Category: Movie/TV Reviews

Lost is hands down the best TV show to ever air on television.

When Season 1 of Lost aired on ABC in 2004, I was unaware of its existence. In fact, I was not aware of this show until 2007, well into Season 3. Now I have somewhat of an excuse. From 2005–2007 I was out of the country and otherwise preoccupied. I didn’t have a phone. Streaming wasn’t a thing. There was just no way for me to know that the best show ever made was being broadcast to 17–19 million viewers on American television every week.

Now to be fair, up until 2007, I barely watched any TV shows at all. TV shows to me were shows like Full House, Family Matters, Fresh Prince, Friends, and Seinfeld. Those last 2 I never really even watched, I was just aware of their existence due to their popularity. I was a teenager in those days and our family just didn’t watch a lot of TV shows.

However, once I was in college in 2007, I began to explore to the world of television as I’d never known it before. Now back in those days, you either bought the DVD’s (which I didn’t have the money to do) or figured out a way to watch it for free online. Hulu was barely a thing, along with a few other random websites, but mostly I watched TV shows on my laptop by going to the networks webpage and figuring out where to download the latest episode. If I was lucky, I would find someone who had actual cable TV somehow, and my friends and I would go watch it live as it aired. But that wasn’t the norm in a college town where most people could barely afford life, let alone TV.

I became invested in Lost because (and this is important) people were talking about it. It was the kind of show my friends constantly talked about. Watching the show was great, but talking about the show added another layer of excitement and intrigue. After hearing my friends talk about Lost and not understanding what they were talking about, I finally borrowed the DVD’s of seasons 1 and 2 from a friend and binged.

I was hooked.

Here are some things that make Lost the best TV show ever:

Large Cast

Lost has the biggest cast I’ve ever seen for a TV show. It’s an enormous undertaking. There just isn’t anything else out there like it. Having a large cast like this is a challenge because the question is, how do you give all these amazing actors enough screen time to showcase their character and venture through their character arc? 

Characters like:

Jack- A troubled but duty-bound tattooed doctor and reluctant leader with major daddy issues.

Kate- An escaped convict on the run, constantly torn in a love triangle between the hot doc and the sexy conman. Also some major step-daddy issues.

John Locke- A lowly manager at a box company with untapped potential as a knife weilding natural born leader, destined for life on the island. Oh yeah and, you got it, some major daddy issues.

Sawyer- Criminal that became an expert conman. Wishes he had a daddy.

Sayid- A soldier from Iraq, tortured by his torturing past of torturing people, including his late tortured wife, whom he also tortured.

Sun- Rich Korean woman in a strained and basically abusive marriage relationship. She may or may not secretly speak english. Mild daddy issues.

Jin- Lowly Korean fisherman causing the strain and abuse in his marriage relationship, due to his overbearing father-in-law who disapproved of the marriage to his daughter, until he realized Jin doesn’t mind beating people up for him.

Charlie- Merry from Lord of the Rings, but on drugs and in a rock band.

Claire- Expectant mother with a hot Australian accent. Falls in love with druggie rock band guy.

Hurley- Comic relief and everyone’s favorite character. Also uber rich cuz he won the lottery. Oh yeah and he’s crazy.

Desmond- Scottish crazy guy who lives in a hatch and presses a button to save the world.

Ben- Mr. Manipulative and winner of the yearly creepy stare contest.

Ok, some of those descriptions might not be helpful, and I could list about 20 more characters that are essential to the story, but you get the idea. It’s a lot of people!

How do you write for each character and involve them in the story in a way that’s interesting, engaging, and furthers the plot? Not that I have a lot of experience doing this myself, but the few small scripts that I have written involving a lot of characters becomes a tedious task of balance and boredom. Lost handles the large cast using a formula that not only executes this balance perfectly, but also keeps the audience engaged and caring about each of these characters. And this brings me to…

Flashbacks

While much of the story of Lost occurs while these characters are stranded on an island, nearly half of every episode is dedicated to a specific character and dives deep into their background through the use of flashbacks. The way Lost uses these flashbacks is very engaging.

They tell a deeper story of who this stranded island stranger is and why they are the way they are. It gives some much needed context into choices they make while on this mysterious island. But most importantly, it allows us, the audience, to fall in love with every character. We get to spend a significant amount of time with them. We get to understand them. Often times we’re surprised or even horrified at their mistakes of the past, and we admire the changes in their stressful and dire present situation. 

It was always exciting to see into which featured character we would dive that week. What questions would they answer? What would be revealed from their past? 

I’ll give an example: Hugo Reyes, AKA Hurley. He’s a happy go-lucky heavy set character that we immediately fall in love with. He is hilarious, good natured, and kind as he tries to be helpful with everyone. But he carries a deep secret. We find out through the use of flashbacks that he not only spent time in a mental institution, having regular hallucinations of people that weren’t there, but he also actually won the lottery a few years before boarding Flight 815, using mysterious numbers he overheard on the radio while institutionalized. From that time until the plane crashed on the island, he felt that the money he won was cursed. Everything started to go wrong for him, to the point that he didn’t want the cursed lottery money anymore. He also felt that because he was “cursed” that he was somehow responsible for the plane crashing on the island. He kept this information to himself for the most part, took everything in stride, and sought a new life on this island away from his cursed money. This added a lot of depth to his character.

Another example is the character of John Locke. His survival instincts and hunting abilities, along with his many knives, contribute extensively to the survivors on the island as he helps forage for food and fight off unknown island predators. However, we discover (spoiler alert!) through the use of flashbacks that up until flight 815 crashed, John Locke was paralyzed and in a wheelchair. 

I could go on and on about each individual character, but suffice it to say that if it weren’t f0r flashbacks for each of its many main characters, Lost would be a completely different show. Also a terrible one.

