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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Bryan Burk [co-producer, Alias; ecutive producer, Lost/Fringe/Star Trek]: The challenge Damon and Carlton have\u2014although they've known about this and they've been talking about it for a while\u2014is bringing this to an end. There's a lot on their shoulders.\n\n Alex Kurtzman [writer/ecutive producer, Alias; co-creator and ecutive producer, Fringe; co-writer/ecutive producer, Star Trek]: Oh, my God. An end to a show that's going to be talked about in 50 years, that will be remembered not only for how it started, but how it ended?\n\n Carlton Cuse [ecutive producer, Lost]: The real challenge is where we hide, when it's over.\n\n Damon Lindelof [co-creator/ecutive producer, Lost]: It's just\u2014will it be a cautionary tale, or will it be, \"This is how to do it right\"? When Lost was coming together, all the way through the audit process, focus-grouping, the show that was always referenced was Twin Peaks.\n\n Kurtzman: That's so funny\u2014same with Fringe.\n\n Lindelof: But never as a good thing! It was always a cautionary tale, and what I always wanted to say was, \"Twin Peaks had 32 episodes. It's been off the air for seventeen years. And you are so terrified by it that you keep bringing it up!\" Twin Peaks' legacy, although they didn't end it well\u2014 at the very least, it's a cultural landmark. How many shows get to say that?\n\n Kurtzman: Is that your memory of it, that it ended badly?\n\n Lindelof: That's the way it was referenced, to us.\n\n JJ Abrams  Lindelof and Cuse] The boldest thing you did was that you forced the hand of the network, to get them to end the show in six years. The fact that you're ending this show on its terms, and not two years after it should have ended\u2014to me, that's the legacy of the show, that's why it will last.\n\n Cuse: I think that's really the lesson of The X-Files and Twin Peaks\u2014but mainly the X-Files. If X-Files had ended after the fifth year, it would have a very different legacy. It was really tainted by those last few years. It's unfortunate, because I think Chris Carter wanted it to go five years, and they were like, \"That's fine. You're welcome to leave, but we're going to continue doing the show.\" And I certainly understand why he would not want to abandon his creation, but, y'know, the show just went on too long. And Lost is also a story. If you're doing Grey's Anatomy, you can do 14 years of it and it doesn't matter\u2014you can always have new characters cycle in and out of the hospital. But Lost is a story, about these people who crash on an island. It has a beginning and it sort of demands an ending. And we were making episodes in the third season of the show, not knowing whether we had to make it last two years or nine years, so we started doing episodes about, like, \"How did Jack get his tattoos?\" Well, he was flying a kite on a beach in Thailand. We became painfully aware of the limitations of this particular type of show\u2014it needed to end. So that became a critical mission for us. We were incredibly relieved that we were able to work it out with the network. And then the show, we felt, really kicked into another gear\u2014because at that point, we could really map out the mythology with the remaining time we had for telling our story, and it just made all the difference.\n\n Lindelof: We were painfully aware from the word \"Go\" because, y'know, we'd written this pilot\u2014which, by the way, we didn't sell them, they said \"Plane crash on an island, make it work.\" We wrote it on the fly, and then they said, essentially, \"How's the show going to sustain itself? How's it going to continue?\" And we were like, \"It's not\u2014not forever. You're absolutely right.\" Eventually, Gilligan and the Professor and those guys\u2014even they got off the island. With the help of the Harlem Globetrotters.\n\n Burk: Did they get off the island? Or did the show just end?\n\n Lindelof: Well, the series was cancelled. Then they did a TV movie in which they get off the island. And then they come back to the island and they build a resort.\n\n GQ: How hard was it to convince the network to let you end it?\n\n Cuse: I think they recognized at a certain point\u2014well, I think it was kind of twofold. We made the argument that the flashbacks were becoming really limiting, and we started making episodes where, y'know, it was apparent from watching the episodes that the flashbacks were really limiting. In the third season, we made what we felt were some subpar episodes, based on the fact that we were just stalling. We had the characters locked in these cages, and I think afterwards, Damon realized that was because we felt locked in cages. And I think at that point, everyone sort of came around and realized, 'Okay, it's better for the show to announce an end date.' It's sort of like JK Rowling saying there were gonna be seven Harry Potter books\u2014by announcing an end date, people understood exactly what their investment was. We're grateful that Steve McPherson and Mark Petowitz [at ABC] were willing to have that conversation, but it was a year-long\u2014well, it was a multi-year conversation, but then the actual negotiation took the better part of the whole third season.\n\n Lindelof: The conversation, for me, personally, started right after the pilot was shot. There would be days when I went to JJ and Bryan\u2014usually in tears, and I'm not saying that to be histrionic\u2014and saying, \"Look, there are only so many ideas you can do on the island. There's only so many boar hunts, there's only so many flashbacks that we can do.