'Cause it's gonna ruin everything.
You have been warned.
Hello. This is the orientation video for
a documentary about Lost.
In this documentary, we will be examining
the legacy of the show,
Its impact on the television landscape
and community of fans that were brought
together to attempt to solve
the mysteries of the island.
Please sit back and enjoy
the movie. Thank you.
Namaste and good luck.
Lost is so much more
than a television show.
Lost changed my life.
It changed the lives of many people.
The idea immediately struck me that
if it weren't a regular island,
that's a show that would intrigue me.
It really did
make you question what you believed in.
Are you a man of science
or are you a man of faith?
There was nothing that had prepared us
for the scale of Lost.
These are all deeply flawed people.
They're all seeking redemption.
And that's incredibly compelling.
I don't think people realize just how
much it transformed
the television landscape.
Lost was a huge deal at the time.
It was gigantic.
It was a really special time.
It felt historic and we didn't know
it would have such an
amazing response from fans.
But we knew it was
sort of go big or go home.
Should we start at the beginning?
I think that's the only place to start.
The inception of the show as we know it
started with Lloyd Braun
who was the president of ABC.
Lloyd wanted the show to be a high
budget, quality drama
version of Survivor.
I said, "here's my thought about it".
I said, "this is going to be a
weirder show than you're thinking.
This is not Cast Away.
In this version, the island's
just not a regular island.
There's a hatch. There are other people
that are there. You know, there's
creatures in the jungle.
This is not what you want."
He's like, "I love it."
He was smart enough to get J.J. on board,
get Damon Lindelof on board,
introduce them to each other,
which is insane.
That that hadn't happened yet.
And then greenlit an outline that was
written in five days.
I wrote a draft of basically an outline
for what the pilot could be.
J.J. and I got together, notes'd each other
rewrote the outline
and then sent it in.
So I had met him on Monday
and that was Friday night.
And then for it to become the biggest hit
on their network ever.
And he also greenlit Desperate Housewives
and Boston Legal and Grey's Anatomy.
Huge, huge shows.
That's an insane batting ratio.
Like, is that what they call it?
Batting average? Or what is it?
I don't know sports.
And then on Saturday morning,
my phone rang in my house and the
voice on the other end says,
"Hey, is this Damon?" And I said, "Yes."
And he said, "Damon, it's Lloyd Braun."
Who is it? This guy from my old
neighborhood, Lloyd Braun.
And J.J. had been prank
calling me all week.
And so when I got this call,
I was like, "Hello, Lloyd."
And he just paused and he was like,
"Well, anyway, I read the outline."
And I was like, "Holy sh*t, this is the
actual Lloyd Braun."
And he said,
"we're green-lighting this pilot."
To me and a lot of
people, the pilot of Lost
is the perfect pilot.
Oh, this is it. There is before I watched
this hour of television and there's after.
Everything came together on that pilot to
make it one of the most memorable
two-hour long television pilots.
I guess they kind of cheated, you know
It's like a double album. But it worked and
I'm not angry about it.
It's just staggering
everything that they did,
sh**ting on location,
getting the actual plane.
It was so expensive and it showed and
that was not a thing that existed.
I don't think anyone understands now
because everybody spends
so much money on TV shows.
That didn't exist then. And now every
pilot is directed by some huge director.
So it's not a big deal anymore. It was a
pretty big deal back then.
J.J. is always excited. Super excited about
everything he does. Everything
he does is super cool, right?
And he was like times 10.
He was so excited about this.
And I remember asking J.J.
like, "What's the look of it?"
You know, usually a cinematographer meets
with a director and goes, "Let's watch
movies. Let's look at photos and kind of
get the look of this."
But he never had time to talk about it.
So one day I remember finally going to
his house and I showed him my lookbook.
He said, "Yeah, yeah,
yeah, that's all fine.
This is what I want.
Just make it look good.
Try to win an award."
Okay? Cool.
It was crazy for all of us because nobody
knew what we were doing.
We just loved it.
It happened so quickly there wasn't time
to plan out what Lost would be.
J.J. had said at one point, "It feels like
we're in film school and the teachers are
letting us do whatever we want to do."
I remember we were writing the pilot on
the plane and it's a weird place to be
writing the pilot of Lost.
I really believe that
when J.J. wrote the pilot
he was inspired.
