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They get away with their bizarre universe through the classic technique of unpeeling the onion, revealing layers over time. The smoke monster might have been a little much to swallow right off the bat, but after a season and a half of polar bears, mystery hatches, and Others, we were ready to accept it as part of our weekly visits to the island. For that matter, when the mystery and the mythology grow frustrating, they unpeel a little more character. We discover Locke's father issues, Kate's father issues, Claire's father issues - pretty much everyone's father issues. Assuming these two stick the landing, and I'm betting that they do, Lindelof and Cuse belong amongst the top ranked show runners of the decade.

Of course, another name shows up in Lost's credits, a person who admits he has little to do with the direction of the show, and that person is JJ Abrams. He may not have much to do with Lost, but he's just as important a name in mythology programming because of a little show called Alias.

Now Alias is as renowned for its downward spiral as it is for its legendary first two seasons. But what a couple of seasons they are. Lost gets a lot of criticism for being confusing, but it's "See Spot run" compared to Alias. I tried, time and again, to watch the show during its first few acclaimed years, but I could never figure out what was going on. Finally, once TV on DVD became the hot thing, I started from episode one to see what the fuss was about. The fuss was this; Abrams had created a show with layers of conspiracy, multiple agendas, convoluted character dynamics, and a somewhat supernatural mythology, just to keep things interesting. He doesn't dumb things down, nor does the pace slow for those first couple of seasons. He plows forward, full speed ahead, and expects you to keep up.

This asks a lot of a viewer, especially for a medium considered to be passive. It certainly gives the audience credit. In a business where the powers that be think viewers need a laugh track to know where the jokes are, and that each episode needs to reset, Abrams throws all such condescension aside and gives us credit, as viewers, to be able to think and figure out what's going on. And though, for whatever reason, late era Alias, not to mention Abrams' Fringe, is much simpler, Abrams shows us that we can enjoy a common denominator that's much higher than the networks normally give us.

The next names, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, accomplished several things this past decade with their masterpiece Battlestar Galactica. I'd say what seems like the simplest, or perhaps least impressive, accomplishment is that they take the core of a silly '70s relic, and realize the potential that the original's show runner Glen A. Larson can't find.

The show is, after all, a post apocalyptic tale of survival and, while Larson gives us singing aliens, daggets, and cowboy cylons, Moore and Eick explore the psychological ramifications of being among the handful of survivors of a devastating, almost complete cataclysm. A few thousand people left from a society of twelve planets, all holed up in a handful of space ships, always on the run, living with the threat of extinction, with no end in sight. It's not pretty, nor should it be. Moore and Eick offer little hope for our survivors. Any less would be a cheat. This is a deadly existence, and the stakes are the highest they could be. The seed of hope may exist, but the road to realizing that hope leaves a trail of compromise and blood behind it.

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