Carlton Cuse Believes Television’s Best Storytelling Is Happening on Streaming

It would be almost impossible to discuss the evolution of modern television without discussing Carlton Cuse.

Most viewers know him as the executive producer and co-showrunner who helped guide Lost through six seasons of mysteries, mythology, polar bears, time travel, and the kind of week-to-week cultural conversation that has become distressingly rare. 

Lost won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series, and Cuse’s work on the phenomenon helped establish the showrunner as a recognizable creative force rather than a mysterious name buried in the credits.

But Lost represents only one part of a career that has stretched across genres and decades.

Cuse co-created The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Nash Bridges, and Martial Law before helping transform television with Lost. 

He later developed Bates Motel with Kerry Ehrin, served as showrunner on The Strain, and worked on Colony, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Locke & Key, and the powerful Apple TV limited series Five Days at Memorial. His film credits include San Andreas and Rampage.

In other words, even those who somehow missed Lost have almost certainly encountered a Carlton Cuse production somewhere along the way. The man has been quietly shaping television while some people were apparently staring at a blank wall.

Cuse attended the 2026 Italian Global Series Festival in Rimini, where he joined Oscar-winning writer and filmmaker John Ridley for “Lost in Fellini,” a conversation about Federico Fellini’s influence on contemporary film and television. 

His appearance came one day after the festival presented him with its Maximo Excellence Award, recognizing his immense contributions to serialized television.

Considering how much of his career has been devoted to expanding what long-form television can accomplish, the honor felt less like a ceremonial festival gesture than overdue acknowledgment.

Although I was in Italy for the festival, scheduling forced our conversation onto Zoom. Cuse was gracious enough not to hold that against me, particularly after I showed him the Adriatic view from my hotel room.

We discussed television’s long fight for legitimacy, the cross-genre storytelling that connects much of his work, why Lost would be extraordinarily difficult to produce within today’s industry, and whether Five Days at Memorial could become the beginning of something larger.

For the longest time, television really wasn’t invited to the festival table. Now, showrunners who aren’t necessarily presenting a particular project are being invited to share their experiences with people from all over the world. Has television finally earned its place at the table?

I hope so. I believe television is really the place where the most powerful and innovative sorts of scripted dramatic storytelling are happening right now.

Movies, yes, there is a small subset of geniuses like Christopher Nolan who get to make phenomenal movies, but a lot of movies are really driven by strict financial dictates.

We don’t have that whole class of really engaging, sophisticated dramas that used to exist in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. They’ve all migrated to streaming.

There’s this convergence of the forms, and I think it’s actually overdue that festivals recognize that because some of our very best storytellers are working in television.

Television also seems to drive some of society’s best conversations, especially with long-form storytelling. When a show is released episodically, people can engage with it for weeks or months, whereas a movie often seems to arrive and disappear.

I agree. I love seeing the phenomenon of Widow’s Bay arise, but you can also have a show like Chernobyl, which is so informative, evocative, and important. It makes you rethink a lot of things and has a kind of cultural significance.

I tried to do that with Five Days at Memorial, which I made with John Ridley. It’s wonderful to see the way that show, living on the Apple TV platform, is still in the public conversation. People write about it.

They find it and discover it. It comes up in conjunction with other crises and issues like medical shortages and disasters.

I love the fact that high-end television is, in my view, really the most compelling place to see stories right now.

I love that you mentioned Widow’s Bay because your history intersects with that kind of storytelling through Lost, Bates Motel, and Colony. You’ve done a lot of fantastical storytelling. Do you see yourself returning to that realm?

The thing I like the most is what I refer to as cross-genre storytelling.

I very consciously thought of Bates Motel as a romantic tragedy crossed with a pulpy crime drama. Those were the two fundamental narrative elements that drove the story, but it obviously had horror elements that connected it to the movie Psycho.

With Lost, when we were telling the story, we were very aware that it was an adventure story crossed with a science fiction story.

Widow’s Bay is wonderful cross-genre storytelling. It has the small town with horror and fantasy all connected, and it’s just great. I love cross-genre storytelling, and that’s very much a part of what I want to continue to do.

Lost was one of the biggest series ever to engage viewers with an ongoing mystery. Audiences spent years wondering what would happen next and waiting for every new episode.