I will stand by the fact to this day that
I really believe J.J. is a genius. Not in
Not in that swanky LA, "Oh my God,
you're such a genius" way,
but like actually a genius.
I mean, he stepped into the mystery.
He didn't know where
it was going. He didn't
know exactly how it was going to pan out.
He just felt inspired. And that was why I
believe the show was
so powerful and special.
Even though on the surface it was just
Gilligan's Island on steroids.
He pitched me what the show was and
I'm like, "That sounds like the worst idea
I've ever heard in my life."
And I was a huge
Gilligan's Island fan, but I
was like, "You're going to dramatize that?
Like, that's going to be really shitty."
And I think if I'm not
mistaken, I was right.
They were in the process of buying the
fuselage of an L-1011
That was going to be taken to Hawaii.
So a lot of things were firing on many
cylinders before the conceptual framework
for the show was even ready.
And it was like, "What?"
You know. And we had 10 or
11 weeks to write it and cast it and film
it and cut it and turn it in.
It was complete and utter
chaos at every single level.
The first priority was casting.
I do remember they were still putting
together the cast. They were writing it
as they were casting.
It was informed by the people we were
meeting as much as it was by our instincts.
And so it was happening simultaneously.
Yunjin Kim came in and read for Kate.
They're back. Where's the doctor?
The doctor's gone.
Like, she's not a Kate, but we like her.
We want to bring her in.
And boom, let's give her a husband.
Now Daniel's got a job.
You know, it's like that.
And that was cool. And it also
created this diverse cast without anyone
being a token anything.
There was an international cast. I mean,
thank God, because they're on an
airplane, they could do that.
When I saw what they were doing with
Daniel Dae Kim, I don't know how many
people realize this, but there's not
often an Asian man as a love interest or
as an object of desire.
The Asian male has been desexualized in
the media so much in our country.
And for me to be part of that and see that,
that was exciting for me.
Well, for me, it was an audition like any
other audition. They were looking for a
Korean-American man who could speak
Korean, and there aren't that many of us.
So I was excited because I thought, oh, I
got a real shot at this.
I remember Shannon and Boone were sort of
the token white privileged, like, shoo-ins
of like, here's some people that probably
aren't going to do well.
On a deserted island.
Then J.J. saw an episode of Curb Your
Enthusiasm that Jorge was in.
I gotta go this way. Just go. Just go.
And he was like, "that guy's in the show."
And it was like, "who is he in the show?"
And he's like, "I don't know,
we'll figure it out.
He was described as maybe in his 50s and a
redneck. And it said red shirt. I was
like, I guess he's wearing
a red shirt for some reason.
But then I was like, oh, or is it like
the Star Trek yeoman that
doesn't survive an episode?
And I was like, "oh, bummer".
I guess I happened to fix that somehow.
And they went with a different redneck.
The character just appealed to me right
away because he was
really salty but real.
I'm a complex guy, sweetheart.
And that's kind of where I was in my
acting career. I'd done 17 years of
modelling. So yes, I traveled all over
the world. I'd reached the top of that
industry, which was amazing.
So I gave it a shot.
Hearing about the audition of like, oh,
they want an Aussie person. And I was
like, oh, you know, ears
prick up, you're like
No script, just going off of like, love
J.J., of course, it's going to be amazing.
Don't know what the hell it is. But it's
going to be good, I think.
Well, I was living in Vancouver. I was
driving a beat up old Toyota Corolla that
had duct tape for a back window because I
couldn't afford to fix my back window.
And I had decided that on a lark I would
go out and do some real live hardcore
auditions for acting roles, not like
commercial roles, which is how I'd paid
my way through university.
I'm going to Live Links. All you need to
do is pick up your phone
and in moments you're there.
Evangeline Lilly had done precious little
before she ever got there. And in the
f*cking pilot, they revealed her to be a
great natural f*cking actress.
When they're being kind of chased by the
smoke monster and Evie gets like kind of
separated from the group and she ends up
in that like mangrove forest.
Just love that whole sequence so much.
One
Two
One, two, three.
I remember just going for it. I was not
an experienced actress and it was a
really emotional scene. And so the only
tool I really had in my arsenal was just
ba*ls out. You know, I
just had to go for it.
