The Keeper

AN INTERESTING article by Edward Wyatt in the NY Times Arts & Leisure section profiles a guy who -- depending on your perspective -- has one of the coolest jobs in TV, or one with the most potential for wackness.

Meet the guy who keeps everything straight on LOST, Gregg Nations:

A co-producer and the show’s longtime script coordinator, Mr. Nations has become the keeper of what has been found on “Lost,” charged with tracking everything that has happened and will happen to the characters on and off the island, in addition to charting the many mysterious characteristics of the island itself.

While most television series maintain a so-called bible — a guide to characters and plotlines that are developed by the creators but revealed over multiple seasons — few if any shows have twists and turns as byzantine as those on “Lost.”

And unlike many jobs, which get easier as the material becomes more familiar, this one has become exponentially more complicated and challenging with each new episode. That will be particularly true this season, when the island itself starts moving through time as the people who seem to be the guardians of its secrets try to protect it from a shadowy conspirator who could have darker uses for its powers.

Enter Mr. Nations, who has now compiled an archive that, were he ever to print it out, might — as he put it in an interview at the “Lost” production offices on Disney’s Burbank studio lot — give “War and Peace” a run for its money.

Just how long the entire document is he does not know; he has never printed it out in full, in part because he and his secretive bosses do not want copies falling into the wrong hands. But he has multiple electronic copies, which he keeps in undisclosed locations.