[Regarding spoilers: I do talk about a few plot points below, but the majority of them are in broad strokes. I mention some of the mysterious elements in the first season of Lost, and the general plot descriptions of a few episodes of Under the Dome. There are also a couple of relatively specific plot points from the show Flashforward. None of these are particularly explicit, and I certainly would not expect them to ruin the shows in question for anybody. However, if you are concerned about knowing anything AT ALL about Lost or Under the Dome (the show, not the book), you may want to avoid reading this article. I would consider this article spoiler safe, though]

The most traditional, popular form for a TV drama is the procedural. Usually, a procedural follows a professional team of some sort (cops, or investigators, or doctors, or lawyers) as they take on a new case every week. It’s a simple, solid formula that is still abundant in network programming because it’s effective. Since each episode is a new story, new viewers can easily jump in and start watching at any moment, and they don’t have to worry about missing an episode from time to time. However, because procedurals follow the same team week-to-week, the viewer starts to feel familiar with the characters on the show. A good procedural is the epitome of “hang-out” television: there’s little commitment on the part of the viewer, but watching the show starts to feel like dropping in on old friends.

When Lost (a show that is decidedly NOT a procedural) began its run, most of the media attention around the show centered on its sci-fi weirdness and dense mythology. Lost’s success was often attributed to its puzzle-box formula, keeping its audience coming back week after week to pick up more pieces, follow more breadcrumbs, and ultimately find out what the hell was happening on this strange island. Several more shows hit the air with a seemingly similar formula, both during and after Lost hit the air, and most of them failed in their first seasons.

The Lost imitators failed because the creators of these shows fundamentally misunderstood what made Lost tick. Sure, the island and its strange mythology is what kept people talking about the show, but it’s not what made it tolerable for over 20 episodes per season. Thinking back to the first season of Lost, the audience learned relatively little about the island: there were whispers in the forest, some sort of “monster,” some wisps of black smoke, a stranded French woman who spoke of a disease, some scary natives, and a mysterious hatch. That’s about it. The mystery elements were certainly intriguing, but not enough to hang a whole show on.

Lost didn’t work because it abandoned episodic storytelling in place of a grand mythology, it worked because it inverted which elements were serialized and which were episodic. While a standard procedural has an episodic story with a few backgrounded character arcs, Lost used every episode to tell a story about a particular character while moving the island story forward in the background.

It also didn’t hurt that the characters on Lost were almost immediately defined in some limited-but-interesting way. Jack was a courageous born leader, Kate had some mysterious past she was running from, Sawyer was a shady racist, Sayid was an intelligent and dangerous former Republican Guard officer, Charlie was a junkie washed-up rockstar, Hurley was sheltered-but-well-meaning, etc. All of this was established in the two-part premiere alone, which also managed to get across the premise of the show (plane crash, weird island, makeshift community) and introduce the monster and the French radio message.

From that point, Lost’s episodic character development allowed the episodes to be individually satisfying while informing future episodes of the show. The flashbacks and character-centric stories added further dimensions to the characters, taking them from “types” to recognizable and unique people. Throughout the first season we learned that Jack was extremely stubborn, Kate had an emotional streak that often superseded her rationality, Charlie was naturally well-meaning and corrupted by his brother’s influence, Sawyer’s rebellious attitude came from distrust and fear of loss, Sayid was forced into his life of violence, Hurley had supernaturally bad luck, etc. While people were less inclined to talk about character backgrounds and development around the water cooler, these stories were genuinely entertaining enough that people didn’t mind subsisting on tiny morsels of mystery breadcrumbs each week.

Of course, what many consider to be Lost’s downfall was its finale, which failed to answer several of the questions raised in prior seasons, or even episodes from the final season. Many were vocally outraged, with certain longtime fans of the show claiming that they wish they had never watched it at all. But in all of this sudden outrage, many were forgetting how entertaining and rewatchable the show was on an episode-to-episode basis, regardless of how many “answers” were provided. Even with its troubles, I would recommend Lost to just about anybody for its characters and its entertainment value alone.

