Why the Future of Television Is Lost

(3 of 4)
And the producers are listening. Last season they killed a second character in a pivotal episode because the one they intended to kill was so unpopular that they realized she would not be missed. Other times, they rebut the fans. To knock down a popular theory--that the entire series is a dream--they made an episode in which a hallucination tells Hurley that everything that happened on the island was in his head, and then they disproved it. "There's a kind of reciprocal exchange," says David Lavery, chair in film and television at London's Brunel University and a co-author of Unlocking the Meaning of Lost. "The fans know more about the show--except what's going to happen next week--than the people creating the show. Fandoms feel power that they never felt before."

Of course, the Lovitzes are a minority of Lost viewers. But they're a vocal one. Pop-culture critic Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good for You, says the show's makers "are relying on the amplifying power of the serious hard-core fans, who are 1% of the audience, to broadcast some of these cool little discoveries to perhaps 10% of their audience. Those are the great evangelists for the show, the 10% who are out there saying, Oh, God, I am so addicted to this show." And they help reel in the other 90%, which is where gratifying the superfans pays off. "Let's say I go to a Bruce Springsteen show, and he plays for four hours instead of two hours," says Lindelof. "Why? What is he getting out of it? Your ticket price is exactly the same. But what happens is, you go to work the next morning, and you say, I just saw the greatest f______ show in my life."

It was for the 1% that the producers and ABC this summer created The Lost Experience, an online game that delved into the Dharma Initiative, the secretive international project alluded to on the show. For more than four months, players hunted for clues in phony corporate websites, voice-mail messages and video clips online. The trick was to give away information that would tantalize hard-core fans but casual viewers wouldn't need. (Among the tidbits: Dharma stands for department of heuristics and research on material applications. See what you can do with that.)

For most of TV history, going to those lengths to get people who already like a show to like it more would have been a waste. Network TV is paid for by ads, and to advertisers, an eyeball is an eyeball, however passionate. But now you can turn passion into money. Fans buy episodes they missed, from iTunes at $1.99 a pop. They're the market for the upcoming video-game and cell-phone mini-episodes. They buy DVDs to catch new details of episodes they have already seen. This month Lost's Season 2 debuted at No. 1 on the DVD charts--listing at about $60 a set. Season 1 sold 1.2 million copies. The networks take notice when it comes time to schedule new series. "I'm not in the room when the corporate decisions are made," says Abrams. "But the possibility of making $50 [million], $100 million more on DVD sales--it's not a drop in the bucket."