From KCRW in Santa Monica, this is The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell. Welcome to the treatment.

Ever since the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 crashed a couple years ago and gave us a TV series loss,

we've seen nuts to the prisoner, the Old Testament, Marvel Comics,

two of its executive producers, Damon Lindelof, who was one of the creators,

and Carlton Cues are here to talk about the show.

Guys, thanks so much for doing this.

Thanks so much for having us.

Glad to be here. It's fascinating to me because I spent a great deal of time just to prepare for this hitting a bunch of the blogs last night.

And the level of obsession that this show has engendered, how shocked were you guys from this start to happen?

Incredibly shocked.

You know, we sort of went into this trying to make a fairly impossible television show idea possible.

And sort of everything that came after was, you know, a remarkably pleasant surprise.

And the first thing, you know, as soon as the pilot aired

almost, in fact, there was a web community building around the show before the show even came

on the air. People were sort of studying every frame of it and kind of trying to derive meaning

from it and instantly sort of theorizing about it. And it became this sort of, you know, a pop culture

phenomenon almost, you know, as soon as it was born. Nobody thought that loss was going to survive

at all. I mean, everyone's best estimate was it was going to be 12 episodes and out. And that actually

was very liberating for us. It basically allowed us to say, well, we're just going to make a show

that we think is really cool. And in doing so, we violated all sorts of rules about television that you're, you know, things you're not supposed to be able to do, like have a large and sprawling cast, tell very complicated, heavily serialized storytelling, include philosophical meandering, have characters who are inherently not sympathetic.

You discover that they've murdered people.

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