Mystery and Theories

Lost is full of mystery. Every episode seems to incite more questions than answers. You’re constantly wondering what in the world is going on. But not to the level of frustration or hopelessness that might cause you to be overwhelmed loose interest. It’s a great balance. It answers just enough questions to keep us engaged and guessing.

Here is where a show like Lost starts to shine. Like I said above, I first heard about lost not because I was in a room where somebody was watching it, but because my friends would constantly talk about it. Everyone would come up with their own theories about what they thought was going on. Then we would share these theories with each other and discuss. Lost gave a lot of wiggle room for questions and refused to answer many of them. Questions like:

What are the numbers?

Who are the Others?

What is the monster?

What’s wrong with Walt?

What’s the voice on the radio?

Who is Jacob?

And those are mostly just a few of the questions from season 1. And some of those answers don’t come until later seasons. That’s a lot of time to theorize and discuss. 

As the show was airing, I often heard people complain about the amount of mystery or questions that weren’t being answered. I would read blog posts about people getting tired of all the craziness going on on this island and how it was becoming too much. 

Not for me. I don’t need all my questions answered. I like a little bit of ambiguity. I like things being left open to interpretation. I think the writers intentionally left some things up to us, the audience, allowing us to become a part of the experience.

The Experience

Lost wasn’t just a show, it was an EXPERIENCE. A PHENOMENON. Shows like this are few and far between.

Every week I was desperate to find out what happened next! I wanted to be the first to watch. I wanted to see if my predictions came through, if my theories were correct, if my questions were answered. Waiting an entire week was too long! I would re-watch episodes to see if I missed any hints or clues to what was coming next. It was intoxicating! 

And what a fantastic premise! Take a bunch of people, strangers, with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences, put them together on a crazy island in the middle of nowhere, and force them to not only get along and survive, but also deal with intense emotional, natural, and even supernatural events together. Their pasts are eliminated. They get to start over. Friendships form. Relationships even. People fight. People die.

But most importantly, people CHANGE.

Change

Lost takes us through the experience of watching people change. I’ll give the best example of perhaps my favorite character of the show and how he changes. 

James Ford AKA Sawyer. Seasons 1 and 2, I hated him. He’s a bad person. A criminal. Through flashbacks, we find out he went on a quest for revenge for the man who conned his parents out of all their money resulting in the death of his parents as a small boy. This quest turned him into a conman himself, and eventually a killer of an innocent man. Shortly after, he boards flight 815, the plane crashes, and now this grungy, rude, inappropriate and unpleasant conman is forced to survive with this group of strangers. He hates everyone, but he does make up rude (and often hilarious) nicknames for everybody, the only silver lining in the otherwise upsetting character of Sawyer.

However, as seasons 3, 4, and 5 of Lost slowly unravel, we start to notice some change in Sawyer. He starts to make friends. He starts to contribute. He starts to help people. He becomes less selfish. He even builds close personal relationships with several characters, and by the end of season 5, Sawyer is everybody’s favorite character. He’s a completely different person. Sure he has similar mannerisms and hilarious nick-naming habits, and he’s still often quite grumpy, but we love him. He contributes, he helps, he’s kind, he pursues successfully a loving relationship, and he creates a pretty good life for himself.

I could give similar stories for each individual character. They all slowly change. So slightly sometimes we don’t even realize it’s happening until we find ourselves rooting for the guy we once despised. Or hoping for the demise of a person we once admired. And everywhere in between.

The Ending

If you google “Lost ending” you’ll probably find that a lot people did not like how the show ended. And while season 6 (the final season) is not my favorite season (that would be season 5!), I think the show ended beautifully. 

I think the writers of Lost understood something that most TV shows don’t understand:

You don’t have to answer all of the questions.

One of the main reasons that people were upset with the ending of Lost was all of the unanswered questions. Or questions that seemed to be halfway answered, like the writers ran out of ideas. But I don’t think this is what happened.

I think we live in this entertainment world where we want something new and different, we expect to be entertained completely, and demand that it all end in a mind-blowing utterly satisfying way. Anything less than that deserves to be criticized. To me, this thought process is a little narrow-minded and disingenuous.

While I enjoy being entertained as much as the next person, I would much rather be challenged. Yes, show me something I’ve never seen before, but also cause me to think about something I’ve never thought of before. Trust me, your audience. Invite me into your world, explain how your world works, and let me be a part of the experience, not just be entertained by it. Let me escape into the creative recesses of your story and (much like real life) DON’T give me all the answers. Let me come to my own conclusions and allow room for my own interpretations. Who cares if I’m right or wrong, it’s just a story. Let that story enlighten our minds beyond the ever diluted dopamine craved shallow forefront of our creative consciousness. Let the message penetrate deeper so that we feel moved, encouraged, and maybe even inspired, to not only explore these ideas on our own and in our own way, but also to expand on them and share them with the world, whether it’s a song, a movie, or a lowly blog post on the internet about a TV show from 20 years ago.

The large cast. The flashbacks. The mystery. The theories. The experience. The change. All managed with care, passion, and intrigue. I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s a perfect show (that declaration belongs to “Breaking Bad”) but something doesn’t need to be perfect to be the best. Everything needs a little imperfection.

Needless to say, in my opinion, Lost is the best TV show ever. There are many shows that come close, and many more I have yet to see for myself, but so far nobody has quite surpassed what Lost was able to accomplish.

If you missed the hype when it came out, and never gave Lost a chance, trust me, it’s worth it. If you’re too young or have no idea what show I’m talking about, go look it up and give it a try. It’s better than most shows streaming today anyways. 

Or if you’re like me, and you’ve already seen the entire series several times but it’s been a little while, consider watching it again.

Go back to the island.

Namaste.