Developers of new Lost-styled shows did not have this in mind. Hot on the heels of Lost’s perceived lack-of-forethought, showrunners stressed in advance of their shows that their mythologies were tightly preconceived. The Flashforward writers in particular talked a lot about their show bible, and how each event and plot point was intricately planned out seasons in advance. This may have been the case, but Flashforward did not live long enough to see it happen. The writers of Flashforward were so focused on their plot structure that they didn’t take the time to make the characters interesting or discernible.

Worse, because the plot was so inflexible, the characters had to be malleable enough to fit into whatever plot point the writers had planned. Joseph Fiennes reverted to alcoholism primarily because his flashforward said he would. Happily engaged John Cho and the lesbian agent have sex while being held hostage, because she needs to be pregnant later for plot reasons. It was a weird case where an ostensibly character-focused show (it centered around the characters and how having a glimpse of their future affects them personally) was hindered by too much of an emphasis on plot elements.

The Event had a similar problem. Plot points were clearly planned out in advance, and the question of what the event was ultimately DID have an answer in the season finale. Throughout the season, though, the audience was told more about what the event WASN’T than what it was. Making the primary reason for tuning into The Event something in which, by design, the audience has no interest/investment, did not lead to compelling television. There may have been aliens and hints at an upcoming war to interest viewers, but the characters were again under-served, and audiences ultimately lost interest.

The most recent show to openly try its hand at the Lost formula is CBS’s Under the Dome. Under the Dome has a lot going for it behind-the-scenes. First of all, it’s based on Stephen King’s recent novel, which was a best seller and received quite a lot of praise (for the record, I have not read Under the Dome, and will not be comparing the series to the book in this article). Secondly, Steven Spielberg is credited as an executive producer. While he doesn’t have the most consistent track record in television, Spielberg’s name still carries a lot of weight.

Most notably, though, is the fact that the television adaptation of Under the Dome is being run by Brian K Vaughan. Vaughan’s most prominent work has been with comic books and graphic novels, and he is the creator of the excellent Y the Last Man series and the apparently superb Saga (I have only read the first issue of Saga, so I cannot speak for its greatness). In television, Vaughan was hired onto Lost in season 3 by showrunner Damon Lindelof, who is a huge fan of Vaughan’s comic work. Vaughan wrote and produced for the show through season 5, and some of his credited episodes (particularly The Shape of Things to Come and Namaste) rank among of the best the series has to offer. Given his pedigree, Vaughan seemed like the perfect person to oversee a new heavily-serialized drama about an ensemble of characters trapped together with no access to the rest of the world.

And yet, Under the Dome suffers from many of the same problems that the other Lost-clones have, in that the characters are simply not very compelling. Since I have not read the book, I have trouble saying whether this is a problem with the source material or just the adaptation, but it’s certainly there. The show is so preoccupied with having its characters talk about the dome that it hasn’t had time to make them interesting. At this point, six episodes in, I can only name 3 characters off the top of my head: Big Jim, Junior, and Barbie. And I can only remember Barbie because it’s a really weird name for a protagonist. As for character traits, here’s what I can come up with so far (using IMDB as a character name guide):

Barbie: Shady, morally compromised, but ultimately good/heroic
Linda: She’s a cop
Angie: ? (I don’t think “she’s been locked up for 5 episodes” counts)
Junior: Crazy
Joe: ? (does “has seizures” count as a trait?)
Phil: ?
Carolyn: ? (I’m seriously not sure they’ve said her name on the show)
Julia: Loves Barbie because he’s around, I guess
Big Jim: Shady, morally compromised, very proud of his hometown, feels a sense of honor, ultimately bad/dangerous
Norrie: ? (see Joe above)
Dodie: Smart, crafty, an underachiever
Ben: Speaks like an 80-year-old’s concept of a teenager
Alice: ?
Reverend Lester: Religious-crazy
Duke: Honorable, compromised, and dead.

