(Note: May contain spoilers for FlashForward, Heroes, V and several other shows that are all inferior to Lost.)

The wildly popular and much-obsessed-over television series, Lost, has launched into its much-hyped final season. When it first premiered in fall 2004, it became an overnight sensation and set the standard for what the speculative sci-fi genre should be like.

What began with the now-simple premise of 48 people stranded on an island in the South Pacific after a plane crash became the catalyst for one of the most dense, convoluted, and mythology-heavy stories to ever survive on television for several successful years. Five seasons, ten Dharma stations, and countless instances of Sawyer uttering “son of a bitch!” later, the ABC series has still remained a cultural phenomenon, and based on how its final year goes, may go down as one of the greatest scripted television shows of all time.

It came with little surprise that, following the show’s explosive success, serialized speculative fiction suddenly became the hot new thing. Several networks rushed to create similar shows to cash in on the new craze.

The 2005 fall television season saw an immediate manifestation of this effort. NBC had Surface, a series about the mysteries of underwater creatures; cancelled after 15 episodes. CBS launched Threshold, which chronicled secret government explorations of contact with aliens; cancelled after 13 episodes. Even ABC themselves joined in with Invasion, another show about aliens; cancelled after a comparably impressive full season.

Then, in 2006, a much stronger effort came along. NBC’s Heroes, which features an ensemble cast of characters dealing with newfound superhuman abilities, made a splash almost as big as that of Lost. Unfortunately, a creatively and commercially successful first season was followed by a sophomore slump, and then a horrendous third year.

Now in its fourth year, the show has reached critical levels of unwatchability and is on the brink of getting cancelled. Were it to somehow survive, the established laziness of the writers almost guarantees that the series would continue to repeat its unbelievably abused story devices. Claire would continue to have daddy issues, the villain Sylar would never be defeated, Nathan would die (but not really) at the end of every season, and Hiro would somehow never have access to his time-travel powers at times where it would move the plot. At the end of the day, with steadily declining ratings and an even quicker-declining story quality, Heroes was an unfortunate failure.

One would think that the networks would have learned their lesson by now. Unfortunately, there has been a recent resurgence in the effort to find the next Lost.

In the fall, ABC premiered FlashForward, a look at what happens when the entire world blacks out for 137 seconds and during that time, gets a look at a moment of their lives six months from then. While the concept is intriguing and the cast is filled with big names (including Lost’s Dominic Monaghan and Sonya Walger) the show has failed to retain interest. It is expected to suffer a dramatic drop in its already fledging ratings when it returns after the Olympics, having been off the air for three months. The same can be said about NBC’s recreation of the 1983 series V, which deals with seemingly friendly alien visitors that are quietly planning an invasion. V only managed to air four episodes in November, far too few to gather enough momentum to survive its four-month-long winter hiatus.

Despite all these disappointments, the networks keep trying to find the next big imitator. It could be argued that this situation is comparable to the string of young-adult fantasy novels that came about after Harry Potter became huge, none of which ever managed to capture both the commercial success and critical praise of Rowling’s books.

The lesson that the networks need to learn is to stop trying to duplicate Lost. The success of the show is a freak accident – an isolated incident. Creating a serialized show today that is both a respected cult hit and a mainstream success is very difficult. It requires an innovative idea, not simply a tired formula of ongoing and sloppily planned mysteries, cliffhangers, and an abundance of shallow twists.

Though considering the decisions these networks have made over the past few years (cancelling any decent Joss Whedon series, continuing Scrubs after a conclusive series finale, putting Jay Leno at 10 p.m.), it would take a miracle for that lesson to be learned.

Reach Weekender Editor Ivan Vukovic at weekender@dailyuw.com.