62 Quotes by Carlton Cuse

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The mistake they made was hanging everything on the question of who killed Laura Palmer. In our show there is not one overriding question comparable to that. There are a series of mysteries: what is the nature of the island, what is the monster, what is the hatch, who are the mysterious 'other people'? Making sure that some of those mysteries are answerable over time is the way to prevent that frustration.

The most difficult story that I've ever been involved in breaking on any of my shows was 'The Constant' episode of 'Lost,' which was when Desmond was consciousness-traveling.

That is very much going to be at the forefront of all the new labor negotiations, particularly with the Writers Guild, because writers are at the center of television series production and all of these new ideas are ultimately writer-based. Right now, our involvement in this is about being involved in the cutting edge of these emerging technologies and learning how it works.