This week, a sprawling 27-page document that was originally used by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof to pitch the show Lost to ABC executives leaked to the Internet. The revelations confirm what most people have assumed all along: The show was a web of lies and its creators were probably making it up as they went along. In the pitch, Abrams and Lindelof said, “We promise” that the show’s episodes will be self-contained, and the series won’t be serialized, so it will be easy for viewers to jump in at any point. Lost is not a trippy sci-fi drama: It’s a cop show, lawyer show and doctor show all rolled into one—at least according to the pitch. The whole “monster” thing will be solved within the first few episodes, because there is no “ultimate mystery,” they originally told ABC.
Unsurprisingly, Lindelof isn’t too happy about the document being leaked online, and offered an explanation to the site Slash Film. He says that the whole point of the document was simply to get ABC onboard with the show and concept, even though the writing team had no intention of sticking to it. “We made a very specific effort in this document to say we were not going to be serialized, we were not going to be genre and we were not going to do what Alias had done. So even though I think it was our intention to do all of the above, we needed to put that in the document.” As Lindelof has explained before, not only did the show not use a prewritten plot outline, writers essentially just made it up as they went along …
