Early on in the life of Pax Culturati, I published a compilation of tweets from writer/producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach (“The Middleman,” “Lost,” “Jake 2.0,” “Medium”). in which he revealed the secrets to being a successful staff writer on somebody else’s TV show. Click here for that, but in brief, it requires humility and a respect for authority (sound familiar?)
Luckily for all of us, as shown in his tweets, Grillo-Marxuach also has the soul of a teacher, and anyone who loves TV and wonders about how the sausage gets made needs to follow his blog, The Grillo-Marxuach Experimental Design Bureau.
It is there that he has now now done all of us who love TV an enormous favor by writing a lengthy, fascinating post detailing his two years as a staff writer on the hit ABC 
drama “Lost.”
Airing on ABC from the fall of 2004 until the spring of 2010, “Lost” chronicled the survivors of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815, which crashed on a tropical island rife with mysteries and secrets. The survivors’ lives also wound up being intertwined, both before and after the crash.
If you want to get some background on “Lost,” ABC still has a site up here; and Wikipedia has a page here; and there’s “Lostpedia: The ‘Lost’ Encyclopedia” here.
Or you can just work your way through Grillo-Marxuach’s account, which is enormously instructive not just in terms of “Lost,” but in the way TV shows are created and produced (often, it’s a lot less organized than you think).
“Lost” fans might also get some answers to questions, like this one:
On question number two. [The island] is not purgatory. It was never purgatory. It will never be purgatory.
Even after watching the series finale following a four-year absence from any exposure to the show, it was pretty clear to me that only after clearing up whatever insanity was happening on the island did Jack die… and then found himself in a pan-denominational spiritual halfway house where his father’s spirit explained that — because the events of the island were so significant to the ensemble of Lost — they had all been brought here to wait for one another so that they would all ascend together. Frankly, I found it to be a nice spiritual grace note, but it most certainly was not a confirmation that the island was purgatory.
There, now you know. Go with God.
Click here for the rest of “The Lost Will and Testament of Javier Grillo-Marxuach.”
(If you don’t want to read the whole thing — and why not, for Pete’s sake? — click here for some bullet points, courtesy Yahoo! Entertainment.)
Images: Courtesy Touchstone TV; The Grillo-Marxuach Experimental Design Bureau blog
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