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Originally Posted by JudgeHoldem
That is a bad article, and the author should feel bad. The whole culture (and I am not one trying to present theories as I just enjoy the show, so much as coming back at when I think a theory is wrong with what it *could* mean) is based on what LOST did to viewers. It's like the guy's like, "wait, what happened to the art?" What happened to the art was twist culture. If you put a mystery in a show, human nature is going to want to solve it. That's why people can look at a piece of s*** show like Homeland and come up with a bunch of theories that turn out to mean nothing, because it's a poorly told straightforward show. That's why a guy like Sam Esmail, who thinks he's a sooper genius, is disappointed when he laid out a long path to a twist, and a bunch of Sooners solved it in the first episode. It's because the writing is leading you down a path. If it turns out there's no path, it's almost like the writers pulled one over on the audience. The twist was that there was no twist. Spoiler alert, audiences don't like this kind of stuff. It diminishes the enjoyment of just watching. That's part of why shows like Stranger Things (that have actual mysteries) have such large audiences. They aren't bogging you down in the mystery, they're telling a story and you're having fun watching it unfold.
Most people don't like thinking when they watch television. All shows that start out with mysteries that don't pay off erode massive amounts of viewers quickly in the wake of all the time people felt they wasted with LOST. It's important to note that people tried over and over to re-create the formula of LOST, and most of those copies tended to focus on the mysteries rather than the characters. People have tried to re-create Cheers on the comedy side, and it just has never been able to get there. There are lots of shows that made it okay, but nothing has ever been at that level again, and we're nearly 25 years removed from Cheers' last episode.
I don't know how familiar you are with his work, but David Mamet has done a series of great movies about con games. In those movies, one of the most fun things about them was watching them unravel, and showing us what we should be looking for (why The Sixth Sense was such a phenomenon when it came out). When you see several movies in a row from someone like that, you're pre-conditioned to think all of his movies are going to be like that. Spartan was a movie he made in 2004 that was filled with a bunch of wild potential mysteries. It turned out it was as straightforward movie, and it took 4 viewings, looking for various angles, to realize that. This was before LOST.
I'm a person who works in a creative field. My intent when creating something is what matters, sorry it's the truth (that's why you have to be extremely careful with what you put into your work or it can make you look bad [a good example is the doll thing from TD season 1]). The audience can take it wherever they want, but that doesn't mean it's the correct interpretation. If you actually think Nolan wants you to only be thinking of the ethics of this show and isn't actually reveling in the idea of showing all these various mysteries for people to latch on to, I don't know what to tell you. It's an interactive fantasy place, where whatever you think is up to you. He and his wife have put a framework in place ("is this right or is this wrong?", "what's real and what isn't?", with various other things added along the way that aren't up for debate), and everything else in it is up to you. This is a liberating experience for a TV watcher, because it doesn't matter what the meaning is in all the little moments (and you should expect no answers on those little things), only the concrete stuff matters. And guess what, we don't know what stuff is concrete *yet*. Jonathan Nolan is a master storyteller in the TV series format. This isn't some Oscar winning screenwriter (The Night Of) who's tapped out and always wanted to tell a story in his own way (proving why screenwriters aren't the last person in a creative process). This is a guy who wants to pull his core audience in and hug them close. In his other show, he made you feel like a surveillance camera was a real person. That's a gift. He knows what he's doing in relation to TV storytelling, and he's in a format that should bring what he's really capable of out in many fewer episodes than his other show that was outstanding start to finish under the massive constraints of CBS and network television.
As I said, I can't stand when people write stupid s*** like that article trying to act like they "get it", and you're doing it wrong. This whole thing is a product of LOST, and it's led to an obsession of tricking the audience because it's so damn smart. They let the genie out of the bottle, and now everyone's like "hey hey wait a minute, can't we just watch?" The answer is no, no matter how hard you try. Networks, cable channels, and makers encourage this kind of stuff. The audiences almost never like it, but once you put mysteries or strange stuff in your show, human nature's going to take over and people are going to try to solve it.
My personal thought is that Nolan and Joy (probably more Nolan than Joy) are playing into that to give the audience a richer experience. For the big stuff, it's always going to be one answer. For the small stuff, it can be whatever the f*** you want.
