When Did Lore Replace Story?

The Homework of Pop Culture

I don’t know when it happened but at some point in the last twenty years a group of filmmakers became what I like to call the ‘backstory brigade’. The core example I remember was in the TV show Lost, the central premise of which was that every episode told the story of one of the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island, at the same time as telling a story about their past before the crash happened in flashback. This was later subverted to be a flashforward and then a flash … err, after? It was weird and infuriating in the end but the dual story method was a fun one at first, whereby the story in the past explained the story in the present, or vice versa, and created unexpected twists and turns. Walkabout, The Long Con and Expose are great episodes that are examples of this format where one of the stories sets an assumption that the other timeline upends. Christopher Nolan’s sophmore effort Memento ustilises a similar dual timeline format to tell an increasingly complex and back-to-front narrative. What this earlier reliance on backstory for story did though was at least still contain the story in the episode. Today, however, there seems to be less of a need for that.

With the advent of prestige television (like Lost) there came the drive for a show to have one long continuous narrative rather than lots of individual episodes that are self-contained stories, so as to drive return reviewings week-on-week. Even episodic comedy shows had adopted the format with a show like Friends becoming more like a soap opera each season thanks to Ross and Rachel. What this meant was that if you missed an episode you had to catch up. “Previously on Lost” became a gag at one point given that the ‘here’s what you missed’ section of the pre-title sequence was getting longer than the inciting incident of the episode. Lost also took great delight in hiding significant story information (purely because the show runners had no answers, it turned out) but liked to allude to mysterious ideas behind everything (a method JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof referred to as ‘Mystery Box Storytelling’). This drove an obsessive devotion in a largely pre-social media audience, who took to forums and their water-coolers to pore over every detail, hint and clue about the hatch, the numbers, the smoke monster, the Dharma Initiative, the…