And she was incredible. And I said to J.J.,
I said, what did you say to her? And he
goes, "Nothing". It was just,
she had this innate ability
that was just incredible.
So I guess my lack of craft and my ba*ls
out approach worked. But I remember
hating my performances when I saw them. I
felt uncomfortable and weird and I was
like, uuuh, I don't know.
So originally Kate was going to be the
lead character of the show. It wasn't
going to be Jack Shephard. It was Kate
Austen. Jack Shephard was actually going
to die in the pilot. All the fans
watching this are like, we know.
And it was going to be Kate's show. Thank
God it wasn't. I mean, that really was
more than I think my little shoulders
were ready to carry with the lack of
experience I had. Matthew Fox had already
carried a show on Party of Five. I think
he was a better candidate to do that.
And you'll never guess which movie star
had Matthew Fox's role first.
Michael Keaton was
supposed to be in the pilot.
Michael Keaton was going to be like the
Jack character and then die at the end of
the pilot. And you'd be
like, whoa, wait, what?
Which completely and totally signals to
the audience that anyone can die at any
time and whatever you're expecting,
the show isn't going to play it safe.
The reaction we had from people was like,
they really did love this character of
Jack. And then he died and people just
hated the whole project. So we thought,
well, that's probably bad.
But the problem is with something like
that, there's the upfronts. All the
advertisers go to New York. They're
spending their ad dollars ahead of time.
Michael Keaton. I will watch
anything with Michael Keaton.
So they're going to pour their money into
something and then watch the pilot and go
k*ll that character? No way. So J.J.'s like
"Oh, I got a guy we can k*ll."
I look up and I see that they're prepping
a dummy that looks exactly
like me. I was like, wait, what?
We're in the middle of sh**ting the pilot
and I'm thinking, OK, it crashed, the pilot
dies. Everyone's stuck here.
How do you continue the story?
I told J.J., I go "how
can this go on? It seems
dead end to me ". And
he said," don't worry,
it's not going to get picked up."
I thought it was going to get canceled
from the moment that we did the pilot.
Wait, what this show about trauma and
smoke and there's a bloody body in a tree
and that's, you think people
are going to want to watch that?
I mean, when that guy gets gobbled up
into the engine in the beginning.
You're like, oh, f*ck. This is real man.
This is like they're not f*cking around.
When you went out on that beach and saw
that airplane, it made you a little
nauseous. It was real. I'd never been on
a production of that size. So I had
something to prove. I
was like, oh, goodness.
My character was supposed to be from
Buffalo and I didn't want to go in there
talking like I'm from Buffalo. Yo, yo,
you know, so I was
trying to have a no accent.
And then the first day with J.J. as your
director and we started filming and he
said, okay, cut, stop, stop. He came to
me and I'm like, oh, no, I'm fired.
He's like, "sounds like you're trying to
hide your accent. "I
was like," well, he's
from Buffalo. I'm from Georgia." He's
like, "You're from Georgia. You're from
Georgia. Sawyer's from Georgia."
And I'm like, "what?"
So it was the first
time in my entire career
that someone set me free with the accent
and said, just be you.
And that changed everything.
I got the role, but I got the role
dependent on getting a visa. I'm a
Canadian and I didn't have a visa.
Meanwhile, the pilot was going to start
sh**ting in two weeks. So if it didn't
happen, then I assume they had somebody
on backup that would have taken the role
and they would have carried on sh**ting.
And I would have never been a part of it.
J.J. Abrams called me. I had worked on a
show called Alias.
Glad you changed your mind.
I always forget the word for giving
all the information for blah, blah, blah.
I was Mr. That guy.
Exposition?
Mr. Exposition. Funnily
enough, I could remember all
those words, but not the word exposition.
Everybody was terribly excited. We all
looked around and said, they're spending
a lot of money. Oh, so this better work.
Better be successful
because it looks really expensive.
It definitely had a lot of buzz. It was
the most expensive pilot ever made. And
this was the end of pilot season. And so
it was kind of a big gamble.
Lloyd got fired and I got called by the
new head of ABC who said, we don't know
if there's a business in this show and we
want to air it as a movie.
This is while we were sh**ting.
And I remember saying to
him, you tell me what the ending is for
this thing and I'll sh**t it.
And I never got a call about that again.
