Carlton Cuse
Carlton Cuse
Arthur Carlton Cuseis an American screenwriter, showrunner and producer, best known as an executive producer and screenwriter for the American television series Lost, for which he made the Time magazine list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. Cuse is considered a pioneer in transmedia storytelling...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth22 March 1959
CountryUnited States of America
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When you're a storyteller, part of the process of storytelling is the kind of communion you form with the audience to whom you're telling your story. If some segment of the audience doesn't like that story, it doesn't feel good.
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Tragedy is a great storytelling form. It worked extremely well for Shakespeare. It worked extremely well for Jim Cameron with Titanic.
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The show is the mother ship, but I think with all the new emerging technology, what we've discovered is that the world of Lost is not basically circumscribed by the actual show itself.
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Being a showrunner meant writing and producing a television show, period, but with 'Lost,' suddenly it became part of the job to promote and be the face of the brand. In a weird way, the story was as much the star as any of the actors, so people wanted to hear from us.
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The thing we love most about Hurley is he's somehow able to say what people are saying in their living rooms just about the time people are saying it. We thought everyone's expectation would be for her to have a black husband. We wanted to confound everyone's expectation. Everyone would be looking for the 50-year-old black guy.
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Television used to be made much more in a vacuum; the only feedback the audience had for a long time was in a Nielsen number that would arrive sometime after the show had been broadcast. And now, people are just completely engaged on so many levels, and I think that you have to find a way as a show creator to follow your own compass.
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Sometimes the fans want it both ways, of course. They want to feel like they're influencing the show, and at the same time, they want to think that showrunners have the story all mapped out in our brains. But it can't be both. In truth, we were usually far ahead of the fan feedback.
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We purposely design the show with a big amount of ambiguity so people can theorize about what a certain scene means. This allows the fans to participate in the process of discovery.
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If we lived in a time where people couldn't watch 'Lost' on Hulu or record it on their DVR, we wouldn't necessarily have succeeded. We need people to be able to catch up. Now you choose when you watch TV. We wouldn't have survived in the old days because people would have missed episodes.
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'Lost' is driving toward an ending, and that ending is: Are these people getting off this island? What is the nature of this island? What is going to happen to them? What is their ultimate fate? What is their ultimate destiny? Those questions need to get answered.
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Twin Peaks' looms large to me as cautionary tale,
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TV showrunners have become known entities to people who watch television in the way that movie directors have been known to filmgoers for a long time. When I started out as a writer and producer in television, I never had the slightest expectation that fame would be part of the job.
We were really surprised, but really pleased, that that did not get spoiled.
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When 'Lost' was over, we expected that there'd be some people who'd really like it and other people who wouldn't. The Emmy nominations are an indication to us that there were a fair number of people who did like the way we concluded our story.