentional (although the theme song you reference was only used in season 2 and the finale in season 3). Similarly in real life you'll never find out which religion, if any, is correct. Or why the pandemic happened. You can still ask, and writers can still explore these topics, even though no one ever knows.
If you didn't like the show, or ambiguous art/media in general, that's fine, it's not for everyone. That doesn't mean it's all part of the same capitalist formula to produce bad art.
As an interesting counter-point, consider Twin Peaks, a show where the network demanded that the creators promptly resolve the core mystery at the end of the first season -- much to the show's detriment.
This is not how Lost was developed. The original idea was from an ABC exec, they hired a writer that failed. They hired another two who came with the general plot, the theme and a plan for five seasons of the series. This was their show, not some randos.
> It's exactly why I've never revisited Lost, even though I loved the first few seasons. The suspense and mystery never paid off, and it was too important a piece of the entire show to bother trying again.
I'm not gonna claim it was good or anything, but Lost was more than just the show - and a lot of the payoff for the island's mysteries came from the ARG The Lost Experience - https://lostpedia.fandom.com/wiki/The_Lost_Experience
> The narrative for the The Lost Experience was designed to be a parallel story line not part of the TV show. Considering the deep mythology to LOST, the Experience acted as a way to cover some background that could not be feasibly addressed in such depth on the main show. In particular, TLE developed the backstory to the DHARMA Initiative and its parent company, the Hanso Foundation. It also established some clues about the Island and the true meaning of the numbers.
Some people still think Lost was good after around the first 3 seasons. Like you, I gave up after that because it was pretty clear that the show would be nothing but red herrings and new distractions.
When my parents tuned in to watch the final episode, I predicted that the ending would be bullshit and not resolve anything. That's exactly what happened. Yet so many people who watched the show all the way through are in denial to this day.
> I could probably write something really mean about Westworld here but I'll just instead say that it's really, really, really sad that they canceled it after season 1.
Funny, because by the end of Westworld season 1 my first thought was that it was just going to be like Lost. The "maze" gave me "hatch" vibes, and I noped out permanently.
Don't look back - you made the right call. I enjoyed Westworld S1, and just finished S4. So full of self-important idiocy. Every line half-whispered as though it's the ultimate drama, but not a single character anyone might care about or identify with.
One of their problems was dragging various actors/characters through season after season - I got absolutely sick of every single one of them. I don't know how they managed their lines with a straight face.
Another was setting everyone up for this ongoing global-stakes quest. Andor just showed that you can make an exceptional story out of small slices of a bigger setting. It often feels to me that when a show/movie sees its character attain super powers, they struggle with storytelling afterwards, being forced to invent higher and higher stakes. Marvel movies (outside of something like Logan), The Matrix (IMO), etc.
Westworld had so much potential and in the end it just all became basically magic pulled out of thin air. Even going to the real world I thought was awesome - it just got TOO out there
Was it best just wrapped up as a nice, concise package? As an example, Ex Machina was great, but I don't need to see Ex Machina II: The Adventures of Ava.
Or if there's value in Westworld (the other themeparks, James Delos storyline, etc), tell a fresh story in that world. Dragging out Maeve and her daughter was tiresome.
It ended up with zero tension, despite all the grand standing. I just didn't care who was about to fight who and even less who might win. The ideas were convoluted and pointless. S2-3 had some decent ideas/plans mixed in. S4 had almost nothing I think would be worth keeping.
Interesting. I liked the original run of the Lost. I've liked it even more when I rewatched it a few times. For me the characters were the most important part of the show, and writers did a great job developing them. I also see a common thread about "good first seasons", but theses seasons were more about ever growing mysteries. Second half of the run gave us great episodes like The Constant, LaFleur, or Ab Aeterno. Me caring for the characters is what made them great.
And writing is what makes me care about these characters. The mysteries were fun and most of them resolved by the end of the show, but for me it is a lesser part of the show.
Not really. BSG quickly established that there's only a few different models, and who most of them were, but many copies of each. There were certainly a few 'surprise, that person's a Cylon!' moments throughout the show, but I think they were all quite well done. (Though to be fair, for at least two of the cylon characters, you could immediately tell they were a cylon because it was a famous actor playing them.)
If anything, I think in the earlier seasons BSG went for more of the 'cylon, human, who cares, they're all screwed up' feel.
I suspect the common theme here for what makes good television is the creative staff in general and the writing in particular.