It was the most expensive pilot at the
time. If you had done a comparison, it
would have been one of the least
expensive studio movies.
If the pilot doesn't hook you in the first
five minutes. The polar bear hooks you.
As a fan, that was the moment
I was like, what am I watching?
It was comedy filming it because, you know
the special effects were raw.
But it worked because it's
coming at you through the jungle.
We ordered a stuffed
polar bear, as one does.
And the polar bear showed up.
But what it was, was it was a
polar bear that was like lying on its
side. But half of it was basically just
flat. So if you stood it up, it looked
like like half a polar bear.
Which was not helpful.
And then J.J. in the end
throws a pillow at me.
It was just me and J.J. going one, two,
three, throwing this big stuffed thing.
So I was like dodging J.J.'s pillow fights,
you know, sh**ting this
thing. It was hilarious.
That's what made me feel like I might
survive that day
because I had that one line.
I just shot a bear.
I just k*lled a bear, you know, and he
loved that delivery. So
I was like, thank God.
Rawr.
We had to have a title card and I just
loved doing this kind of crap. So I had
my laptop and I just
did the best I could.
Which, by the way, has a ton of awful
artifacts on it. Like when I look at it
now, I'm like, what the f*ck, how
did we ever let this happen?
But it was one of those things where like
I did it thinking, well, if it works,
we'll replace it. And we just didn't. And
somehow that thing ended up on TV.
We had a screening. J.J. had us all over to
his house. I just remember us all sitting
there. And even just like the first five
minutes, we all just looked
at each other like, holy sh*t.
This is happening now, actually. I got
full on goosebumps. Like, this is f*cking
cool, man. It's like
nothing we'd ever seen.
There was such a purity in sh**ting the
pilot because it was ours. It was
completely ours. And we were a team and
there was so much
camaraderie and excitement and joy.
We felt like a family, like we were on a
journey and we were just embarking.
On the show, we're a bunch of strangers
that now have to live together on an
island. In reality, we're a bunch of
strangers that now have to
live together on an island.
And they created kind of a complicated,
suspenseful pilot that they assumed there
was no way that they were ever going to
have to make more of.
Guys, where are we?
When it actually got picked up as a
series, it was like, oh sh*t.
It's the ABC mega hit that has its fans
burning up the net with rumors.
The plane crashed and they took off.
Overnight stars in
TV's hot new phenomenon.
The show blew up so quickly.
I went and did Comic Con in 2004 in the
summer between sh**ting the pilot and the
show airing. And we filled
an auditorium of 3,000 people.
I was like, how do people even know we
exist? How do they know they like the
show? They haven't seen it yet.
But there was this crazy buzz. And we
knew that when the pilot aired, that
either it would be a phenomenal success
or it would be a dismal failure, that
there would be no middle ground.
And I remember the night we all went out
after the pilot and we all looked at
Matthew and he's like, yeah, you can
throw away your boxes now.
Because we, we like bought
TV and bought like a couch
kept all our boxes in
case we had to return it.
It didn't make any sense. You know, it's
sort of like the amount of people that
watched your show is like the amount of
people that watches the Super Bowl. It
doesn't make any sense.
I never watched the pilot episode because
there was a plane crash in it.
I'm a bit of a nervous flyer.
I still to this day have
not seen the pilot.
We have to go back. What's
that? I said we have to go
back. I said it really quietly.
My name is Bobby Moynihan and I am the
world's biggest lost fan. And if you
think you're a bigger
lost fan, come find me.
I liked that it was a little,
I guess snobby to like
Lost. I liked being like,
oh, I know everything about it and
you don't. Like I enjoyed it.
I have acquired some lost props over the
years. We'll start off small. I have the
giant fish biscuit machine.
It's nine feet tall. The shipping was
more expensive than the thing itself to
ship it from Hawaii, but it came with
like dirt on it and I was like, this is
Lost dirt. I was like psyched about it.
Wife not as psyched. It was in our living
room for a super, super long time.
Just knowing documentaries, I can't wait
to see this insane montage.
I have a couple Dharma beers,
Dharma macaroni and cheese,
four toed statue, the pneumatic
tube with the notebook in it.
Oh, I have a Dharma jumpsuit. I have a
Virgin Mary statue. I got stopped at the
airport and they were like, what is this?
