Once I committed to doing my Top Ten Episodes project, I knew there were a few major television shows that I had to catch up with. "Lost" is one of them, the product of a bygone era when the most popular shows were still on network television. That means the first season runs 25 episodes! Even if you count the pilot and finale as supersized installments, having over twenty serialized episodes in a single season is something I just don't encounter much anymore.
"Lost" at one point boasted the most expensive television pilot ever made, showing the immediate aftermath of a passenger plane crashing on an uncharted island in the Pacific, and what happens to the survivors. It is one of the shows that started off the trend of bigger, more spectacle-driven television. I was aware of "Lost" in 2004 - everyone was - but I didn't have the time to watch much television when the first few seasons were broadcast. I saw random episodes here and there, but nothing really caught my interest. I remember that genre fans were excited because "Lost" was a genre show that was popular with the mainstream, but it didn't feel much like a genre show to me. The characters seemed much more like the denizens of prime time soaps or procedurals, and the mysteries of the island were always rather amorphous and indefinite.
And watching the first season this time around, it took a very long time for me to really get invested in the fates of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815. The format of the show is brilliant - Each of the main characters in the first season are given individual flashback episodes throughout the year to fill in their personal histories, while they explore the island and learn to get along in the present. This means that episodes can take place in Korea with Sun (Yunjin Kim) and Jin (Daniel Dae Kim), or Iraq with Sayid (Naveen Andrews), or in England with Charlie (Dominic Monaghan). Cultural osmosis meant I already knew some of the characters like Hurley (Jorge Garcia) and Sawyer (Josh Holloway), but I wasn't aware at all of others like the pregnant Claire (Emilie de Ravin) or step-siblings Boone (Ian Somerhalder) and Shannon (Maggie Grace).
However, after twenty years and a lot of cultural shifts, I don't find the "Lost" characters to be a very appealing bunch. I understand that in 2004 having East Asian and Middle Eastern main characters was considered very progressive, but in 2025 the first thing I'm noticing is that the Iraqi guy is played by an Indian actor and only four of the fourteen main characters are women. No, Rose (L. Scott Caldwell) and Rousseau (Mira Furlan) don't count. The traditional hero types, Jack (Matthew Shepherd) the doctor and Sawyer the rogue, do a lot of the running and shouting whenever there's a crisis, but are not nearly as compelling as unlucky Hurley or Sun with her difficult marriage. Still, kudos to "Lost" for committing to having non-English speakers as major characters, back when getting American viewers to read subtitles was still a dicey proposition.
Many of the storylines and relationships develop slowly, and the plot beats of many episodes get repetitive - I know this is due in part to the demands of network television, but it still feels like the show is wearing me down more often than it's winning me over. I really wanted to be able to latch on to the more complicated personalities like John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) or Michael (Harold Perrineau), but so far they're just bundles of familiar tropes - a damaged man undergoing a spiritual rebirth, and an overprotective black father learning to cope. I'm hopeful that they'll become more interesting the further we get into the show. I don't have much patience for the weaker, one-note characters like Shannon and Claire, but this is still early days so I'm willing to give them time.
I hate to say it, but I wasn't too impressed by the performances of any of the actors, though a lot of them are very charismatic and fun to watch. Only Evangeline Lilly really had much of a film career after "Lost," though everyone seems to be steadily working. The breakout star is clearly Damon Lindelof, who was showrunner with Carlton Cuse, and has the most writing credits out of anyone on the first season. And it was only toward the end, when all the plot threads started tying together, and the characters all finally started working together, that I had the urge to watch more than one episode in one sitting. The cliffhanger ending was excellent, so I'm not going to wait long before starting season two.
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