By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Throughout much of the medium’s history, television programming followed a similar formula based on episodic storytelling. Episodic storytelling means that each episode of a show is a self-contained story. It has little to no impact on the episode that follows and only limited connections to the episode that came before it.
In practice, that means no matter how many times you’ve seen Balki and Larry do the dance of joy, next week, they’ll probably do it again.
In the 1990s, a few brave shows like Babylon 5 and later pay cable shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire tried to change that by telling serialized tales. Instead of self-contained episodes, these serialized shows built complex and connected narratives that told one complete story over the course of several episodes or several seasons.
Despite critical acclaim, serialized storytelling was slow to gain wide acceptance on network television. That changed in 2004, when one massive sci-fi series took serialization to a cinematic level on the small screen, scoring ratings so big it changed everything happening on television, forever.
In the process, it ushered in what many now believe was television’s golden age, but that doesn’t mean the show itself was a success. By the time it was over, the series became so hated and reviled that it’s since been forgotten by the pop culture world it created.
This is why Lost failed.
Lost’s Story Begins With Survivor
Before discussing what went wrong with Lost, we must discuss its huge success. That’s impossible without also discussing Survivor.
The now long-running reality TV show had only been on the air a few years when Lost debuted. Survivor’s popularity cannot be overstated. Every episode of the Jeff Probst-hosted series was a massive event. The kind of thing people ducked out of church early and held watch parties for.
Survivor’s popularity reached a level comparable, perhaps, only to football, and it was talked about in offices and auto shops with equal fervor. And Survivor just happened to be a reality show about a bunch of people stranded on an island. So when Lost first appeared, much of that island interest transferred over to it, and everyone was ready to tune in for what they expected to be a fictionalized version of Survivor.
The show’s splashy promos, featuring an eye-popping special effects bonanza, combined with the existing Survivor mania, resulted in a premier episode with big ratings. The show itself was so glitzy and so unusual that much of that audience stuck around. Now it was Lost, not Survivor, that everyone talked about while waiting in the dentist’s office.
Lost Was The Right Show At The Right Time
Situated shortly before the age of streaming and on-demand video but during the rise of digital video recorders, Lost was the right show at exactly the right time to become one of the biggest things in television history. Nearly 20 million people tuned in for the Lost series premiere, and more than 23 million tuned in for the season 2 premiere. Lost was a phenomenon and regularly ranked as the most popular television show in the world.
Critics were crazy for it. The show was praised for its exceptionally high production values, excellent cast, and complicated mix of drama and mystery. Lost was a rocket to success, and everyone in the world was along for the ride.
Lost opened up the possibilities for more serialized, high-concept storytelling on network television. It proved that audiences would invest in an ongoing, deeply mysterious narrative. Through it, producer and future Star Wars director JJ Abrams perfected his “mystery box” format, where a series of secrets and puzzles drive the plot. It was those secrets that kept people tuning in week after week.
Lost wasn’t a fictionalized version of Survivor; it was a stealth science fiction series that had people hooked before they knew what they were being hooked into.
The Story Of Lost
The show’s story begins with a plane crash on a tropical island. The survivors are stranded on a beach, looking for a way to hang on until their inevitable rescuers can arrive.
And then, something huge roars off in the distance, and trees come crashing down. It turns out this is no normal island. There’s a smoke monster and a hatch that leads to a secret underground area.
While the survivors grapple with all this weirdness, they start to realize rescue isn’t coming. Days pass, and no one shows up to save them. All while things keep getting weirder.
The hatch turns out to be one of many. A long history of strange happenings is uncovered, and there’s a growing suspicion that a company named Dharma may be behind all of it.
The crash survivors themselves are part of the mystery. They aren’t normal people. They’re criminals, mobsters, gangsters, and sinners. There’s a child with strange powers. There’s a crippled man who suddenly regains the ability to walk.
Week after week, the secrets of the island and Lost’s cast grew deeper and deeper, and audiences found themselves sucked further into unraveling the mysteries of the Island.
All those questions will be answered. All those mysteries will be solved. That was the promise of Lost that kept people tuning in. Or so they thought.
Lost’s Big Impact On American Culture
For many, Lost became a weekly obsession. The timing was right to take that obsession to the internet, since Lost coincided with, and arguably helped catalyze, the rise of online fan communities.
Premiering in 2004, Lost hit just as internet forums, fan sites, and later social media were becoming ubiquitous. The show became a gigantic online puzzle for fans and the first watercooler series for the internet age.
The show’s crazed fanbase made the people writing and producing it into massive stars. That had never happened before, in the world of television.
In film, writers and directors were often heralded as celebrities in their own right. People flocked to Stanley Kubrick movies and Steven Spielberg projects, simply because they put their names on them. But Lost made behind-the-scenes creatives like J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Carlton Cuse into household names.
