We have to go back.
It’s been many long years since ABC’s smash hit Lost was available to stream on Netflix in the United States. Now we can finally return to the island and join our favorite survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 as they navigate mysterious polar bears, dangerous Others and a plot that ranged from some of the best television ever made, to some of the most disappointing.
The series originally aired on ABC between September 22, 2004, to May 23, 2010. Created by J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, and Jeffrey Lieber, the show combines elements of mystery, science fiction, and supernatural fiction, woven into a character-driven narrative that trucks heavily in flashbacks, flash-forwards and even the occasional flash-sideways. But mostly, Lost is all about characters you love and the ways they interact with one another.
Lost follows a colorful cast—and an abundance of ever-shifting extras—on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. The main cast is comprised of:
- Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox): A spinal surgeon and the group’s de facto leader.
- Kate Austen (Evangeline Lilly): A fugitive with a troubled past.
- John Locke (Terry O’Quinn): A paraplegic who regains the use of his legs on the island and believes in its mystical properties.
- James “Sawyer” Ford (Josh Holloway): A conman with a tragic past.
- Sayid Jarrah (Naveen Andrews): A former Iraqi Republican Guard torturer.
- Hurley Reyes (Jorge Garcia): A lottery winner with a string of bad luck and one very important number.
- Sun-Hwa Kwon (Yunjin Kim) and Jin-Soo Kwon (Daniel Dae Kim): A married couple with marital and cultural tensions.
- Charlie Pace (Dominic Monaghan): A drug-addicted rockstar down on his luck.
The show is filled with fascinating subplots and clues, like Hurley’s lottery numbers—- 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42—that end up playing a major role in some of the island’s biggest mysteries.
While many fans were left divided and upset over the series finale, I still think of Lost mostly with a great deal of fondness and nostalgia. I wish I’d been reviewing TV shows back then! I miss those days, when every new episode was an event that we all watched at the same time and then talked about later. The streaming diaspora has really put a dent in all that.
This was also one of the first network TV shows that really pushed the proverbial envelope. It came out just a few years after HBO’s The Sopranos proved that cable TV could be as compelling and “premium” as any movie, and just a few years before the series premiere of Breaking Bad, which would set the stage for a golden age of television.
All six seasons of Lost land on Netflix today, June 1st. I can’t wait to give it a rewatch.
Fun Trivia:
When Lost last came to Netflix back in 2016, fans noticed that the series finale was 18 minutes shorter than the 104-minute finale originally aired on ABC. A bunch of scenes were missing! (Don’t click if you don’t want spoilers).
Showrunner Damon Lindelof (The Leftovers, Watchmen, Mrs. Davis) was confused by this change, which was just a mistake due to the leap from network reruns to streaming.
“I am totally befuddled by all this,” Lindelof told EW at the time. “Love it or hate it, the finale that aired is the definitive finale and to alter it in any way defies explanation. Something tells me that this isn’t Netflix’s fault … that it’s an honest mistake and something got miscommunicated — I seem to remember ABC had to make an edit for rerun airings that tightened the show into ‘format’ (42 minutes to accommodate commercials), and somehow that [version] mistakenly got sent to Netflix. This sometimes happened with our finales — we’d ask for extra time and ABC would agree to air, but then we had to do another tighter version for subsequent airings and/or international [markets]. We usually left these (painful) cuts to the discretion of our editors… but as the show lives on in DVD form and on Netflix, there is ZERO reason to have the shorter version out there.”
In 2023, Maureen Ryan published an excerpt from her book ‘Burn It Down’ in Vanity Fair, detailing accusations of racism and sexism during the production of Lost. The piece has been controversial in its own right, but is worth reading.
For those of you who really loved Lost, I highly recommend FROM which airs on MGM+. The series stars Lost alumni Harold Perrineau and long-time Lost director, Jack Bender, also serves as producer and director on FROM. That series—which hopefully makes its own Netflix debut someday, or at least a Prime Video release—shares a lot of narrative DNA with Lost as well, with a creepy town that nobody can leave filled with mystery and terror. FROM currently has two full seasons out with a third slated for Fall of this year.
