With the debut of the new fall shows, it's time for the annual proclamation of certain shows as "the next LOST". Last year it was FlashForward (a bad show that I enjoyed); this year it seems to be The Event (which, from what I saw of the pilot, is just a flat-out bad show).
The notion of "the next LOST' is familiar to sports fans; players are often anointed as the "next Willie Mays" or the "next Michael Jordan". The easiest way to illustrate the folly of this rhetoric is to ask "Who was the first Michael Jordan?" (or "Who was Michael Jordan before Michael Jordan?"). Almost always, the answer to this question is that there was none. True greatness is unique.
That doesn't mean that there were no players of equal value to Willie Mays before he arrived; certainly Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth (and arguably others) were equally valuable players. It doesn't mean that there were no players of equal value after Mays--certainly Barry Bonds has a great case to having been a better player than Mays. However, the key point is that Cobb and Ruth and Bonds weren't really like Willie Mays, except in the degree of their greatness. They all had unique styles, different strengths and weaknesses and personalities.
So there may have been other shows that came along before LOST that you consider equally good, and there may be shows that come after. But there will never be another LOST. Any show that is truly close enough to LOST to be considered the next LOST will not be a great show, because it will be easily recognizable as a ripoff.
Now, there certainly is something to be said for taking the lessons of what made LOST great and applying them to a new show in a unique or creative manner. The shows that have aspired to be the next LOST have not done that at all; they have instead attempted to copy as many LOST characteristics as possible with absolutely no shame.
Consider The Event. I did not watch much of the pilot; for goodness sake, there was a baseball game on. But what little I did see was packed with ripoffs of LOST:
* a tropical Island
* a cliff on the coast of the tropical Island ("Dave", "The Substitute", "The End")
* a plane crash or a potential plane crash
* what sounded and looked like electromagnetic humming
At the end, some creepy woman told the President "They saved us." When he asked who, I fully expected her to say "The Others".
It was said so often (especially in defending "The End") to be considered cliche, but LOST really was a show about characters first. The characters were at the center in Season One, and they were established as the mythology was being rolled out. In fact, it probably wasn't until around the terrific trio of episodes 1x9-1x11 that the true scope of LOST's intricate mythology was even hinted at. Prior to that, there was certainly intrigue (why no one had come to rescue them, the Monster, Adam and Eve), but the mythology explosion had not yet begun. One could even argue that the true blossoming of LOST's mythology didn't come until the first orientation film was screened in 2x3.
FlashForward and The Event have made the mistake of defining their mythology clearly in terms of a single moment. The plane crash which starts our LOST viewing experience is only the latest in a long line of similar events. The plane crash brings our characters into the world of the Island, but the other shows define their weirdness in terms of the initial event, and so there's no time to define characters before diving head first into mythology.
The LOST equivalent would be if the fundamental mystery of the show was not "What is the Island, and what does it want with these people?" but rather "Why did the plane crash?". If the focus of the show was why the plane crashed, then immediately upon arriving on the Island, the Lostaways would have had to begin investigating that. Instead, they simply tried to survive, and gradually became aware that they were on a very special place and caught in some extraordinary circumstances. In The Event or FlashForward, that realization is immediate.
The mythology of LOST certainly made the show for me. The characters were good, and ultimately made the journey worthwhile, but the mythology made it a must-watch every week. If you knew it was going to be an episode featuring a character you really couldn't stand (Charlie would be the best example for me), you still had to watch. It could be an episode in which Charlie has bizarre dreams; or it could be an episode in which Charlie shoots an Other, or in which Charlie swims down to a previously unseen DHARMA station.
The closest thing to LOST on TV today, as far as I'm concerned, is AMC's "Rubicon". Rubicon is nothing like LOST in so many ways, but it has compelling characters and an interesting serial story. It's not good enough to be worthy of the "next LOST" tag, but if a show ever comes along that is, it will look a lot more like "Rubicon" than like "The Event".