Of the characters above, the most defined are Big Jim (the most intriguing character on the show BY A LANDSLIDE), Barbie, Dodie, and Duke. I would still consider Barbie to be more of a type than a fleshed out character at this point, but given that the show is 6 episodes in, that’s excusable. Despite being able to state more about her, Dodie is at best a tertiary character, who has been used primarily as a plot device to explain things about the dome. And Duke died in the first episode.

Under the Dome doesn’t use the flashback/character story structure that Lost does, but it does have an episodic crisis-of-the-week format that keeps the episodes relatively self-contained. In each episode since the pilot, there has been a crisis that the characters have to work together to solve or get through. This week there’s a fire! Now there’s a crazed cop on the loose! A meningitus outbreak! A missile being launched at the dome! A water shortage!

The problem is that the conflicts are resolved within the episodes that introduce them, and there’s no sense of urgency or escalation when it comes to people’s fear of permanent entrapment. Logically, there’s going to come a time when resources are dangerously low, but nobody seems to be worried about these shortages past the episodes in which they are in focus.

I can’t help but feel like CBS is largely to blame for the shortcomings of Under the Dome. Known primarily for procedurals and multi-camera sitcoms that aim as broadly as anything on television, it wouldn’t surprise me if CBS wanted Under the Dome to be as accessible and simplistic as it can be. Beyond the episodic plotlines, Under the Dome has a terrible habit of giving characters too much expository dialogue and explaining things that should be obvious to the audience, out of fear that some dullard will watch and be confused at the simplest plotpoints. When they intercept a message from the military stating that they have a planned to launch a MOAB at the dome, and that it’s been “painted green” for the strike, we have to stop everything to have Barbie explain that MOAB means “mother of all bombs” and that “painted green” is military terminology for a place that has been marked for bombing. He knows this, because he used to be in the military. Another particularly funny bit of obvious dialogue was in this week’s episode, when Dodie explained that rainwater is clean because of the evaporation process. Good. We wouldn’t want any 2nd graders to be confused.

CBS’s desire to make Under the Dome an ongoing series (as opposed to the miniseries it was initially planned as for Showtime) is going to prove detrimental to this show, as well. Les Moonves, the CBS Chairman, was recently quoted as saying “Why can’t they be under the dome for a long period of time? This is television.” Well, aside from the obvious logistical reasons (running out of food and supplies, CBS probably not being okay with a show focused around cannibals), there’s simply not enough to creatively sustain Under the Dome indefinitely. Unlike Lost, there’s really only one central mystery: what is the dome, and where did it come from? Since they presumably won’t answer that until the end of the series, the writers will have to focus on drama within the dome for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, unlike when Lost had to stall during the first half of season 3, the characters in Under the Dome are not currently interesting enough to sustain that kind of show. Under the Dome has nothing but its weekly crises, which will get old very quickly. There’s a reason why the book only takes place over a couple weeks.

There’s a well-known story regarding the behind-the-scenes work on the end of Battlestar Galactica. Ronald Moore, the show’s creator and showrunner, was beating himself up over how to end the series and do justice to all of its mysteries, which he had openly created on-the-fly with no real idea how they would be explained. After thinking long and hard about it, he had an epiphany. The next day, he strolled into the office, walked right up to the whiteboard, and wrote in large letters “IT’S THE CHARACTERS, STUPID!” Moore’s realization was that what they paid off in the plot was relatively inconsequential, as long as they did justice to their characters and gave them the ending they deserved.

While the merits of character-catharsis-over-plot-explanation can be argued in regards to the controversial Battlestar Galactica finale (I would argue that Battlestar is a more plot-heavy show than Lost), Moore was certainly right in understanding that characterization is the most important element to a show’s survival. Even in plot-heavy serialized dramas, characterization is the glue that ties everything together. Its the element that elevates the best shows above the merely-tolerable ones. It makes our sitcoms work. And it’s what keeps us coming back to our favorite procedurals, even when we don’t have a reason to catch every episode.

You can have a successful show without strong characters. You can attract audiences to all sorts of programs based on concept alone. But shows without strong characters rarely last. Hopefully Brian K Vaughan and the writers at Under the Dome will recognize this before its too late.