This gets back to game design eventually, I promise.

If anyone has paid any attention to television this fall, as the new season kicks in, you’ll have noted that it’s been a little wierd. After a seeming eternity of every show being a bad Law and Order ripoff, with half of them being cancelled before midseason, for the first time, the networks are taking crazy chances.

Invasion (aliens in a hurricane). E-Ring (life at the Pentagon). Surface (aliens in South Carolina that don’t like scuba divers). Threshold (apparently Nazi aliens). Prison Break (how the hell can this go 2+ seasons?)

The culprit is, according to this article, Lost:

Now that ABC’s two monster hits [Lost and Desperate Housewives] have dominated TV ratings, writers in every genre of television are reporting that networks have thrown open the doors, even to the craziest ideas….Networks are embracing high-concept premises, large ensemble casts, multiple plotlines, parabolic character arcs, and cliffhanger episodes that demand viewer patience from week to week – a kind of storytelling that has been distinctly out of fashion since the era of “Twin Peaks.”

Excellent! Provided, um, that they actually turn out to be any good. And so far, the jury’s out. Of the shows I mentioned (all of which I caught the pilot of), Threshold is the one I’ll most likely watch again. Sadly, this is because it has a perverted dwarf. I’m not making this up.

And while completely ludicrous, Prison Break has a shot, too, if someone in programming wises up and realizes that scheduling a male-demographic serial against Monday Night Football is bone stupid.

There are a couple of observations here. The first is that it’s interesting that there’s at least 3, if not more, shows that were obviously trying to riff on Lost’s success, but none that are really trying to reach Desperate Housewives. Sound familiar? Yep, we have the same thing here, with a seemingly endless array of shops trying to make Vietnam shooters in a completely cutthroat shark tank while Maxis is free to make Sims expansion packs with only token competition, despite the fact that doing so would have a much lower bar of entry. I’m guessing lots of men are making the programming decisions over there, too.

The second is a concern that these shows may not really understand what they’re attempting to copy. It reminds me of when Seinfeld became a hit, and everyone tried to make a ‘Seinfeld’ clone, but seemed to miss the point of it. Most of the copycats seemed to think that what made Seinfeld great was that the characters were self-absorbed jerks. They failed to realize that the jerks had to be likeable for you to tune in, and that the real magic was the writing which tied each story arc in the episode together in the end, often in perverse ways.

Do these new sci-fi shows really ‘get’ what they’re trying to copy? I don’t see it yet, although to be honest, I’d be hard pressed to pin down what, if anything, Lost has that makes it so supreme that could be applied to different settings. My favorite Lost-type show has been The 4400. I think in both cases, the shows were very much about the mystery that surrounds not only The Event, but also The Humans. Invasion, Threshold and Surface just seem like they’re in a hurry to get the mystery over with.

Games have this too. It’s easy to fix stuff that isn’t broken, or misunderstand what makes a game fun. Dungeon Siege was, technically, far superior to Diablo in terms of UI, but it made the game almost play itself, and some of those convenience factors were rolled back in the sequel.

So all of this is a long prelude to the design question of the week. What game can you think of that was a sequel or a copy of another game, that completely missed ‘the point’ of what they were trying to be faithful to?