Lost in time, with a crowd

No man is an island. Neither is a TV show. But the ripple effects emanating from the hit series Lost are almost as powerful as the strange, magnetic doomsday device (that works!) in the island's mysterious hatch.

About to enter its third season, this take-prisoners drama has been more than a runaway hit, becoming a pop culture phenomenon â?? it is the Lost leader â?? inspiring many shows to resort to imitation as the sincerest form of flattery.

There's plenty of good coming out of all this. One great example is that TV shows are becoming more multicultural, as is the credibility and care given to science-fiction programs. Mysteries and conspiracies are everywhere too. Happily, this year's crop of Lost-influenced shows are a bit more subtle than last year's failed insta-clones, like Surface, Invasion and Threshold.

"Last year, ABC, CBS and NBC all jumped in with science-fiction-ish shows and, of course, they failed as they usually do," says David Lavery, co-author of Unlocking the Meaning of Lost: An Unauthorized Guide.

"So what does that tell us about this year's shows? Well, what they (network executives) are thinking is that the real cause of Lost's success wasn't the science-fiction elements but rather it was the strange interlocking of the characters, and all those kinds of things."

The loose but connected cast is most evident in two new buzz shows, Heroes and The Nine. NBC's Heroes is riding a wave of good early press and is also one of most predominantly sci-fi. It features a large cast of strangers who separately realize that they have super powers. Eventually they will come together, but the creators have already said it is going to be a slow burn, with the characters' separate stories starting to link in Episode 5 or 6.

One of the most blatant similarities to Lost is a Japanese-speaking fanboy character, played by Masi Oka, who can teleport himself through time and space (maybe he should blink himself to the island so he and Jin can chill out).

ABC's The Nine is another one of this year's hot shows. The pilot opens up with nine characters in a bank where a robbery takes place. After the first commercial break, the show flashes forward 52 hours, and the hostages are rescued. Because of their shared trauma, they are determined to stay in touch.

But The Nine's other trademark, time manipulation, is another of the season's big themes. Playing with time and retro-plotting (slowly revealing backstories) are in. As are flashbacks, which were once used sparingly and usually only on soap operas, but now are becoming integral to reveal explosive plot points. For example, while The Nine's story follows the love interests and healing process of the characters post-heist, the traumatic events in the bank will be revealed throughout the season. But will viewers respond to a similar concept as Lost, which leads into The Nine?

"One of the things that goes on in television is something called recombinant programming," says Lavery. "It's just like recombinant DNA, which you splice together and it replicates.

"So when you look at new shows, you can see them thinking, well, it worked with Lost, so it can work with this. Instead of an island, let's try a bank robbery," adds Lavery.

"But it's not always a bad thing. Remember, Lost was a result of this. Basically, an ABC executive said, â??why can't we make a live-action Survivor?' "

Time twisting isn't a new device - it's long been lapped up by Star Trek fans. Even last year it was evident in Prison Break as flashbacks were employed to tell Michael's backstory, as well as the various stories of the fugitives (and absolving most of them of serious crimes, making it easier to root for a group of supposedly hardened criminals). Even comedies do it, such as the great My Name is Earl, which usually opens with Earl flashbacking to what misdeed he needs to fix each week.

Showtime's new Dexter features a forensic scientist who's also a serial killer with flashbacks that prove key to the plot. There's also Day Break, the mid-season replacement for Lost, which features Taye Diggs trapped in a Groundhog Day situation where he relives the exact same day trying to avoid the mysterious people who are after him. As well, there's the British-produced Life on Mars, which focuses on a modern-day cop who finds himself solving crimes in the '70s. Yet Fox's explosive 24 is the exact opposite, happily bucking this trend. It's real-time format makes flashbacks impossible.

This manipulation of time and convoluted plots, however, indicates that viewers don't want simple, spoonfed TV shows.

"I think the audience was there, ready willing and able for this type of sophisticated television," says Lavery. "The way they read an ongoing story is certainly not the way we used to read Magnum P.I. Viewers want something that really challenges them, and the reason Lost has been such a huge success is that the creators got that."

The question is whether these new series are different enough in their own ways to captivate an audience, just like the adventures of TV's current favourite castaways.

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The similarities are inevitable. It has some things the same, but none in a way that makes it dull a second time.
I think the only comparison is that neither speaks English, hust Jin and Hiro don't even speak the same language! (Sorry, getting a little too angry for me own good.)

I really don't buy the comparison between last year's batch of sci-fi Lost-inspired shows (Threshold, Invasion, Surface), and their failures, and the hopes for Heroes' success. The reason that the three from last year failed was because (outside of the first episode, and in the case of Invasion, first half of the season) the writing of the shows steadily declined. It didn't seem the stories of each show had much of a direction. It already appears that Heroes has a definite direction, and that the story is progressing to a specific, pre-determined point.

In this case, this is how Heroes should be compared to Lost. Each show has a basic idea of how their stories will unfold, and how they will end. This is a strong part of Lost's strong continuity and storylines, and hopefully will be the key to Heroes' success.