...Now, a lot of people say they know where a show will be in five years. Five years is the old-school deadline for syndication. People in this town dream of syndication because it is the Holy Grail, not just the difference between a BMW and a Mercedes, but the difference between splashing your wealth around a bit and having a couple of summer homes while still having the staff at the Post Ranch Inn recognize your face from 100 yards.
   Nevertheless, the best-laid plans of mice and movers often get dragged out into the valley and shot behind the ear. It's hard to launch a hit, hard to stay on top of the Nielsens and hard to stay great. But a show with good genes that starts with well-mapped DNA has the best odds.
   So it was good to see that ABC, which will be playing the role of Lazarus next season, not only trotted out its surprising buzz shows for further investigation by the nation's critics but also that most of the shows held up under scrutiny. Two, in particular, stand out....
   ...Another promising drama on ABC, "Lost," takes a standard premise -- an airplane crash strands people on a remote island -- and gives it legs. The cast is enormous, but each character will be fully fleshed out and you won't be so comfortable categorizing them (are they good or bad?) for a while. The cast is diverse in various ways, too. There's a Korean couple who don't seem to speak English. There's a father with his son (and lost dog). There's a doctor, a fugitive, a squabbling brother and sister, a pregnant woman, a man who sits, ominously enough, away from everybody else. These people and their situations were thought out, with multiple overlapping storylines imagined.
   Also, this is no ordinary island. It's clear there's a Big Bad in the jungle. The pilot teases it, but creator J.J. Abrams says that's just so that if it appears in episode nine, you won't dismiss the idea of it as foolish. You know it's there. He'll get back to you. In the meantime, something is killed in the second episode that hints at strange goings-on indeed, completely aside from the Big Bad.
   Abrams and partner Damon Lindelof sat down and seriously thought about how to break free of typical castaway storytelling confines. If you've watched "Alias" at all you know two things: Abrams knows how to spin plates, but he also set up a template that doesn't make viewers demand airtight storytelling. But in "Lost," there's a much more defined road map, and, after the pilot, you immediately want another hour. And the true delight is that after that second hour, you want another one. It has almost everything to do with mystery, a feeling that the island is not just an island, that it has all kinds of possibilities (other people on it, the fact that it may not be anywhere on the original flight path). And the producers are going to tell stories in flashbacks -- a flexible, useful tool -- but they'll also be tweaking the format a bit by, say, getting a glimpse of the father and son while the flashback is ostensibly focusing on the Korean couple (that's just an example; it doesn't actually happen).
   In any case, Abrams and Lindelof didn't just sell a story about castaways. They sold a vision that stretches five years.
   With a lot of luck, "Lost" -- and "Desperate Housewives," too -- will get there.
   SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle Permanent Link | 10:40 AM