And it was a Virgin Mary statue with two
bags of rolled up brown sugar.
Made to look like heroin inside of it. So
I'm standing there cracking open a thing
going, I'm going to go to jail for
heroin. This is a Lost prop.
While we were sh**ting the pilot in
Hawaii, Tom Cruise called and asked if I
would meet with him.
J.J. went to Maine to go on vacation with
his family and I went back to LA and
started working on episode two. By time
we were four or five episodes in. He was
full time directing Mission Impossible 3.
Okay, now what? What's the
rest of the show going to be?
Episode two was the continuation of the
pilot, which second episodes frequently
are. And then we hit the next episode
called 'Walkabout'.
And that really defined the show.
You know, they didn't think about the
early with the like standing in the
wheelchair and stuff. Did they? No.
Because they didn't know
it was gonna be picked up.
But you just could have sworn all those
things like they're so
good at weaving that stuff where
Got the reveal at the end he was in a
wheelchair. So good.
Spoiler alert.
That's like the best moment ever. Like
when he stands. But I mean, I still get
chills thinking about it.
I'd never asked what was going to happen.
I didn't know that he was in a wheelchair
when we started sh**ting the show. Until
that episode was delivered to me.
I didn't know that that had been the case.
That was a great reveal I thought.
How cleverly they
were able to hide the fact
that he was in a wheelchair the entire
episode until that final
moment was a gut punch.
Hey, don't you walk away from me. You
don't know who you're dealing with. Don't
ever tell me what I can do. Ever.
I thought, well, this is wonderful. No
way I can tip anybody off because I don't
know what's gonna happen. And I wanted to
continue that. They said, you want to
know? And I said, I don't want to know.
I like having surprises just like everyone.
I still have people talk about it. They
say, I'm sorry to bother you. And I say,
bother me. It's like, we should all have
somebody come up and tell us that we were
great once a day. That would be nice.
I have heard don't tell me
what I can't do, but only on
occasion. Most of the time, people just
ask me if I'm lost.
It broke the box.
I have an image in my head of lost airing
in this like cube box of like this 1985
TV that I had probably in my house.
I mean, like broken open.
Of like what you can do
with TV because before then it was like,
oh, no, that's gonna be a movie. That's
gonna be a movie thing. Nothing. Nothing
you can do on TV.
And they just broke that wide open.
2004 was kind of the height of reality
television. And then there were
procedural episodic dramas like CSI and
Law and Order. And then there were
sitcoms. And that was
basically what was on television.
You start seeing this sort of new golden
age, particularly in the area of
sterilized drama, which is something that
television had never really kind of gone
all in on before. Soon you're getting so
many shows that are, you know, prestige
television. But Lost was incredibly
unique at a time when audiences and TV
networks were craving unique.
Tonight, we're going to take you to a
mysterious island. Almost no one knows
where it is, but millions of people have
become obsessed with
what's going on there.
I got introduced to the show because I
had a friend who was like, "Hey, man,
there's the show, It's on ABC, and
there's dinosaurs in it for sure."
I didn't think it was
going to be a sci-fi show
I thought it was just going to
be a show about people just stranded
like, you know, like Lord of the Flies or
something like that.
No, this was so much more.
Everybody already had their preconceived
notions as to what what the whole thing
was about. You know, is it purgatory? Was
they all dead? Blah, blah, blah.
Oh, they were in purgatory the whole time.
No, they were not. I don't think you
watched the same thing I watched.
The island was not purgatory. It was
never purgatory. We never talked about it
being purgatory. And the first thing we
ever said to each other in that writers
room was that the
island is not purgatory.
The show is a bit like an iceberg, right?
You only see the top 10% above the water
and there's a whole lot of mythology that
exists beneath the water.
Lost was that rare television show that
expected more out of its viewers.
It did get complicated and it did force you
you to pay attention, you know, which I
think is a good thing.
It's just really an
important part of our lives.
I mean, you know, there's like
relationships and jobs
and food and sex and lost.
I mean, in many ways, the story of Lost
is really a story of its fandom. It was
this really special moment where you
still had whole families sitting down to
watch the same thing.
Now you can be into a really cool show
and you're kind of hard pressed to find
community face to face around that show.
I think there was some level of enjoyment
of that show because of the connection it
inspired between the people watching it.
