Lost Formulae

Television drama, like most forms of drama (if not most forms of fiction), tends to thrive in mass production once artists hit on a successful formula. Happily, thanks to the contributions of deconstructionists and structuralism, academic criticism seems to have moved past the knee-jerk rejection of formulae as inherently lowbrow or unoriginal. Roland Barthes managed to demonstrate how narrative formulae are at work in cultural forms one might not otherwise describe as narrative (professional wrestling, for instance, or portrait photography); Stephen Johnson (in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You) demonstrates the potential utility of formulae and variations from formulae as a deliberate and constructed game artists play with their audiences. Kennings and riddle-games, as I've talked about here before, reveal the long history of formulae in texts and hint at their potential cultural utility. We might be able to take a step beyond commercial interest - knowing what formula makes a program successful, sustainable, and lucrative - and examine how formulae and their variations (in TV drama, as an example) enrich a text's potential and empowers its audience.

Take Lost, for example, ABC's quasi-SF hit that helped open the floodgates for a new breed of SF/horror programs this season. At first glance, on first description, Lost appears to fit quite nicely within existing forms and previous parallels. The most apparent, of course, is Gilligan's Island, which also told stories about a group of strangers isolated on a deserted island. The castaways provide a pseudo-microcosm of society in the form of familiar character types (leaders/heroes, ingenues, bungling comedians, sage advisers, mercantile opportunists, romantic interests) and undergo trials both mundane and fantastical, particularly conflicts that arise from petty or personal agendas, but never forgetting the demands of survival or the aspiration for future rescue. Of course, one is a half-hour comedy, the other an hour-long drama, but there are parallels - at least, when we describe the formula this way.

This is hardly a formula, however; it's really more of a description of results. That society should seem to be represented by a microcosm is hardly surprising, since character types are not only ancient models based on observations of society, but cultural paradigms that we use to perceive and program our behavior in society. How the microcosmic relation is constructed is far more interesting than simply noting that one seems to exist. And this is one way in which Lost clearly varies from Gilligan's Island on a generic level: the latter uses character as a given, unquestioned and dependably predictable, while the former uses character as the point of departure, the starting point for constructing plot.

Conventionally, one-hour TV drama has long employed A-plots and B-plots (a better description than "plot" and "subplot" in that "subplots" can often take the foreground for the better part of a one-hour episode), in which two stories are told simultaneously. The best-known structure is that of drama and comic relief - a standby for programs like L.A. Law, for instance, just as it had been in melodrama, American musicals, and variety shows. This is not the only way to deploy A-plots and B-plots, however, and their utility has recently expanded with the rise of series arcs, or long-term plots that last for longer than a single episode. Lost uses A-plots and B-plots to sustain suspense over the long haul of the entire series, while rewarding the audience with smaller versions of the larger arc in each one-hour episode.

What makes this structure work most effectively, however, is the choice to reward long-term investment in the B-plots (installments of the larger, series arc) with short-term narratives that manage to expand interest in the series as a whole, while managing to remain somewhat self-contained. The key to this mechanism is character. By means of flashbacks and retrospectives, character histories are gradually revealed - but always in terms of a current, ongoing action or development (typically framed as a series of choices). This process forms the A-plot: we will learn more about these characters, as each story is ultimately about them; but these characters will grow, change, and often confound our expectations by means of their interaction with each other and the situation as a whole as it develops (i.e., the B-plot). One might look at it as Aristotle's poetic principles in action: plot is the soul of the drama, but the windows on that soul are through character actions as they overlap with and shape that plot, and through their collective choices enact it.

To put this another way - to abbreviate the formula - Lost lays before its audience an assortment of mysteries: strangers. At first we (as the characters do) interpret these mysteries according to familiar patterns - we think of these characters as particular types. But each plot, each episode, subverts and challenges these expectations by exploring characters in detail, and revealing not only details about these characters' pasts, but an ongoing series of actions in which these characters actually decide what kind of people they are going to be. Our suspense is engaged: we want to find out who these people are, and the more we find out, the more mysterious they become. But the focus on individual characters (or individual character relationships) allows us to be satisfied with a single installment, and feel as if a whole story has been told - while drawing out our interest, and magnifying the allure of the series as a whole, through the interweaving of these characters' stories in the larger fabric (revealed in glimpses only). Each episode satisfies; each episode increases our interest in the next.

How does this empower the audience? Insofar as it demands that the audience do the work of seeing how this interweaving of characters' private tales with the development of the whole manages to embody - not some symbolic set of icons representing an ideal society - but the process of constructing a society itself. The show manages through its structure to focus not only on individuals, but on the nature of community itself. A template is not simply presented to the audience as a product to be consumed; rather, a system is devised through which the audience can (through imaginative engagement) play out various scenarios that both challenge and construct community.

It might be obvious, but it seems worth noting, the irony of examining community through isolation - not only the isolation of becoming "Lost" on a mysterious island, but also the "isolation" that television's so-called "wasteland" is supposed to inflict on passive viewers.