Obviously I'm not a Lost fan, and I stopped watching the show after I tried out the first two seasons on DVD. But I think Emily Nussbaum's piece on how the show became "a hit series about the difficulties of finding an ending to a hit series" is useful reading given the rise of intense, networked fan communities, and their ability to collectively impact the success or failure, the life or death, of a series:
Built as it was from video-game aesthetics, comic-book plots, and science fiction, Lost had always included witty internal acknowledgments of its own geek appeal, including characters who acted as stand-ins for Lost fans. Hurley began the series as an actual character, but he quickly became our avatar: the sci-fi geek, full of Star Wars references, loyal and positive, like Cuselof’s ideal. In contrast, Arzt, the wicked fan, was a science teacher full of gripes, but he hilariously blew to bits in season one. Later, we got snarky Miles and Frank Lapidus, an outsider who made bemused remarks about the melodramas around him.
This was fun in the early seasons, when Darlton felt like they were in communion with their audience, but as the show began its final slide, these characters increasingly operated more as venting devices for fan frustrations—a way for the writers to let us know they heard us, but also to joke about logic problems or clichés instead of addressing them. The snarky chorus stood in contrast to the main ensemble, which, with a few exceptions, devolved from archetypal (but layered) characters into action figures, their aims narrowing, like video-game heroes, to a single goal: Find Sun, find Jin, find Claire, return to the island, get off the island.The job, it turns out, has changed. It used to be that you were responsible for writing a show, or for directing it, or getting, I don't know, a plane's-worth of clothes that looked like they'd been through a plane crash and a lot of tropical sunshine. Now you are doing all of those things with the knowledge your'e being watched over by what is effectively a highly devoted, motivated, team of fact-checkers who have actual power over you other than writing cranky letters and blog posts. If they get too displeased with you, you lose your job because your show goes off the air.
Commercial pressure's always been there, of course. But while in the past, writers, creators, etc., have had to work within broad frameworks for what audiences like, now audiences have the capability, and apparently the desire, to make clear the minutiae of what they like, in real-time as shows air. I don't know how you retain creative control in those circumstances. And if you do retain it, how are you sure that the creative vision you're pursuing is yours, rather than crowdsourced?