Widow’s Bay has generated some of that same excitement. Is there still room in our culture for a long-running, multi-season story that keeps audiences engaged that way?

I think there are some systemic challenges that exist right now. The biggest one is the amount of time between seasons of television and the process of making television.

We were churning out a Lost script every eight days. We started a new episode every eight days. We made 24 episodes in the first season, 23 in the second, and 22 in the third. We were starting a new season every year.

In streaming right now, it’s very hard to turn around a new season of television in less than two years. That is really tough for an audience to wait that long and carry forward an ongoing story.

I think that, in turn, is going to change the way streamers program what they make as they realize there are these big drop-offs in the subsequent seasons of television shows.

It’s a challenge. There are people trying to solve for it. John Wells is doing a great job with The Pitt, really trying to take the network model, stick it into the streaming world, and create an effective hybrid where they’re making a lot more of the show.

Even so, it’s only 15 episodes as opposed to 24 episodes a season, and it isn’t as immediate as network television was.

Network television doesn’t really have the central audience position that it once did, and the networks also don’t have the resources to tell those stories.

It’s amazing that we got to tell Lost on a network and had the money to execute that show. I think it would be very difficult for a network to do that now.

Opportunity is the biggest thing that limits it.

Places like HBO are still committed, with Game of Thrones or House of the Dragon, to intense, long-form storytelling. They count on the audience coming back, and they spend money to re-engage that audience when they release a new season.

It’s just much harder because the streaming environment is different from what we had in the network television era.

I want to circle back to Five Days at Memorial. You mentioned that people rediscover the series whenever another disaster occurs. Have you ever thought about approaching Apple with something like Five Days of another event?

The initial five days of any significant crisis are often when the entire world is watching. It feels as if there could be an anthology there, somewhat like American Crime Story.

Yes, exactly. I think that’s a great idea.

I’m going to turn that around. Thank you.

I would love that. What do you think people who watch and consume television today should understand about the medium, particularly if they still hesitate to view it with the same respect as film?

I would hope there doesn’t exist a prejudice against television that used to exist, which is that it was a lesser form of storytelling than cinema. I think those days are gone.

Streaming is now the convergence of movies and television, and some of the very best storytelling you can see is happening on television. Watch Andor.

I feel like there’s nothing as uplifting as finding a great show on television and getting to watch it, either week after week or even binge it. I prefer week after week.

The very best narrative storytelling is happening in streaming right now. We’re fortunate to have some really talented, compelling storytellers working in that medium, and it’s a great time to be a watcher of television.

Cuse’s preference for weekly television should come as no surprise to anyone who remembers what it was like to watch Lost as it aired. The experience did not end when an episode’s credits rolled. 

It continued through conversations, theories, arguments, message boards, podcasts, and the increasingly elaborate attempts viewers made to determine whether every background object was another clue.

That communal experience has become harder to create, but Cuse clearly doesn’t believe audiences have lost their appetite for it. 

The greater problem is an industry that expects viewers to remain emotionally invested during gaps of two years or more, often without any certainty that the story will be allowed to reach a conclusion.

His comparison between Lost and today’s productions was particularly striking. Lost was visually ambitious, narratively complex, filmed in Hawaii, and produced at a pace that now sounds almost impossible.

The team delivered more than 20 episodes each year while maintaining the momentum necessary to keep viewers theorizing between installments.

Streaming promised television creators greater freedom, but that freedom has come with fewer episodes, longer production cycles, and an increasingly fragile relationship with audiences. 

Cuse’s enthusiasm for The Pitt reflects what makes that series feel so refreshing: It is not merely reviving a broadcast-style episode count but restoring continuity between the people making a show and the people eager to watch it.

Cuse may believe the best narrative storytelling is happening on streaming, but his comments also serve as a reminder that quality alone does not create a television phenomenon. Viewers need consistency, opportunity, and enough time with a story to allow it to become part of their lives.

Lost understood that. So did Bates Motel. Five Days at Memorial demonstrated how even a limited series can remain relevant years after its release when it confronts questions society has not finished asking.

And should Apple eventually announce Five Days of something else, let the record show that the idea was born during a Zoom call between Los Angeles and Riccione. Stranger things have happened in Carlton Cuse’s television universe.