Groups of people who didn't know each
other, when you found out they were Lost
fans, you were all a part of the club.
To me, Losties are the equivalent of
Trekkies. If you love Star Trek, you're a
Trekkie. If you love
LOST, you're a Lostie.
LOST fans. LOST fans are the best.
Curious. A little weird.
I don't know if I can really
describe a typical LOST fan.
You just swing, swing
the camera over to Ralph.
It's a deeply invested community, so when
someone comes to talk to you about it,
they mean it. You know,
they have things to say.
The Lost fan community is the most
unbelievable community. They're
incredibly bright. You have to meet it to
keep up with the show. And so devoted.
Lost fans are awesome.
You kidding? They have
such good taste as well.
Love logic. Love to figure things out,
but also have huge hearts
and are really emotional.
So it's almost like everybody who didn't
fit in but was a really great student is
a Lost fan. And myself included. I mean,
we're all goonies, right?
The whole pitch was larger than life. I
think it drew a certain kind of viewer.
It's OK to call us nerds
Lost to me is the nerd disguised as the
jock, right? And you're like, "Wait a
second. That's not a
jock. That's a nerd."
And I don't think that many people found
that out until maybe the later seasons.
The fans took ownership of it. They sort
of took this thing that we were working
on and went, "It is
ours. And you must serve
us." Because they were so passionate.
Everyone was like, "This is wild."
Because people were so into it.
You find yourself convinced that Lost is
just this little project I do with my
friends. We go out in the forest and the
beaches and we do this little
stories and stuff like that.
And then, you're like
going "Oh, we might be a
bigger deal than you think."
It really brought people together in this
really cool way where people were like,
"This was my show with my fianc or my
roommate or my dad."
Even now, you know, I walk into a
restaurant or something like that. Like it
might take people a little
second, you know, "Did I
go to school with you?" But then they'll
get it, you know what I'm
saying? It'll fall into place.
I was walking in New York City. A family
comes towards me and they look at me and
they double back and they go,
And it took me a while to figure out what
they were saying. And
I, "Oh, the Perdidos? Oh,
the Lost." And they were from Spain. And I
go, "Oh, yes. Si, soy...
Los Peridos."
And that's when I was like, "Wow, this is
like nothing I've been on before. This is a
serious phenomenon."
I was in a group called MKTO.
And we were doing the Macy's parade in
New York and KISS was behind us.
They were talking about how they loved
Lost. You know what I'm saying? I was
like, "This is so crazy. We got KISS
behind and they're talking about Lost.
We're about to go perform."
It's just like, you know, so I was
always getting moments like that, you
know, people you would never
expect that I loved the show.
I mean, when I saw my picture in USA
Today, I knew that I was through the
f*cking Looking Glass because I've been
in this business 50 years
and nobody ever gave a f*ck.
And Lost changed that to a great degree.
And Lost changed it in part because of
the kind of fans that it had.
Not fans that will come up to you and
say, "Weren't you so-and-so?" No, they
know because they've seen
the episode more than once.
And they're not just high and goofing on
the f*cking trees. They're serious about
it. They're way more
serious than I ever was about it.
I think Lost fans really helped change TV
because the writers challenged the
audience like here. Here is full
Here's relationships that are taboo. You
got a Midwestern white girl with an Iraqi
soldier back then? That just stretched
everyone's perceptions.
And the audience stood up and said, "Yes,
we want more of that." So for me, I love
and praise the Lost fans for doing that.
For showing the world, "Hey, we want more
intelligent writing, diversity and
inclusion, and the way life really is."
The show was asking a lot of big
questions that I was asking. Why am I
here? What is my purpose?
I was told that I was going to hell at a
very early age because I'm g*y. And I had
already attempted suicide.
I credit Lost for saving my life because
I didn't have a lot of support back then.
And the message boards opened up this
just vastness of
friendships and people from
all over the world that I could speak to
about my favorite characters, about what
was going on and theories
and everything like that.
The anonymity that online was able to
give you, nobody could hear my flamboyant
voice. They could just get to know me for
me. And that was one of the first times
I'd ever felt that way. And the Lost
community gave me that.
The fuselage was this crazy new concept
that you might have a place to build a
community around a show. And I know the
showrunners read everything.
