Read This: Breaking Bad helped Damon Lindelof let go of people who hated the Lost finale
Not long after J.J. Abrams paid penance for his abuse of lens flare, Damon Lindelof has written an essay in which he attempts to end, once and for all, any further argument over the Lost finale—a confession suggesting that the co-creators of Lost are rapidly trying to unburden themselves in order to ascend. You know, like in the finale of that TV show Lindelof keeps catching shit about.
Lindelof was reminded anew of how people didn’t like the Lost finale—and how they like to remind Lindelof of that—when Sunday’s Breaking Bad prompted a fresh Twitter hell of people taking shots at him, because that’s what Twitter is for: the spontaneous discussion of shared cultural experiences, and the immediate ranking of them as better or worse than other cultural experiences. Then you find the person who created that loser art so you can tell him he’s a loser. (This is what is known as “fandom.”)
As he’s become inured to this sort of abuse, Lindelof retweeted many of those criticisms. “Hey @DamonLindelof THATS how you do a series finale. Not whatever the hell that crap was you did with #Lost,” wrote one person whose first thought, upon completion of a show he enjoyed very much, was how to express his anger about another series that ended three years ago. “@DamonLindelof how do worthless fuckheads like you get hired when there are people with actual talent like Vince Gilligan around?” wrote another human being with fresh, unsullied insight into the workings of the entertainment industry.
But perhaps realizing that Twitter is not always the place for well-reasoned responses to things, Lindelof—with the typically self-deprecating acknowledgement that he was similarly using Breaking Bad to “narcissistically whine about the perceived shortcomings of my own work"—wrote in The Hollywood Reporter about how he’d also set out to talk about Breaking Bad, only to find himself talking about Lost again, for some reason.