Fuck that guy, and his new show. I usually check out HBO’s offerings, but I won’t view this one. I didn’t mind the show as much as the show runner’s deception in the press about having some actual idea of where it was going. Forgive me for not being fooled a second time, Mr. Lindelof.
And I want credit for calling this at the time:
My interest for the last couple of seasons has been continued for two reasons: the drama is interesting even if the underlying theme is disjointed, and I wanted know if my initial suspicion was correct: The writers of this show, after the first season, were thinking, “OMFG, we just got renewed. How the hell do we now make sense of this hash?”
But that’s not what happened. The pilot was broadcast, the critics loved it and the ratings were huge. “When I got the call the next morning as to what the ratings were, I literally cried,” Lindelof said. “Not with joy, but sort of like, this is too much.” By then he’d been working for five months without a day off. Network shows are grueling, and he was expected to make more than 20 episodes that season. “I wanted the ‘Firefly’ trajectory. Like, we’re going to be kind of pushing up against cancellation, and we’re going to make 13 of these things, and then it will be like this cool cult success.”
“When you’re a show runner,” Cuse says, “the Holy Grail is if you could have a show that’s both critically acclaimed and a ratings success. I remember Damon walking into my office and saying: ‘Oh, my God. Does that mean we have to keep making this?’ ”