\" The idea of needing to generate a narrative every week from this premise was so limiting that it made sense to everybody as a thirteen-episode-and-out miniseries, but doing 24 or 25 a year?\n\n We had, basically, an entire season of them trying to get in the hatch. And then, on season 2, once they get in\u2014 every single script we wrote, Carlton and I would sit in the writers' room looking at a blank white storyboard and go, \"Now what?\" Until we knew that the show would end, you can't really work towards anything. We knew that the story was very simple. The beginning was, \"These people come to an island and they don't know why.\" The second act is, \"Some of them escape.\" And then at the end of the second act, those people are drawn back to the island, and the third act is this sort of d\u00E9nouement. And it's like, we couldn't advance to the end of the second act, when some people got off the island, until we had an end date.\n\n I was talking to anyone who would listen about how we needed to end the show. But what they would say to us is, \"You guys just won the Emmy. The scripts are good. You're getting ratings. What are you guys talking about? There's nothing wrong.\" I think we were looking downstream, and saying, \"In order to save the show, you need to announce an end date now, while the show's still healthy, because if you wait to do it until the show gets sick, it looks like you're playing defense as opposed to offense.\" So we timed it, I think, exactly right. Because if we hadn't been writing those episodes, the network wouldn't have seen what we were talking about. But we didn't write those episodes as proof. The fact that we made it through two years\u2014that we made forty-eight hours of Lost with nobody getting off that damn island\u2014is a miracle. I don't know how it happened.\n\n Roberto Orci [writer/ecutive producer, Alias; co-creator/ecutive producer, Fringe; ecutive producer/co-writer, Star Trek]: How long did Gilligan go?\n\n Lindelof: They went four years\u2014but they were half-hour episodes.\n\n Burk: It's like they're authors who're writing a great book that's never allowed to end.\n\n Orci: What we're trying to say is, We have it very hard.\n\n Lindelof: I think the end date soothed people's anxieties about whether or not we were pulling the show out of our ass. Which we had to do, at a certain point. It was like, \"All right\u2014let's put them in cages! Let's introduce some new characters on the beach!\" Let's do this, let's do that. We had to do anything that we could just to generate story, things that weren't in our original plan, because we were in a stalled modality. We'd done every piece of storytelling we could without letting people off the island, and once you start that, you're moving toward an inevitable conclusion.\n\n Orci: Maybe Fringe needs an end date. Of course, with our ratings, if we ask for one\u2026\n\n Abrams: It might be today!\n\n Orci: \"Sure\u2014is next week okay with you?\"\n\n Burk: \"Can you pack your shit right now?\"\n\n Abrams: \"Listen, we demand an end date!\" \"Tomorrow! Done!\"\n\n Lindelof: I wonder if you could sell a show to a network and basically say, \"This show will only last for three years,\" without seeming like a complete dick. Because you're inferring that it will last three years. A show only exists by the grace of the audience.\n\n Abrams: Yes, but every show begins with that leap of faith, that it's going to last.\n\n Lindelof: Right\u2026\n\n Abrams: You never go into it thinking it's going to fail. But the genius of what you guys did\u2014you paint the perfect picture, too. After winning the Emmy, after getting these ratings, being in this position that most showrunners and producers dream of being in, to literally discuss the idea of self-termination\u2014it just doesn't happen. The crazy thing was that you guys, using all the leverage you could possibly muster, convinced the network to do the unthinkable.\n\n GQ: You're working on the last season\u2014 how close is the ending you're working toward to what you'd originally conceived as the ending of the show?\n\n Cuse: The mythology was sort of an evolving conversation that started when these guys wrote the pilot, and continued through the first season of the show. And obviously it was only once the ratings for the pilot came in, and for subsequent episodes, that it became apparent that the show was going to go for a while, and we started cooking mythology to last for the long term. You know\u2014we kind of view it like there's these milestones we're going to get to. You're trying to get to New York, but you know you're going to stop at the Rock Roll Hall of Fame Museum in Cleveland, and you're going to go to Lake Michigan, and you're going to go to Wall Drug in South Dakota. The process of getting there is one of discovery. We don't know how many episodes it's going to take to get to Wall Drug, or whether we're going to take the Interstate through Chicago or the rural back roads through Michigan on our way there\u2014and that's the funniest part of television. The show sort of dictates the pace and the direction of the story, but we know we're going to get to that milestone. We're going to end the show exactly where we thought we would. Certain character things will have evolved over time, but the actual final imagery was something we discussed a long time ago, and that's actually where we're going to land, at the end of the season.