Lost aired on ABC from September 22, 2004 to May 23, 2010, six seasons and more than a hundred episodes, and it changed how network television told stories. Jeffrey Lieber, J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof created it, Lindelof and Carlton Cuse ran it, and it was inspired, of all things, by the film Cast Away. What it became was a heavily serialized science-fiction adventure drama with a supernatural streak, filmed mostly on location, and the most argued-about show of its decade.
Trailer, via Live2getherDieAlone.
Flight 815
Oceanic Airlines flight 815, flying from Sydney to Los Angeles, crashes on a mysterious island somewhere in the South Pacific. The survivors, stripped of everything, have to work together to stay alive. The island holds secrets. That last sentence is the show’s entire promise and its entire problem.
The Structure
Each episode typically has a primary storyline on the island and a flashback, later a flashforward, that reveals who one of the survivors was before the crash. That structure is the show’s masterstroke. It let a huge ensemble cast be introduced one life at a time, and it made character the engine of a show that could easily have been all mystery.
The Cast
Matthew Fox as Jack Shephard, Evangeline Lilly as Kate Austen, Terry O’Quinn as John Locke and Josh Holloway as Sawyer are the center, and O’Quinn’s Locke is the performance the show is built on, a man of faith on an island that seems to answer him. Michael Emerson’s Benjamin Linus arrived later and became the best villain on television. Jorge Garcia, Naveen Andrews, Henry Ian Cusick, Yunjin Kim, Daniel Dae Kim, Nestor Carbonell and Jeff Fahey each got hours that belonged to them.
The Questions
Lost was a mystery box, and the mysteries were extraordinary while they were mysteries. The hatch, the numbers, the smoke, the Others, the button. The show’s willingness to keep asking made it addictive, and for three or four seasons it was the best water-cooler show in the country.
Where It Falls Short
The answers were not as good as the questions, and everyone knows it. The final season in particular chose feeling over explanation, and a viewer who had kept a notebook for six years had reason to feel cheated. The show also sprawled. Characters were introduced and dropped, and some seasons marked time waiting for a plan that was still being written. The cost of filming on location shaped the storytelling in ways that sometimes showed.
The Verdict
Lost is a flawed masterpiece, and the flaws are inseparable from the mastery. It proved that a network audience would follow a serialized story anywhere, and it left behind a decade of television that tried to be it. Watch it for the people. Forgive it the island.
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