LANTERNS Won’t Drag Things Out Like LOST Did, According to Damon Lindelof
Damon Lindelof learned a few things from spending six seasons stranded on a mysterious island, and one of the biggest is knowing when it’s time to end the story.
The writer and producer behind Lost, The Leftovers, Watchmen, and Mrs. Davis is now helping bring DC’s Green Lantern mythology to television with HBO Max’s Lanterns.
Lindelof says the creative team approached its central mystery with something Lost famously struggled to achieve with a clear destination.
Lost ran from 2004 to 2010, delivering 121 episodes while turning its island into one gigantic puzzle box. The ABC series became a television phenomenon, but as the mysteries piled up, viewers increasingly wanted answers.
By the time the series reached its divisive finale, plenty of fans felt the journey had gone on longer than necessary.
Lindelof, who co-created Lost and served as co-showrunner, remembers the problem. During a press conference tied to the Lanterns premiere, he explained that ABC wasn’t exactly eager to put an expiration date on one of its biggest shows.
“For a show that had a mystery engine, the audience was saying, ‘When are you going to tell us what the f*ck is going on here?’ We’re like, ‘We really want to, but once we start answering mysteries, the show is coming down the hill, it’s closer to the end.’”
That’s a tough situation for any mystery series. The questions keep people watching, but eventually you have to start answering them. Once those answers arrive, the story naturally moves toward its conclusion. When a network has a massive hit, however, reaching that conclusion isn’t always the priority.
Lindelof appears to have carried that experience into the shows he’s made since, and Lanterns was constructed with a much different mindset.
According to Lindelof, he and Chris Mundy, the series’ co-creator and showrunner, agreed early on that Lanterns needed to tell a complete story rather than keep its mysteries alive simply to extend the show.
“He said, ‘I want to tell a complete story. We’re going to do a mystery, and then, more importantly, we’re going to have a relationship story between these two guys that feels resolved at the end of the story that we’re telling.’
“We want the audience to be really hungry for more when it ends. I think that it feels like it was a really good meal, but a couple of hours after you’ve consumed it, you’re going to say, ‘I think I want to spend some more time in that world.’”
Instead of stretching its mystery until fans start begging the writers to explain what the hell is happening, the goal is to give viewers a satisfying story with an actual resolution while leaving them interested in seeing where the characters and the larger DC Universe could go next.
It also sounds like the mystery itself isn’t the only thing carrying the series. The relationship at the center of Lanterns is just as important, with Mundy and Lindelof wanting that character story to reach a meaningful conclusion as well.
Of course, wanting more Lanterns when the story ends would be a much better outcome than wanting to escape the island yourself.
New episodes of Lanterns arrive Sundays on HBO Max.