‘Lost’ Turns 20: The Real Reason a Tropical Island Melted Everyone’s Brain

There are many measures of success for a film or TV series. The most easily understandable are viewership metrics. Slightly less quantifiable is the amount of cover stories, articles, think pieces, blogs, social media posts, and articles inspired by a movie or show. Then there’s what I call the Die Hard factor.

For a decade after the release of Die Hard, you could swing a dead cat and hit someone pitching or making “Die Hard in a blank” (a cruise or military vessel, a bus, a stadium, an airplane, a boarding school, a bigger airplane, a military base or military academy, or an airplane that just happened to be Air Force One). Insiders joked that the pitches would eventually circle back to “Die Hard in a building.”

When I began my career, as a network executive in 1993, Moonlighting had the highest Die Hard factor of all TV properties. One season later, everything changed with the immense success of ER. The Die Hard factor on that one was so high that in the following years the airwaves were swamped with shows that were undoubtedly pitched as “ER in a newsroom,” “ER in a police station,” “ER in a law firm,” and even “ER in the White House.”

All of which brings me to Lost, the series that dethroned ER for the Die Hard–factor tiara.

It has been 20 years since Lost ruled the world. I should know: I was there at the beginning, aiding in the development of the show during the filming of the pilot, and then serving as a writer and supervising producer for the first two seasons. And like so many things that once ruled the world, Lost’s greatest lesson of success has yet to be truly learned…just as it wasn’t learned from Moonlighting, ER, or even Die Hard, for that matter. It is never the high concept that creates the success, but rather the audience’s affection for the characters who live within the high concept.

Die Hard only works because we want put-upon flatfoot John McClane to foil a terrorist plot so he can put his marriage back together. Moonlighting only works because the anarchic, form-breaking writing supported the genre-defining chemistry between David Addison and Maddie Hayes. ER only succeeds because it worked documentary-style, you-are-there televisual magic in the service of Michael Crichton’s unwavering belief in doctors as heroes.

Lost attracted an audience because it had a thrilling, high-budget, high-concept pilot that described an irresistible mystery. That audience came back and stayed because even if the series that followed didn’t always offer satisfying solutions to those mysteries, it most certainly delivered on the promise of a cast of fleshed-out characters whose lives were shot through with compelling incidents, difficult situations, tear-jerking agonies, and shocking destinies.

There is a very sweet, but also very exasperating, time in the life of any artist involved in the creation of a television pilot that goes to series: the months between the completion of the work and the actual release of the work. During that time, the show belongs only to those on the inside, and those with whom they choose to share it in secret.

During the summer before the release of Lost, I carried a DVD of the pilot with me in my computer bag. On occasion, I would put a friend or family member on a variation of the NDA I call a “Friend-DA” and show them its first 10 minutes. Among the many gorgeous shots that J.J. Abrams and his cinematographer Larry Fong concocted for the epic opening plane crash sequence, there’s one of Matthew Fox’s Jack running across the frame to rescue a fellow passenger as all hell explosively breaks loose behind him.

When I showed it to one of my high school friends during a hometown visit and that shot came on, my friend took a moment to catch his breath. Then, completely without irony, he let out the words “What a guy!”

He had instantly fallen in love with Jack, and would follow him through this story for the balance of the decade.

That moment—more than the off-the-charts audience testing, more than the micro-focus of our corporate overlords (Lost is the only show on which I have ever worked where network and studio execs were so excited about the coming episodes that they showed up in the writers room to hear story pitches), and even more than the rapturous applause from 3,000 newly minted fans when we sneak-previewed the pilot at the San Diego Comic-Con—made me realize that I wasn’t just carrying a DVD.

I had the fucking Pulp Fiction briefcase, and everyone who opened it saw the light.

When I saw the pilot for Moonlighting on the air as a high school student, it was clear that something major was taking place in the medium of television. When I saw Die Hard on opening day in a multiplex, the audience was palpably elated to watch Bruce Willis become a major movie star in real time. When I saw the pilot for ER as an executive of the network that developed it, I could feel the world changing: I could feel the tidal wave of frenetic, documentary-style shows we would be watching in the coming years.

The sensation of secretly showing someone something that you know is going to impact popular culture in a major way…the thrill of knowing that you are involved in the creation of the thing that will soon fill the first blank in the television world’s next cycle of blank-in-a-blank pitches…

It is beyond explanation.

I had seen artists create this piece of work in real time. As the pilot was being written and shot, I spent months working with a team of fellow writers to figure out the show that would follow, and to create the detailed backstories that would become the backbone of the flashbacks for the first season.

I also knew that, for the show to succeed, the alchemy that led to this amazing pilot—the green light off an outline months while most competing pilots had been written and prepared for production; the hasty assemblage of a team of top-notch artists who had to work around the clock to create miracles onscreen; the pressure from a studio that was dubious of its investment and the tension between it and the network—had to be replicated day after day in a writers room working under the scrutiny of a very invested network, and a studio that worried about having a very expensive, if potentially huge, show on its hands.

It was terrifying.

During that time, as the writers room beavered away on the first run of episodes, I was assigned the daunting task of writing the episode that introduced the show’s Korean characters, Sun and Jin. I didn’t know a thing about Korean culture. I knew that the characters were going to come under some fire because of how they’d be introduced into the world of Lost (in a manner that made them appear as a stereotypical patriarchal marriage led by an authoritarian husband in order to truly surprise the audience with the revelation of the characters’ truths).