I always cared what people thought about
the show. And I always wanted everybody
to love the show. I'm just not wired in a
way to say, "I'm writing the show for me
and I can only please myself and I don't
give a sh*t what anybody else thinks." It
was very important to
me that people liked it.
So once I started working on the show, my
dad became like an internet
sleuth. And like he was
on the boards all the time. I remember he
would print them out and then bring them
home and show me what people were saying.
And in terms of look, do fandom opinions
influence the show is a debate that's
been going on since the internet came out.
Um, yes, they influence the show.
Obviously they influence the show. Do
they drive the show creatively? No. Do
they maybe put a little bug in your ear
about something that you might talk about
in the room? Of course.
Nikki and Paulo is really the first time
I can think of the internet truly
affecting the course of a show's arc
where it seemed like the backlash around
them sort of forced the
showrunners into murdering them.
Nikki and Paulo weren't written out
because of the fans. They were written in
because of the fans. Who are those other
people? Like what are their names? What
experience are they having? It just kept
coming up. So we were like,
"Uh, okay. Let's try that."
I hated Nikki and Paulo the moment they
showed up on screen. I was like, "What
fresh hell is this?"
And so we just knew as soon as we got
into the editing room from the first time
that they were standing in the background
of the scene and then they started
talking to our characters.
Hi, I'm Nikki.
That there was just this feeling of like,
"Where did these people come from?"
What the hell am I
watching? Never heard these
names before in my life.
Nina and Pablo.
Dude, you know their
names. It's Nikki and Paulo.
It was almost instantly
like, "abort, abort, abort."
By the time the episodes aired, we had
already written them off the show.
We did what you have to do in a
circumstance like that.
You have to bury them alive.
You get to Expos and now it's like the
most polarizing episode
of Lost in the run, right?
Razzle dazzle!
I feel like Expos gets a bad rap.
Expos's better than you remember.
It's great. Billy Dee Williams is in it.
How are you going to be mad at that
episode? It's great.
The show kind of came up at the same time
as social media and I think Lost fans
were some of the first to utilize social
media to create these communities.
I mean, Twitter was invented
while we were sh**ting Lost.
It was like the first time that you would
have instant feedback from audience
members that were watching the thing, you
know, as it was
unfolding. It was really wild.
And I remember saying, "This is a flash
in the pan. No one wants to read an
opinion of 140 characters. You couldn't
have any nuance. This won't last."
And by the end, I remember watching it on
Twitter, like live watching it on Twitter
with the cast. It's like, "I'm tweeting
and Daniel Dae Kim is tweeting."
And that was me watching Lost on a
Wednesday. I was like, "This is," I think
it was Thursday then. I was like, "This
is great. Me and all my friends watching
my favorite show, our favorite show."
Lost aired at a time
just before we got bingeing.
When Lost started, it was really
appointment television. Like if you
missed it that night, unless you had a
VCR and you set your VCR, that was it.
But as the show went on, on demand was
becoming a thing. If you had cable, you
could watch things on demand.
This was before streaming, so you
couldn't just... But people had TiVo back
then. That was a huge thing,
that people were TiVo-ing Lost.
So we went from being the water cooler
show that everyone had to watch on
Wednesday night to go and talk about on
Thursday morning, to being a show that
you could say, "Don't tell me anything
because I've recorded it and I'm going to
watch it on Saturday." And
that had never happened before.
And I remember when the DVD sets came
out, how people would say, "Now I can sit
down and watch the whole season because I
didn't want to watch it week to week. I
wanted to wait till the DVDs came out."
What the DVDs did was they brought in
more audience because people were
starting to get used to binge-watching
shows on DVD. And notoriously, DVDs don't
pay writers a lot of money in residuals.
Because the studios argued that they
spent so much money developing the
technology, they didn't
know if it would turn a profit.
And, you know, about two years later we
went on strike. So...
And so it really was positioned in this
special time and place. And so much of
what makes something a pop culture
phenomenon isn't "was it the best?" Isn't
the creators actually knew what they were
doing when they said, "Oh, this is what
the world wants right now."
It just happened to be the right place,
the right time, and the
right thing. And that was Lost.
Imagine creating a show, being a part of
a show that has that much influence and
power over people's hearts and minds,
daily thoughts and
workplace conversation.
It was inescapable. People were talking
about it everywhere.