\n\n GQ: And that's going to be what, exactly?\n\n Cuse: Nice try.\n\n Lindelof: I don't know what the legacy's going to be, but I think there are gonna be two reactions to the series finale of Lost. The first reaction will be in the months that follow it, and then there's gonna be another reaction, five years from now. I think they're gonna be wildly different. When you think about The Sopranos, for example, or Seinfeld\u2014the zeitgeist that surrounded the immediate ending of those shows in the weeks that followed, versus the way we look at those shows now. Twin Peaks is another one. The only legacy that matters to me is the one five years from now. My own personal hope is that people remember the show as an experience, as opposed to a show. How did you feel while you were watching Lost, when it was on the air? It's like Harry Potter. My son is three years old, and when I read him those books now, there's seven of 'em right there on the shelf, and it's like watching a show on DVD\u2014you finish one book, you go right to the next book. But that's different from the sense of anticipation that I experienced between books, waiting for the next book, talking to fellow fans. Hopefully, the legacy of this show will be that it was a benchmark show, in terms of proving that a worldwide television audience was immensely smarter and more sophisticated than previously believed. And that it was tapping into this\u2014without the Internet, I don't think that the show could have existed.\n\n GQ: Do you think it disproved core beliefs within the industry about who would watch a show like this? You obviously had your coterie of hardcore nerds, but it couldn't have become as big as it did if it wasn't reaching outside the traditional sci-fi audience.\n\n Lindelof: They clearly sold the show on the back of a non-sci-fi premise, which is that a plane crashes on a mysterious island. Yet in the way they sold the show, not only did they show the plane crash, but they showed the monster. They showed, in their promos, them standing on the wing of the plane and hearing this noise out in the jungle, so at the very least, they were saying, \"There might be something slightly weird about this show.\"\n\n Cuse: What's weird is, there's so much science-fiction genre stuff among the top movies of all time, and yet on television they're scared to death of it. I would hope that another legacy of Lost is that it'll prove that you can make genre shows on TV and still draw a big audience.\n\n GQ: Why are they scared to death of sci-fi shows?\n\n Orci: They're hard to do well.\n\n Abrams: They're really hard to do well.\n\n Cuse: One of the things JJ says, which I've always found inspiring, is \"Take a good 'B' idea and do it with 'A' ecution.\" It seems really simple, in theory to do that, but it's actually really hard to achieve. \n\n Abrams: You guys make it look so easy. It's hard enough to do it in a movie\u2014look at how many bad sci-fi movies there are. But TV is such a relentless beast. With the constant need to feed the machine, and keep it going, to have a show be that dramatically successful, and have elements of sci-fi\u2014it's nearly impossible. It's so hard to do. Even Rod Serling couldn't do an hour-long version of Twilight Zone, although they tried it for a bit.\n\n Lindelof: The answer that a network ecutive would give you, if you said \"Why are you so afraid of sci-fi?\"\u2014well, they'd say, \"I'm not afraid of sci-fi,\" but once you put their feet to the fire, they'd say it's because women don't watch science fiction. Women don't like science fiction, and women are the majority of the TV audience. Women control the remote. That's the fundamental belief. I think it's a falsehood\u2014but more importantly, when we all sat down on the first day to talk about Trek, one of the first things we talked about was, \"How are we going to get our wives to go see a Star Trek movie? How are we going to get them to go see it, and how are we going to get them to like it?\" And we talk about it all the time on Lost. Sci-fi or no sci-fi\u2014can we make somebody cry with this episode? Can we engage the audience emotionally? So that the moments you think about when you think about Lost aren't the science fiction moments\u2014you're thinking about Charlie dying, or the raft launch, or them going into the hatch\u2014\n\n Burk: Claire giving birth, on the same episode where Boone dies.\n\n Lindelof: Yeah. There's a heavily, heavily sci-fi moment in the Fringe [Season One] finale, when Walter is standing at Peter Bishop's grave. But it's so emotional. It's totally sci-fi, because Peter Bishop is totally still running around. We've seen him alive all season. It's a totally science-fiction premise\u2014but you're getting pure emotion out of it. And that's the hardest thing to do. I think that's why Alias worked as long as it did. It wasn't about Sidney Bristow fucking running around doing karate\u2014it's about this girl who works for her dad, and she wants to make him proud, and they have this fucking strained relationship, and then there's this other guy who in a very weird way is sort of her surrogate dad, and he's the villain. Those emotions, getting Sidney to cry, and thus engaging us as an audience, that's really the key to the brand, that I think all of us sort of gravitate to. We're using science fiction as a genre, but we're trying to do the same kind of storytelling that makes a traditional drama work.