Nothing 'Lost' in their narrative

One leftover item from yesterday's entry: since when is TOO MUCH NARRATIVE a bad thing? Have any of you every thought to yourself, "You know, I'd like Lost a lot more if there was just less of it?"

The industry-standard right now goes something like this: air a show roughly 20-24 times over an eight-month period. That's your season. That's your content. Networks like FX, HBO, and Showtime alter this script only in terms of the number of hours they dedicate per season per show. But that's not a major shift from the norm, really: the difference is merely numerical, not substantial.

But that standard is slowly eroding. There are too many stations, too many programs, too many ways to watch these programs...in short, too many options for the average consumer. Lost may only be delivering 16-episode seasons from now on, but those episodes are not the sum total of the story that is Lost. Mobisodes, websites, ARGs...these are all fine and dandy ways to add to the narrative, but they are the beginning, not the end, of such alternate forms of narrative to serve the overall story a particular show wants to tell.

Which means we'll soon have to reconceive what Lost is:  after all, what you call a television show that you don't watch on television? What do you call content that relates to a show but isn't shown within the show itself? How do you assign overall worth to ancillary material? Calling it a television show barely does it justice now: what happens when you stream it to your computer, download it to your cellphone, and then get periodic text messages from the Hanso Foundation alerting you when to log onto their website for updates on their newest scientific endeavors? Is that a television show? Or is it something much, much more?

I think you know how I'd answer that: give me as much Lost as possible, in as many formats, so long as the quality is high and the narrative is appropriate to format. But I'm not advocating this approach for any and all long-form storytelling. Lost is doing it the right way currently: they are using their rabid fanbase's insatiable need for anything and everything Lost in order to roll out expositional back story that both illuminates and deepens what is happening in the "main story" on television. Thus, they reward the diehard fans without penalizing the casual fans. (In other words, don't look for the "Here Is All You Need to Know About Smokey the Monster" mobisode anytime soon.)

As long as Lost maintains this balance, they should tell the Lost narrative on as many platforms as possible. Television. Internet. Smoke signals. Town criers. Semaphore. Interpretive dance. OK, maybe not the latter, but still. There's no boundary to how they can tell this story.

And as long as they recognize that, we all benefit.