Guten tag!
How are you doing this fine Sunday morning? I’m doing quite well. Good.
Well my television show idea received another blow last night while we were watching and finishing up the first disc of the 2nd season of Lost.
I’m trying figure out how this happened. You may remember I was a tad stymied several posts ago when I discovered that a friend of mine had similiar ideas for a TV show they were working on. I kind of blame the whole synchronicity or coincidence business. Sure, great minds think alike.
There is a pattern here though that I followed in coming up with my ideas. I think people have already picked up the pattern and are way ahead of me on the trail. If I figure out how I got to the pattern then I should be able to veer the pattern off into a different direction.
I first started thinking about writing a television show after seeing the original Wicker Man movie. At that time I thought, “Man, somebody should remake that movie for today’s audience”. Little did I know somebody already was. I’ve heard the remake isn’t very good. I haven’t seen it yet but plan on it. The remake of Wicker Man that was in my head was good though for sure. I began to think that I should put my money where my mouth was and start getting my ideas out on paper. If I had the thought that Wicker Man should be remade into a movie and somebody else also thought the same thing, then who’s to say that one of my other thoughts isn’t being put down on paper by someone else right now?
Then I started lamenting the state of reality shows on television. “If we only had HBO”. K and I loved renting the series “Six Feet Under” and “The Sopranos”. It is still possible to have to really great shows on television. It’s not all just “Deal or No Deal”.
Imagine a World where a show like Twin Peaks is introduced into the Fall Season line up. Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if there was a show like Twin Peaks on the broadcast channels again?
Right around this time in my thinking, I was aware that the show Lost was out there. I hadn’t seen any of the episodes and didn’t really know what it was about. I knew that people had crashed a plane on a tropical island and that strange things were happening to them on this mysterious island. I remember noting that it seemed like this show Lost was getting the same kind of press that Twin Peaks was getting when it was on the air. Maybe this show was the new Twin Peaks that I had been praying for?
So I did have this show that I hadn’t seen called Lost in the back of my mind when I started thinking up my television series.
We started watching several episodes of the old British TV series “The Prisoner”. I then thought, “Gosh, wouldn’t it be great if there was a funky show like The Prisoner on TV now days?” While looking to see and discovering that they are making a Prisoner Remake, I also found an article where J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost praised The Prisoner as one of the influences for his show. Hmm. That show Lost comes up again. I bet I would really like it. I also began to think that I shouldn’t watch it though because it might influence the work on my own television show.
The pattern is now formed for my show I am calling “Holy” (I did notice right away that Holy was a one word title just like Lost). It would be a combination of the movie “Wicker Man”, the television show “The Prisoner”, with the surreal elements of “Twin Peaks”.
Now having watched the first season of Lost, I can kind of see the framework for all of the shows. There is something very similar. These shows are all built around the idea of the characters interacting with a mysterious environment. In Wicker Man there is the mysterious island that must be investigated by the police detective. In the Prisoner, Number 6 has to figure out how to break out of the Village and get off of the island. In Twin Peaks the town of Twin Peaks is the setting for a number of bizarre events. In Lost we have another mysterious island where bizarre events occur.
In creating the idea for my show Holy I can see how I must be intrigued by the notion of characters reacting to a mysterious environment. In Holy I had thought of this place called Techah (I might still use it) which was a city that the characters were creating on the Oregon Coast (not on an island) where interesting and sometimes mysterious things occur. I have been reading quite a bit about communal living and utopian societies and was going to have Techah be an attempt at a utopia.
I can see that the idea of characters reacting to their mysterious environments isn’t an original plot device. Many shows use this and will continue to use this. I think I may still use some of this for Holy, but thanks to Lost (and the direction I think it’s heading), I am going to have to rethink a large chunk of my story.
I’m starting to think that Lost might be the show that I wish I was writing.
I always appreciate when people writing about shows that people may not have seen yet indicate when a spoiler that may ruin the surprise of the show is coming up. We are only to disc 2 of season 2 of Lost so if you haven’t seen up to that point don’t read the following spoiler. I also realize that Lost is well into season 3 and several of you already know what is going on. Please don’t be a jerk and spoil anything for me.
LOST SPOILER:
We are at the point now where Jack and Locke have made it down into the hatch and have discovered the weird underground bunker. The computer gets shot and Desmond tells them that they should go watch the instructional film that explains why the bunker is there and why they have to keep entering the code into the computer. In a great scene that I have now watched 3 times, Jack and Locke load up and watch the grainy film. The film talks about the history of something called Dharma Initiative. From what we can tell so far it appears that the island that they crashed on in Lost is actually and experiment to create a large scale communal research compound.
I think around this time I said to K, “Well there it goes”.
The island of the Lost series now seems (as far as we have gotten so far in the series) to be the results of a failed attempt at what the characters in my story Holy are trying to create with their city Techah. An experiment trying to create a utopian society. The Dharma Initiative even has a wealthy financial backer and European urban planner architect guy like I was planning on having in my story.
We are really going to have to speed up our viewing to get caught up. Everywhere you look on the internet seems to have a spoiler for Lost. I just discovered that Wikipedia has an entry for the Dharma Initiative (I didn’t read it). If we were caught up to season 3 I could actually read some of this stuff.
(END OF SPOILER)
Okay I feel a little bit better after that long post. We actually went to breakfast with Lianne and Martin before I could finish this post and I talked to them about my television writing dilemmas.
After laying out the patterns here I’m feeling a little bit better about where I could differentiate it enough so that Holy doesn’t seem like a Lost rip off. I’m definitely not doing a “hey I thought of that first” thing here. I’m just trying to see how similar ideas for stories can be affected through similar tastes in source materials and inspiration. Perhaps I came to the same conclusions as the Lost creators because we both wanted to see similar television shows based on the same previous shows that we liked back on television.
It’s good that I am finding similar ideas as the Lost people. Now I need to use that as a tool to see where my story is going and take it into a different direction. I’ve noticed a few directions in the pattern that I could explore.
That being said I’m sure there are thousands of blogs out there claiming to have thought of similar Lost plot points.
I’ve got to go wash the dishes now.
