'Lost' Creator Reveals How His New Sci-Fi Show Will Avoid Repeating the Same Annoying Mistake

‘When are you going to tell us what the f*ck is going on here?’

In 2004, Damon Lindelof transformed television as co-creator and co-showrunner of Lost, the ABC sci-fi drama that helped establish the mystery box genre. Over the course of six seasons, devoted viewers tuned in weekly looking for answers about the strange island where the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 were stranded. But the slow trickle of information infuriated some fans, who were unsatisfied with the show’s final season. Lindelof learned a lot from that experience, and he’s taking a different approach for his latest sci-fi show.

Lindelof is co-creator of the DC Universe series Lanterns, a sci-fi Western buddy cop series following veteran Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) as he trains his possible replacement, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre). At a press conference ahead of Lanterns’ Aug. 16 series premiere on HBO, Lindelof explained that the biggest challenge Lost faced was the network’s desire to keep the hit show going as long as possible.

“We had to aggressively fight for an end date as early as when the show premiered,” Lindelof said. “For a show that had a mystery engine, the audience was saying ‘When are you going to tell us what the fuck 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.’”

Lindelof went in the opposite direction with his 2019 HBO limited superhero series Watchmen, a sequel to the seminal comic from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. While Watchmen’s story spanned decades, Lindelof tied up all its mysteries and character arcs in just nine episodes. Lindelof said Lanterns co-creator and showrunner Chris Mundy has managed to thread the needle with a hybrid approach.

“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,’” Lindelof said. “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.’”

The biggest payoffs in Lost always came from the show’s strong character arcs rather than its sci-fi elements, and Lindelof said the Lanterns writer’s room had the same approach to storytelling.

“It’s all about the characters and their humanity,” he said. “If you start and approach the material and you’re having conversations about rings, planets, aliens, and all that stuff, you’re in the wrong territory. The territory is who are these guys? Where do they come from? What does Hal want? What does John want?”

Lanterns embraces some buddy cop tropes by pairing the cocky veteran Hal with the far more disciplined John, but Lindelof also describes the series as “a love story and a mutual respect story.”

“We did talk a lot about father and son stories,” Lindelof said. “John and Hal are not quite father and son. They’re more akin to brothers — at least that’s the way that it reads sometimes. But they’re both processing this very complicated relationship with their own dads in partnership with one another.”

Lanterns will develop that relationship over the course of eight episodes along with unraveling a mystery tied to a mass shooting in Rushville, Nebraska, that involves dangerous extraterrestrials. HBO has not officially greenlit another season, though John Stewart will appear in James Gunn’s Man of Tomorrow film in 2027.

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The first episode of Lanterns is available to stream on HBO Max. Future episodes will be released on Sundays through Oct. 4.