TV's Trouble With the Human Condition

On "Lost" and how to tell a story of diversity.

There are many things that the series Lost did uniquely, and many things it did uniquely well, but over the last couple of years I’ve been giving one such quality a lot of thought. Where, I wondered, are the new shows with a cast of characters as diverse as the one in Lost?

First, a qualification: when I talk about a diverse cast of characters, I don’t just mean actors from various backgrounds. I mean a show that deals with a variety of cultural backgrounds, that explores the clashes and co-operations that emerge when myriad religious, cultural, and political worldviews collide, and which examines our shared humanity and how that whole is built out of its wildly differing parts.

A prerequisite for such a show to work is having a narrative scale big enough to explore multiple backgrounds and stories. Granted, Lost is occasionally baggy, and at times in its middle season the looseness of its plotting threatens to entirely unravel, but for the most part its huge scale is justified. This is…