\n\n GQ: So okay, you've got your ending figured out. How soon after that will the movie come out?\n\n Lindelof: Shit\u2026\n\n Abrams: How much more do you need?\n\n Lindelof: This is a slippery slope, but I think it requires both Carlton and I to answer. My answer is\u2014\n\n Burk: \"How much will they pay us?\"\n\n Lindelof: We have to, have to, have to design the final season of the show, and the final episode of the show, to be absolutely 100% an ending. To leave any threads untied, or any stories unresolved, or any answers un-given, so that the audience will go pay fourteen bucks to go to a movie theater and get them, would be a complete slap in the face. It would be such a betrayal on every single level.\n\n Abrams [whispers]: December, 2012.\n\n Lindelof: We want to make it very challenging for someone else to try to make a movie about Lost. That's my answer. This story is about these characters. It started when they crashed, and it'll end when we end it. If there's a franchise alive after that, who's to say\u2014but unlike Chris Carter, who basically said that he wanted to do X-Files movies, or 24, who've said \"We want to do Jack Bauer movies,\" we've long said that we want this to be our ending.\n\n GQ: Julia Louis-Dreyfus told that joke on the Emmy Awards this year, about this being the last year of network television. That's obviously a little premature, but things do seem to be going that way\u2014one thing that made the experience of watching Lost such an experience is that it might have been one of the last real mass phenomenons generated by network TV. Do you think we're approaching a point where people won't be able to do shows like this\u2014shows that cost a lot to produce and demand a lot of focus from an audience\u2014on a network anymore?\n\n Burk: I don't think they're going to spend the money that they [currently] do on these big shows, in the same way. But there's always going to be a place to do stories. The question is, how much will it cost? How will you do it? And where will you show it?\n\n Lindelof: Right now, on Thursday afternoon, there's one answer, and then tomorrow morning, when the ratings for the first episode of FlashForward [which premiered the day this interview was conducted] come in, there'll be another answer. People say to Carlton and I, \"Do you think you could sell Lost today?\" JJ and I didn't sell Lost. We didn't walk into a room and say, \"Hey, we have this idea.\" FlashForward, I feel, did get sold. It's a multi-character, heavily serialized science-fiction show. It's much more genre in its premise than Lost ever was. \"People black out for two minutes and seventeen seconds, they get a glimpse of their own future, and the show is all about whether or not they can avert that future.\" That is a science-fiction premise in its very bones. And they sold it. And from what I understand, although I haven't seen the pilot yet, they spent a lot of money on it, too. So the networks still think they can swing for the fences. But if tomorrow morning, the ratings aren't good, if it craters\u2014then the story will be, \"This is the death of the behemoth genre show.\" But if it does a big number, which everybody in the Lost writers' room thinks it will, then it's like, why couldn't you do Fringe on HBO? Why couldn't you do Lost, thirteen episodes a season, on Showtime?\n\n Kurtzman: You would've preferred that.\n\n Lindelof: Yeah. Less is more. And we could have cursed and shown nudity and stuff. Now that you can't watch television with rabbit ears anymore, explain to me the difference between ABC and Showtime, other than the financial model, which is that one is subscriber-based and the other is affiliate-based.\n\n Burk: There were three networks when we were growing up. We were just talking to an actor, who used to have a show on, years ago, that was getting a 50 share.\n\n Orci: Cancelled!\n\n Lindelof: We worked with this guy on Nash Bridges, who'd worked on Remington Steele. And when we'd get our Nash Bridges numbers\u2014which were good numbers, the reason that show went away had nothing to do with the ratings, it was for entirely different reasons\u2014he'd say, \"They cancelled Remington Steele with a 28 share!\" Because anything less than a 33 share was considered a failure. If there's only three networks, you should be getting at least a third of the audience. Remington Steele was cancelled with better numbers than American Idol.\n\n Burk: Look, this happens all the time. We grew up watching sitcoms. Comedy was king, y'know? And now there's only a handful of sitcoms on. Everything's very cyclical. I'm sure there'll be another show after Lost\u2014hopefully, there'll be another show after Lost\u2014that inspires that fervor, on the Internet and everywhere else. \n\n Lindelof: When Lost came on\u2014that year, it was Lost and Desperate and Grey's. It happens in surges. \n\n Abrams: Did [Marc] Cherry negotiate an endpoint?\n\n Lindelof: What?\n\n Abrams: Did Cherry negotiate an endpoint? For Desperate?\n\n Lindelof: He was just kinda bluffing it, I think. He said he wanted to\u2014\n\n Cuse: He had said at one point that he wanted to do seven years of the show, but I think now he's content to do it for a while longer.\n\n Burk: They're gonna end by 2018\u2014no matter what.\n\n Lindelof: That show's gonna be the friggin' Desperate Golden Girls.\n\nTo read Part One of our Q+A, click here"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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