Are you looking for a new show to binge-watch? Do you like shows with mysteries and intrigue? Lost might be the show for you. Lost is one of my favorite shows and I think that it is sometimes overlooked and underrated by people in the modern day. Today I’d like to clear Lost’s name and explain why it is very underrated.
What is Lost?
Lost is a science fiction adventure drama series which aired on ABC from 2004 to 2010, with a total of 121 roughly hour long episodes over six seasons. It centers around an ensemble cast of survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious tropical island. Throughout the story, these survivors, played by actors such as Matthew Fox, Evangelline Lily, and Josh Holloway, learn to survive on their own, and uncover the secrets of the island.
While it might be commonplace now, when Lost first aired, the only shows which followed serialized plots were soap operas such as Days of Our Lives or General Hospital, in which the events of the previous episode directly influenced the events of the next episode. We think of this as the norm now, but broadcasters worried that if viewers missed previous episodes, they would be too confused and stop watching. The way soap operas got away with this was making the situations carry over, but the relationships between characters change from episode to episode.
WIth the dawn of on-demand video and DVD rental, and the rise of reality shows such as Survivor and Big Brother, show creators Jeffrey Lieber, J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof saw an opportunity to create a serialized series whose situations changed from episode to episode, and drew up the idea of Lost. Initially, this was met with some pushback from ABC, who saw this as a risky move, so many elements of soap operas were added to the structure of the show. This included the heavy use of flashbacks, and the use of an ensemble cast. These elements, which were used to make the show less serialized, fortunately became core parts of Lost’s identity, and are certainly part of its massive success.
What’s So Great About It?
These soap opera elements, flashbacks and ensemble casts, are a huge part of Lost’s identity. As for the ensemble cast, the show rejected having a main character, instead focusing on roughly 12-15 characters which changed from season to season. As characters died or left the show for varying reasons, new characters were promoted from side characters to members of the ensemble cast. Each episode would center around the journey of one character. Not only did this allow for each episode to be viewed on its own without having seen every episode before, it also allowed viewers to choose favorite characters to watch specific episodes for.
Before we describe the flashbacks, I should warn you that the rest of the article will contain mild spoilers. If you are interested in watching this show and you are especially afraid of being spoiled, now would be the time to click off. However, if you continue to read you will not be so spoiled you can’t watch the show anymore. I just need to go over small things from the first few episodes of the show.
The show takes place after a plane crash on a remote island, but it is revealed in episode 1 that the flight took off from Sydney, Australia. However, there is only one Australian member of our main cast. This type of reveal is common in this show, where a fact is revealed which puts into question the background of our main characters. With this, the audience is left to wonder: How did our characters get to Australia and why? It may seem inconsequential, but these questions led to the best parts of the show. During an episode focusing on one character, after each commercial break, the show would feature an extended flashback of their life before the plane crash. During these flashbacks, the show would answer mysteries such as how the characters arrived in Australia. These flashbacks led to some of the most creative moments in the show, such as the action packed K-drama flashbacks of the Korean characters Sun and Jin, or the Grey’s Anatomy – esque medical drama flashbacks of the surgeon Jack.
Finally, the most unique and innovative aspect of Lost is its mysteries. While the show could have easily been a linear, formulaic drama, Lost is anything but that. The show centers around its characters discovering mysteries surrounding the supernatural nature of the island they crash landed on, and these mysteries to the characters become mysteries to the audience. The show is packed with hidden details and mysterious clues relating to the nature of the island. As one example, the Lost team bought an ad slot for the season finale FOR THEIR OWN SHOW to advertise the fictional airline Oceanic Airlines, which contained clues for the mysteries that were solved by the characters during the same episode of the commercial. This is unheard of even now, and it was a huge reason for the success of the show.
Criticisms
Even for all of its successes, however, the show was not without its flaws. As the show went on, the mysteries became grander and grander in scale and more and more complex. The show eventually fell into the trap that it was so scared of falling into, where each episode required knowledge of everything that had ever happened before it. While this makes it ideal for streaming and binge-watching culture, it became too difficult to follow, and eventually the science-fiction fantasy elements became so bizarre it hardly felt real. Along with this, some of the mysteries from the early seasons were recontextualized so much that they became ridiculously complicated. For example, in the second episode of the show, the characters came across a monster made of smoke roaming the island. This became the most pressing mystery of much of the first season, and fans finally got their answer about eight episodes later, when it was finally revealed as “a security system.” Not only was this too vague to be a good answer, it also became more and more wrong the longer the series went on. Without spoiling too much, the smoke monster became first a security system, then an electromagnetic anomaly, then a manifestation of Claire’s (a member of the main cast) insanity, then finally was revealed to be an ancient deity the whole time! If that makes no sense to you as someone who’s never seen the show before, you’re not alone. No one gets how it is all those things at once, and especially not the writers of the show.
Regardless of this, though, these are all problems with the last two seasons of the show, and the first 3 seasons are some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. It’s engaging, thrilling, innovative, and paved the way for all of your favorite shows. If this article convinced you to give it a shot, you can stream it on Hulu and Disney+.`1
