The new TV season

So it's all about cloning Lost this year, I guess. I love Lost, so this isn't the worst possible scenario. It's certainly better than having every new program be some poorly-scripted "Reality show" passing for real-life entertainment. But nothing I've watched yet compares to the original, in terms of character development, interesting plots or edge-of-your-seat suspense. So why bother?

Well, here's why. It's smelling like there's at least an honest attempt in many of the new shows to write multi-dimensional characters and allow them to grow, to focus on continuity, and to provide a hook (or hooks) to bring the viewers back, week after week. All of which are just fine by me, since they were a large part of what attracted me to Lost in the first place.

Heroes is probably the best of the new. It borrows quite a bit from a genre I happen to know a bit about, but that's OK because most of the umpteen million viewers checking it out don't know comic books like I do. But to the creators' credit, the show isn't just about the new superpower of the week. Sure, seemingly real people find themselves with emergent abilities they may in fact have no wish to have. But if you come back next week, it's because you want to see what happens to the cheerleader who can't be hurt, or the painter whose best work perfectly captures disasters that haven't happened yet (but will). Or because you want to know if there's a dark force behind everything that's happening. And who wouldn't want to know whether New York City will really be destroyed, or if these unlikely heroes can do what their comic book cousins have been doing for decades? Continued next month. I mean, next week!

The jury's still out on 6 Degrees, another NYC-based drama that features a group of strangers whose paths keep crossing in the strangest ways. You know, like the main and supporting characters in Lost keep showing up in each other's flashback segments? There's at least one minor mystery, or hook, in this one: a doubly-locked secret box that a girl on the run is risking her life to guard. Will wanting to know what's inside be enough to draw viewers back for a whole season?

And just in case the connection wasn't obvious enough, ABC's filled the one-hour slot after Lost with The Nine, a concept that deserves points for its uniqueness, at the very least. The first episode shows a botched bank robbery, that was supposed to take 5 minutes (according to the robbers) and actually lasted 52 hours. We see the start of it, and the outcome, but precious little of the 2+ days in between. Then we follow the nine survivors (including one of the bad guys himself, who'd planned the job around the premise "no one gets hurt") in the weeks and months afterward, as pieces of what happened are slowly doled out. I can't think of another show to take that sort of approach as its central conceit, although Sydney Bristol's lost 2 years (in Alias) comes to mind.

And I'm sure there are others, as well. Even Kidnapped, which seems to owe more to 24 than Lost, has its share of mysteries and secret pasts, as well as a weekly dose of action and suspense. The networks have clearly decided that the existence of weekly continuity, typically a surefire repellent that keeps potential viewers from sampling a new show after its debut, is now a positive that will keep everyone coming back. We should know if they're right or not, over the next six months or so.