I also knew that this would be my first attempt at creating an episode of Lost, and that if I failed, I might not be allowed to remain.

After days of banging my head against my own ineptitude, I remembered a painful memory from my own past. I was 10, fresh off the boat from Puerto Rico, and I didn’t speak very good English. I was picked as an audience volunteer in a magic show. I could not understand the magician’s instructions, and was eventually laughed off the stage by the other kids. So while I may not have known much about Korean culture, I definitely understood not being able to speak a language and being ostracized for it.

All of my pain about being an outsider, being an other and being othered—not to mention struggling to master a language in order to change my life, as well as the perceptions of others—went into that script. The episode wound up being very well-received. For an hour of TV produced in 2004 to feature two Asian leads, with 30% of the dialogue Korean with English subtitles—and for it to be met with so little resistance from the studio or network—was a minor miracle in and of itself, and a great show of faith. My pain became a site for our corporate masters, and then our audience, to bond with these two unlikely series leads, thereby helping to increase their involvement in (and the longevity of) the show.

I couldn’t have been prouder.

I bring this up not to sell you on my individual genius, but rather to illustrate why Lost, especially in that first season, found and kept an audience. Yeah, all the sci-fi stuff was fun to figure out, but those characters were our everything. All of us in that writers room were under a tight timetable, creating something that was huge, expensive, and unwieldy. It required intense work from a great many fellow artists who felt exceptional weight from the corporate entities holding the purse strings—especially after the series premiered to huge numbers, and so many eyes turned to us with great expectation of the many wonders to come.

With so much at stake, all that the writers could do—from Damon Lindelof on down—was enter the writers room, take meat cleavers to our own chests, and put on the page whatever hurt the most.

There’s a million reasons Lost became a pop-culture-defining hit: the tantalizing mysteries of the island; the nonlinear flashback structure that illustrated the difference between who the characters pretended to be on the island versus who they were in the outside world; the large and diverse cast, which was a triumph for representation in spite of the limitations of the time; the serialized nature of the show and the cliff-hangers that came about as a result; the physical beauty of our Hawaiian locations as put onscreen by our exceptional crew. However, the secret sauce of our success was that every one of those aspects came together to support characters whose struggles were relatable, who kept the audience coming back week after week, season after season, even after it became abundantly clear that the island would not give up its secrets easily…if at all.

Like ER and Moonlighting—and even Die Hard, which could be sequelized to diminishing returns only for as long as Bruce Willis could be troubled to assay the role of John McClane—Lost has yet to be rebooted. Lost was never designed to be that kind of franchise. Hell, Lost was barely designed at all; it was made on the run by people whose talents were, thankfully, up to the many challenges of such an unwieldy lark.

There’s also the truth that Lost came at a time when the very universe that allowed for its existence was about to collapse—even if none of us knew it at the time.

In 2004, Netflix was a mail-order DVD rental service, and Facebook was a just launched localized directory service for Ivy League schools. Twitter (or X, or whatever) and Instagram were years away from existing. There were still only a few major broadcast networks, making it possible for a single show to capture a humongous chunk of audience and hold it for a protracted period of time. It was a time when a single network president could insist that the world needed “Cast Away meets Survivor” and make it happen through sheer tyranny of will, a willingness to both write huge checks and buck the traditional timeline for developing and filming pilots, and no algorithm to bow down to. In 2004, J.J. Abrams was a wunderkind on the rise; backing his talent was a daring investment in an individual, not a business deal with a mature production company.

In a mere 20 years, the earth that Lost ruled has been completely remade and remodeled by new technologies, viewing habits, trends, and ideas of what content is. The innovations Lost brought to the small screen have long since been assimilated and made the norm. The sort of vast, pervasive, inescapable worldwide fame that Lost commanded in its time—the same sort of vast, pervasive fame that Moonlighting, Die Hard, and ER all held before—is simply not attainable in today’s fragmented media environment, at least not in the way it was back then.

And so, like Moonlighting, Die Hard, and ER, Lost now slowly recedes into history, still loved by many, but also hanging out as one of thousands of “postage stamps” on your Netflix welcome screen (where it has just arrived this month), waiting to be discovered by those who were not around when it premiered. It’s an artifact from another time and another way. I often wonder if it’s better like this, if we’re actually blessed by not having to endure endless attempts at “recreating the magic.”

Today, Lost is a mysterious signal from a strange island in the growing distance, broadcast to remind us all that if you want to properly rule the earth, you will do so only by daring to do something unique, risky, perhaps career-threateningly expensive—and perhaps unapologetically resistant to franchise-style exploitation. And also by giving the artists involved both enormous pressure, and great latitude, to create with wild abandon.

It was once in a lifetime. It was singular, an irreproducible chemical reaction brought about by the most unlikely collision of talent, hubris, and circumstance imaginable. It was beautiful and mystifying and frustrating, and oftentimes quite terrible both to make and to watch. But I was there at the beginning. And to this day, especially as it grows dimmer and dimmer, I yearn for the heady energy that came from being part of something that felt impossible, yet will most likely rate a mention in the history of the medium.

I bled for Lost. All of us who worked on it did. And Lost certainly made all of us bleed more than once. But if I went to my mailbox today and found in it an envelope holding a ticket for Oceanic Airlines flight 815, I would not only accept that ticket—knowing exactly what was to come—I would board that airplane with a smile and gladly open a vein in exchange for another glance, however fleeting, at a lonely, faraway, inscrutable island where magic and wonder truly were possible.