Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place*

By James Poniewozik | @poniewozik | December 16, 2009 | +

ABC

Last October, Maureen Ryan, Alan Sepinwall and I met at John’s pizzeria in midtown Manhattan to divide the globe among our respective empires a margherita pie and talk about TV. Mo Ryan went to the trouble of recording and transcribing the convo and is posting it in three parts. (The Library of Congress will be after this recording, mark my words!)

In the first installment, we talk about Lost. And we discover that I can really yammer on when you pull my chain. If I said anything particularly stupid, may I note that I was the only one drinking.

* Hat tip to whoever suggested this title on Twitter back in October.

@TIMECulture

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mimsysnark

That was a fun, interesting conversation. Can’t wait to read the next installment!
ferociouswalrus

It was nice to see some of the thoughts I’ve had about both Lost and BSG articulated so well. ;) I know some people who were BSG fans who now say they’re sorry they watched it because of the last episode. This seems ridiculous to me. I had a great time watching it for four years, even if I HATED the ending (which I actually didn’t), it’s not as if I was wrong to enjoy it for four years.
tomn2

Awesome! Three of my four favorite TV critics, together, talking TV. It would only have been better if Tim Goodman had been there. Thanks!
http://twitter.com/poniewozik James Poniewozik

Agreed. If Goodman were there, I would not have been the only one drinking!
rosseau

I’m glad Ms. Ryan brought up a neglected point: that planning a story like Lost’s in advance would be foolish and impossible. I can see them having a master plan but the level of complexity, number of characters, number of their emotional arcs and the many plot questions raised on this show preclude someone at the beginning thinking all of this up at a moment. Remember, J.J Abrams thought of this island with a hatch on it, without thinking up why. I guess the most asked question the producers get is a silly one; yes they are making it up as they go along and tell me one instance where that has been bad for the show?
Tom Shaw

Re: Lost, I mentioned this a week back in a post about the probable dire state of sci-fi going into the 10/11 season, that Lost isn’t beloved because of the sci-fi.

Lost is beloved because of the:
Well crafted characters.
Sure, some of the cast were ciphers, but they tended to be killed off quickly (e.g. Boone). How many television characters really have the layers of Locke, even limiting to the 1.0 version?

Creative narrative techniques.
Sure, compare and contrast flashbacks weren’t invented here, but expecting audiences to remember that many details over how many years to make the impacts of those flash-whatevers largely was. (Or perhaps this should be summarized as: Challenged the audience.)

The Mystery*. How do you keep an audience in suspense? I’ll tell you next week. Giving audiences something they’ve never seen before, and then essentially challenging them to figure it out, leads to a far more involved (and attentive) audience.

But where I differ with you is the flipside of The Mystery – namely, The Answers. If the showrunners establish mysteries with apparent rules, I damn well expect the answers to be consistent with those rules.

(Take BSG – like I said at the time, God literally brings Starbuck back from the dead, “plants” the coordinates in her history decades back (and thus is apparently totally fine with everything that happens in the interim) – but then has to give a half dozen other characters visions just to get her to remember the coordinates at the right moment. Why couldn’t God (of all beings) just cut out the middlemen?)

So yes, if the answers are pulled out of a hat, then it invalidates the time I’ve spent on those mysteries up to this point. The resultant tarnishing of its legacy is totally justified, in my opinion.

–
In looking at the successors to Lost, I feel the best candidate is Fringe. Again, not because of the sci-fi, but because of the characters (Walter Bishop is the best character introduced since Mad Men debuted, IMO), and the mysteries – even if they probably did too good a job of hiding them (did even .1% of the audience realize the truth of all those “Peter, did you remember” dialogues? I didn’t, until they fully explained the alternate timeline).

(P.S. Of course, this is the real reason why Flashforward blows. Aside from Charlie (I still don’t remember his name), Dimitri half the time, and now Lloyd Simcoe half the time, all the characters are one-dimensional and effectively non-existent. And while I think the mysteries are more established than people realize (the flashforwards are of a timeline without flashforwards), not enough progress is made on them (especially in the first 55 minutes each episode) to make me want to care. Hence, failure.)
http://www.blogila.com/entertainment/im-on-the-radio-every-day.html "I’m on the radio EVERY DAY!!!!!"(*) | BloGila.Com

[...] Damn Poniewozik (or one of his Twitter followers) for coming up with the much better subject line “Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place” for his own post on this discussion. Damn [...]