You may be thinking, “Really, Macy? You’re going to the mat over a show that came out over 20 years ago?” Well, yes. Because it simply isn’t given the respect it deserves.
Like many Americans, my family and I loved our nights huddled around the TV to watch our favorite TV shows live. For us, that meant American Idol, Dexter and, of course, ABC’s network hit Lost.
There’s a good chance you watched Lost in the early 2000s, too. And there’s an even better chance you think it got bad. Or you have some sort of perspective that it started strong but went off the rails after the first three seasons. Somewhere along the way — maybe when the flash-sideways began, or when a smoke monster turned into a man, or when you realized there wasn’t going to be a clear-cut answer to every mystery — you bailed.
Maybe you saw the finale and thought it ruined the whole show. (More on that later.)
I watched Lost when I was a kid, but hadn’t revisited it for close to a decade. Until it came to streaming services, first Hulu and now Netflix and Disney Plus. One day, I decided to replay the pilot episode and, well, it transformed me into the person writing this 1,500-word defense. I binged the show and then immediately turned around and binged it again.
I’m truly mad at myself for wasting so much time thinking this show was a disappointment. In truth, it’s a glorious, ambitious near-masterpiece. It’s my favorite show.
That’s why I’m writing this. I’m here to ask you to do something radical: Rewatch Lost in 2025. Yes, all of it. And this time, go in with fresh eyes — see it not as a weekly network drama, but as a serialized, character-driven odyssey that, along with The Sopranos and Mad Men, paved the way for the prestige genre TV we obsess over now.
Because the truth is, Lost wasn’t a failure. It was just ahead of its time. Here’s why.
I’ll tell you right now, spoilers be damned. They. Were. Not. All. Dead. The. Whole. Time.
The idea that the characters were really all dead the whole series and that the island was just a purgatory-like state is completely untrue. It’s been debunked by the creators of the show, the actors who starred in the show and the dialogue in the series finale itself.
A twist ending like that — revealing they had all died in the plane crash right at the start — would be a horrible one. It would retroactively reduce the entire plot of the show to meaningless, empty nothingness. So, thankfully, that’s not how it actually ended.
Now, you can just enjoy the show knowing that it all matters.
TV in 2004 didn’t look like Lost
When Lost premiered in 2004, there was nothing like it on network television. A lush, cinematic sci-fi mystery shot on 35mm film, with a massive ensemble cast of mostly unknown actors and an evolving mythology? On ABC, of all places? In the era of CSI, Desperate Housewives, and the dozens of other cop shows and formulaic TV, Lost was a risk.
Lost is a sci-fi show (I think a lot of people forget that) with horror and supernatural elements. It’s serialized, meaning you must see each episode to understand the next one, unlike so many shows that were airing on network TV at the time.
The show follows a group of drastically different people who have just survived a plane crash on a remote, tropical island that seems to harbor deep, dark mysteries. But each survivor has secrets of their own. And they must live together in order to survive. (I can vividly remember hearing protagonist Jack Shepard say, “If we don’t learn to live together… we’re gonna die alone.”)
Despite this, the writers crafted compelling story lines and introduced some of the most intriguing characters (Ben, Juliet, Jacob, Penny, Miles) into the later seasons. It’s easy to forget that Lost was doing time jumps, shifting perspectives and emotional bottle episodes long before The Leftovers, Dark or Severance existed. It experimented with structure constantly: a flashback here, a flash-forward there, a time loop in season 5. Entire episodes would focus on side characters you hadn’t seen in weeks. It was complicated, sure, but thrillingly so.
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