‘Lost’ found the path to an equation that changed the future of TV

“Lost” cracked the code to making TV richer and more ambitious.

ABC was struggling to find hits in 2004 when the network introduced two of them: “Desperate Housewives,” a new take on a primetime soap opera; and “Lost,” a sci-fi-tinged mystery that fast became a fan sensation, from its cryptic numbers to what really happened to that crashed plane and its passengers. Of the two, though, it was “Lost” that fundamentally changed television and the relationship between the creative talent behind TV shows and the networks that carried them – fueling what might be called the novelization of television – not in the way the series began, but rather how it ended in 2010. The roots of that actually began several years earlier, when the show’s executive producers, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, recognized that the twisty, mysterious series’ ratings were beginning to suffer because of the open-ended nature of viewers’ commitment. When would we get some answers, fans wanted to know. At their urging, in what Variety called a “paradigm-shifting play,” ABC allowed them to announce an official end date for the series, ordering 48 episodes over three seasons to complete the story. The announcement served notice that the series was indeed building toward something, that a payoff awaited those who were sinking all this time – and graduate-school-level thought and analysis – in the show, and what it all meant. Until then, the prevailing wisdom in television was, in essence, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Series ran until the audience stopped watching them, not when the creators said, as if they were novelists who had reached the conclusion of the story.