by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

So now that I’ve spent a year watching and thinking about LOST, I’d like to examine what the show hath wrought upon us, in terms of the media landscape. There are several trends that were obviously inspired by LOST. For better or worse, JJ Abrams’s mystery box storytelling device has become a mainstay in film and television. The show was one of the first to be available through the iTunes store, and it was available to stream on the ABC website for free for two months in 2006. This was a test run of the subscription model, which has now completely taken over how we consume media. (This model is also definitely on its last legs, but I’ll save that rant for another time!)

Sadly, the storytelling device I like the most from LOST—the, for lack of a better term, Craigslist missed-connection scenes where characters almost meet but miss each other in flashbacks—is one that didn’t really take off as a trend. (Though, for my money, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven does it very, very well.)

In terms of successors to LOST, there are the obvious ones. The shows with airplane plots, like Manifest, where passengers of a plane realize that five years mysteriously passed while they were in the air for what felt like a normal amount of time. They must rejoin society and figure out what happened during the time they’d been presumed dead. The Wilds is about a group of teen girls who are stranded when their plane crashes on the way to a retreat, but it’s revealed that the crash was planned, and the survivors are being monitored. The girls are questioned by the FBI about their time after the crash, so each character gets an episode with flashbacks to their life before the crash and during their time on the island.

The most successful and most recent iteration is Yellowjackets, where a girls’ soccer team gets stranded in the woods after their plane crashes. Unlike LOST, the flashbacks in Yellowjackets show us what happened before and in the aftermath of the crash, and the main storyline is in the present, where we see the survivors in adulthood. In response to the comparisons, one of the Yellowjackets showrunners, Ashley Lyle, said: “It was a seminal show, so how you could ever be offended by being compared to a show like that is a mystery to me.”

And then, of course, there are the shows with a similar structure but different plots. These are a little more interesting, in my opinion, because you can see where the storytelling elements come from, more than the plot. Flashforward (which also starred Dominic Monaghan), for example, focuses on a global event where everyone sees a flash forward of their lives six months in the future and what they do with that information. Once Upon a Time, from writers who’d actually worked on LOST, Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, kicks off when fairytale characters like Snow White, Prince Charming, and Rumpelstiltskin come into the real world.

My favorite example, though, is The Good Place. Mike Schur, who created the show, said he modeled it after LOST in his mind, but he wanted to explore what it means to be a good person through the story of Eleanor, who believes she is put in heaven by mistake. If you somehow don’t know the twist, it does feel very LOST-inspired, though the cliffhangers and character reveals function a little differently because of it being a half-hour sitcom. The twists and turns of The Good Place feels like such a spiritual successor to LOST; it makes perfect sense that Schur was inspired by it.

What I think is really interesting is how LOST didn’t really kick off huge careers for the main cast. Sure, several of them went on to have steady work, including Naveen Andrews, who was on several more sci-fi shows, including the seriously rad Sense8, and Evangeline Lilly, who would go on to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But none of the cast became big stars in a way you’d expect for a big show like this.

I ultimately think the breakout stars of LOST were the showrunners. They were able to take the notoriety of working on the show and run with it onto new projects. But I think I’ll refrain from giving the men in charge of LOST any more time here. So, if you really want to know what they’ve been up to, that’s a quick google search away.

Overall, I think the show mostly holds up, and if you’re willing to dedicate the time, it’s an interesting watch. I’m glad I decided to go back to the show in October 2022 and committed to this project. However, Maureen Ryan’s work in Burn It Down contextualizes the show in a way that makes it a bit harder to stomach. While it was formative media for me and informed a lot of my taste, knowing the cost of the show, what it took from people behind the scenes and on camera, makes me consider it in a new light. To my sixteen-year-old brain, the show and its finale rocked my world, but now I can think a little harder about the storytelling, especially over the course of its six seasons, and what other kinds of stories get the limelight now that didn’t in 2004, when LOST became a phenomenon.