Lindelof and Cuse began hosting a podcast, one of the earliest ever on the internet, and it helped popularize the online podcast format. They hosted panel discussions in front of thousands at places like the San Diego Comic Con, where people flocked in hopes of hearing the tiniest hint as to where Lost was going.
Lost mania was at a fever pitch. Everything about television and pop culture was changing due to its inexorable pull.
There was just one problem. None of the people making Lost knew where the show was going, or what any of it meant.
The Creatively Bankrupt Origins Of Lost
That lack of direction makes sense when you learn where Lost came from. It wasn’t a labor of love birthed into existence by some creative with an amazing idea or plan. It was the brainchild of a studio executive with an idea that he thought might make ABC a lot of money.
Lost was conceived in 2003 when ABC executive Lloyd Braun pitched the idea of a supernatural stranded-on-an-island drama. J.J. Abrams had already made a name for himself with the series Alias, and he was brought in along with Damon Lindelof to create a series around that pitch.
ABC was all in on the idea, and they spared no expense. Lost’s two-hour debut episode became the most expensive pilot ever produced at the time, costing over $14 million and filmed entirely on location in Oahu.
Lost Spared No Expense
While it may be true that the show’s production team had no idea where any of it was going, there’s no denying that they threw themselves into making it the best whatever it was that it could be.
The show continued to be shot entirely on location in Hawaii for all six seasons. To make it work, the cast had to live there part-time, and they soon became infamous locals. Celebrity rags regularly published photos of them partying at island hot spots in their off hours.
ABC kept shoveling money into the show, maintaining its cinematic, high-dollar look and style throughout Lost’s six-season run.
As Lost ran out the clock on its way to the show’s grand finale, the series seemed poised to go down in history as one of the greatest, most significant programs in the history of television. But it was already doomed.
The Unbearable Weight Of Self-Inflicted Expectations
Heading into Season 6, expectations were enormous. Fans had compiled long lists of unanswered mysteries like: What is the Island? Who are Jacob and the Man in Black? Why those numbers? Many were questions they’d been asking since the show’s very first episode.
There were already signs that fans were about to be disappointed.
“We can’t answer every last question… If we did that, the show would be so pedantic it’d be uninteresting,” Carlton Cuse warned, in numerous discussions and interviews.
Fans seemed fine with this, as long as they got answers to some of the show’s bigger, and more important mysteries, and as long as those answers weren’t something stupid like it was all a dream, or a holodeck simulation (hello Star Trek: Enterprise), or most feared of all: The island is hell and they’re all dead.
How Lost Destroyed Itself
Season 6 got off to a rocky start. Everyone knew it was the show’s final season, so they expected they’d start getting answers. Instead, the show began raising more questions with a “flash-sideways” device taking viewers into what appeared to be an alternate timeline where Flight Oceanic 815 never crashed.
The flash sideways is explained in the series finale as a form of purgatory or afterlife “way station” where characters find each other after death. Which, while not being the exact “they’re dead and in hell” nightmare everyone had feared might happen, came far too close to it for comfort.
At least the flash sideways got an explanation. Not so for everything that happened in the previous five seasons, which included time travel, pirates, and magical healing powers.
Because no definitive answers for the island itself were given, many thought the show was saying the characters had been dead the whole time, which, for most viewers, was a worst-case scenario. The Lost producers quickly clarified that this was not the case… but if people couldn’t figure it out after watching the show on their own, then the series did something very, very wrong.
Viewers felt that they had been teased with puzzles for six years, only to get a character-focused ending that glossed over the mythology they cared about. The phrase “They were all dead the whole time” became a meme representing a botched ending, and despite being a misunderstanding, it succinctly expressed viewers’ disappointment.
Why Lost Failed: A Warning For Those Who Came After
Lost’s reputation was totally destroyed after the finale. Viewers felt they wasted their time and became vocal detractors.
The phrase “Lost ending” became a cautionary tale. For years after, showrunners of other series would joke in interviews, “We don’t want to do a Lost on our audience.”
The Lost fan community imploded and vanished overnight. The goodwill the show built up turned into a punchline. The critical praise its earlier seasons received seemed hollow.
Many walked away from Lost feeling as if they’d been ripped off. That feeling of betrayal persists today.
With a better ending, Lost would be remembered as one of the greatest science fiction shows of all time. Instead, it’s a footnote. A cautionary tale. A warning for those who promise more than they can actually deliver.
No one talks about Lost anymore. Everyone seems to have forgotten it. Battlestar Galactica, another serialized series released around the same time, to much smaller numbers, is still lavished with YouTube tributes and constant social media discussion. But it’s as if Lost never existed.
