Braga Says 'Lost' Opened Door For Genre Serials

Former Star Trek: Enterprise executive producer Brannon Braga said that he has great confidence in the power of science fiction, and he is pleased that in the wake of the success of ABC's Lost, other networks are signing up for new genre series such as his own Threshold.

"Starting out, all we have now are lofty ambitions," admitted Braga, who said that the producers' intention with Threshold was to contain stand-alone stories within each episode, though the series' overall dramatic topic is the gradual accumulation of evidence of an alien invasion by an expert in disasater scenarios. U Daily News noted that although creating serialized shows has been considered a risk, since viewers who miss a week can miss significant developments and such series tend not to play well in reruns, a successful serial can be habit-forming and keep viewers tuning in week after week.

That's what happened in the past with The X-Files and is happening now with Lost, a series developed by ABC Entertainment Television Group chairman Lloyd Braun who ironically once declared that his group had "been actually very careful, as have our producers, to not create a show that is too serialized."

Threshold on CBS will join ABC's remake of The Night Stalker, about ghoulish murders, while the WB's Supernatural follows a family broken up by unexplained horrors.

"'Lost' opened a big door, and I'm grateful to it," said Braga. "Each episode, we want to take the team out, investigate some freaky thing, make it scary, add a piece of the puzzle - and, by the end of the season, a puzzle will be solved. Viewers can appreciate the larger mystery or just tune in and have the (excrement) scared out of them."

Though he admitted that it is difficult to structure such a show, Braga noted that he has "tremendous faith in the sci-fi and horror genres."

The original article is at U Daily News.

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