Producers of ABC‘s paranormal thriller The River promise not to follow in the footsteps of AMC‘s slow-burning serial, The Killing, they also share their LOST lessons.
Referring to the decision made by The Killing creator Veena Sud not to resolve the show’s central mystery after the first season, EP Zack Estrin says:
“Our staff writer actually worked on The Killing, so she came into this saying, ‘Hey guys, whatever you do, don’t do what we did at the end of The Killing,’” [laughs] So we certainly took that to heart. We’re not going to leave everybody hanging.” [In fact, the end of the season,] is simply bats–t crazy.”
EP Michael Green also reveals the lessons they’ve learned from LOST, and how The River hopes to satisfy genre fans:
“The biggest lesson for me is that fans of genre television have gotten so good at watching genre television that we get to make more and better genre television. They’ve proven to networks and studios who have to pay for all this that people respond better when the shows are better and that they watch the show leaning forward, with their intelligence turned on. There was a lot of assumption early on that people liked to watch television passively, and genre television watchers and fans of Lost and shows like it have just done a tremendous service by saying, ‘No, no, no, we are watching with our whole hearts open, and we want our attention to be rewarded with experience.’”
For Estrin, the biggest ‘LOST’ take-away is the importance of pay off:
“One of the things that we are definitely both hyper-sensitive of is that we’re not going to be dragging out one question for six years of television. The question of ‘Where is Emmet Cole?’ is not THE question of the series, it’s just the first question. The show is called The River, after all; it’s not called The Search for Emmet Cole. There’s much bigger things out there than the first thing we’re asking you this season.”
Source: EW
Poor The Killing — nothing wrong with extending the central mystery beyond the first season. It’s all relative. It can certainly be argued that they didn’t manage viewer expectations as well as they could, while the execution of the first season could have been better, but let’s not kill serial. Again, it’s all relative and continuing storylines into the second season doesn’t necessarily mean leaving people hanging. I just feel there’s an important distinction to be made there.
All that being said, I think it’s clear that The River has a different story engine to The Killing, so I don’t see them facing quite the same dilemma, especially since the search for Emmett Cole isn’t the sole question of the season.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Right on time. Every new show must cater to the Snooki-loving iPhone addicts and promise them that the outcome will not be like ‘The Killing’. There are a lot of people who have no complaints about ‘The Killing’. I’m so sick of this PR checklist (comparisons to ‘Lost’, NOT ‘The Killing’, etc. etc. etc.) that must be adhered to in order to placate the entitled masses.
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The ending to The Killing was a disaster because viewers were led to believe the mystery would be solved in not one, but THIRTEEN forty five minute episodes. And the showrunner has implied that it’ll be ANOTHER thirteen forty-five minute episodes.
It was promoted wrong, and when they learned the truth, viewers were understandably pissed. Showrunners on other shows learned from the debacle and are trying to correctly align expectations. It isn’t fair for you to decry this. It’s a good thing.
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The article’s comment about the assumption that people liked to “watch television passively” (vs. actively paying attention “with our whole hearts open”) smacks of network exec double-speak for the scape-goating process by which it is assumed that the audience is so mentally inattentive (which doesn’t speak well of the medium more than the audience) that the writers of the shows can hold the same mind-set (or lack of mind-set). Except being lazy is a tad bit more fun if you’re pulling in a paycheck, isn’t it, show-runners? Good to know you’re stepping up to the plate and attempting to create cohesive “genre” plotting and payoffs.
The “Lost” genre (as well as “The River” genre) is basically the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Metaphysical genre. Assuming we weren’t paying attention and didn’t care about payoff was just flat-out stupid. Have you ever tried to sneak an erroneous Star Trek reference past a fan?
And you’d better be careful with that whole glowing cave/well of souls/source of all that is good & wonderful from Lost carrying over into The River. The instant I heard that “if he finds ‘The Source’ I’ll put him down” comment from Colonel Kurtz, uh, I mean Kurt… the klaxons went off, warning me of another sad letdown.
Yes folks, we ARE paying attention and fomenting our emotional attachments to your product. Assuming we’re not is assuming you make a lousy product. Sometimes you’ve got to go with your gut and decide to create a good show and not listen to the “research”. After all, 90% of all research tells us 90% of all research is false.
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