The Lost Room & depth

I’ve just finished re-watching the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries The Lost Room. I discovered it by chance a year ago and it’s a phenomenal TV show, compelling to the brink of addiction. In themes and levels of mysteriousness, it draws comparisons with Lost but unlike Lost it hasn’t been drawn out to a ridiculous length and subsequently become diluted and confused.

At only six episodes in length The Lost Room is an intense, incredibly deep story. It’s this depth that I admire most. It’s breathtaking just how much back-story and potential for future events there is. Rather than coming across as a show too crammed-full of ideas for its own good, it’s a rich experience that reveals its depth with subtlety and intelligence. I’ve drawn a huge amount of inspiration from this show.

When I think of my writing I don’t want to simply create an intricate, deep world that’s either clumsily exposed or kept from sight. I want to create one that expands beyond the plot and reaches both off into the past and into the future just like The Lost Room. I believe a story should sit perfectly in a moment of time. We should feel like we have come partway through it and that the plot, and the lives of the characters, continues off into the future. I believe that under the surface should be a whole other level that we only get minor glimpses of.

No other TV show that I have come across does this so succinctly and so successfully as The Lost Room and I would benefit greatly from emulating this in my own writing. If I can write something as fantastically hanging in time as The Lost Room I’d be a happy writer.