I'm going to do a quick impression of me
watching Lost. Here's me. Every single
time it goes to a commercial during the
show Lost, here's me. Ready? What the
f*ck is going on here?
So, how about Lost this season?
It's the first season of Lost on DVD.
That's the meaning of Christmas?
No, it's a metaphor. It
represents lack of payoff.
Hey, maybe we can go
to the island from Lost.
No, I don't want to listen to Matthew
Fox's heavy breathing.
Kate...
What is the Dharma Initiative?
My relationship with Lost is not your
business. It's extremely personal.
The island it was mythical,
but in the end they died.
I didn't understand it, but I tried.
At the beginning, I loved the work, and I
really hated the fame.
I'd reached a point in my life where I
was being trailed by paparazzi. I
couldn't go to the
beach in Hawaii anymore.
That was the thing that made me
desperately want to get out of my
contract. I wanted to quit.
I wanted to leave the show.
They did have like a
very big idea for Kate.
They wanted her to be really interesting.
They wanted to give her a sordid and dark
past, which often wasn't done with women,
but was done much more with men.
They would make a man
have, you know, made a lot of
bad decisions, but you follow him in his
journey, and he's
redeemable, and you love him.
That's the male story. The female story
was like, "She's so perfect
that you can't fault her."
Which is a shame, because then females
watching movies and TV back then were
like, "Oh, so in other words, I have to
be perfect to be loved, and a man gets to
be flawed and be loved."
They were really breaking that mold with
Kate, which was
exciting, and I loved that.
And then... and then
the triangle took over.
You ready?
Ready.
Jack or Sawyer?
Jack or Sawyer?
Jack or Sawyer?
Who is Kate gonna hook up with?
I don't know
I'm all about Kate, and who
she ends up with, I don't care.
And my character really
became about Jack and Sawyer.
And she bounced between them in this very
fickle love triangle, where I don't think
it was a very good look for her.
I was hungry for her to have more
interesting material and, you know,
something better to do than
run around after two boys.
At the beginning of the show, especially,
there was a lot more of a sense that the
island had a very active psychic plane,
and a lot of that had to do with Walt.
And look, people are like, "Well, they
never really said whether Walt was
psychic." Walt was psychic. Walt
manifested the polar bear, okay?
It's pretty clear from the episode that
he did, right? So we knew that from the
beginning, and, you know, maybe the
network wasn't excited about the idea
that Walt was psychic.
At the time that we were working on the
pilot, we were at least saying that we
were playing by Michael Crichton rules.
We were using genre, but there had to be
some sort of scientific basis for the
genre, unlike Indiana Jones rules, which
is like, "Yeah, there's crazy ghosts
coming out of the f*cking arc, and they
will melt your faces off."
I think that we knew that the show wanted
to be an Indiana Jones show, but it had
to present as a Michael Crichton show.
And then I had an idea. I'm a dog person,
right? Vincent wasn't
the most trained dog.
And the dog was literally having the best
time of his life, like, on the beach, you
know, jumping in the beach water, like,
running around. So it was good, but, you
know, like I said, it was a task, trying
to get him to stay here.
He was somebody's lab who kind of can
follow her and do things.
So I went up to her and I said, "What if
I want Vincent to swim after the raft?
Don't tell me he's the only lab in the
world that won't jump in the ocean."
She said, "No, he'll jump in the ocean,
but the only way he'll
follow the raft is if I'm on it."
I said, "Okay, great." So we put her on
the raft, we get our cameras on the raft,
and we see everyone on the shore waving
and all those beautiful shots, and
Vincent now jumps in the water away from
Maggie Grace and is swimming toward it.
And then I get the coverage of Walt
saying, "Go back,
Vincent, go back, Vincent."
"Go back, Vincent!"
"Vincent!"
"Go back!"
Oh my God, I could cry remembering it.
Every dog lover in the world loved that
moment, and I didn't tell Damon and
Carlton I did it. They went, "Oh my God."
Being on the raft was a great thing, too.
I was just amazing, like, that thing was
actually just floating
and just being out there.
God, I loved that raft. We had to sail
that damn thing. They left us in the
middle of the ocean with that
thing, and we were sailing it.
You know, no boats could be around
because it's a helicopter shot, so it's
like wide, and we were going to Kauai.
In that little bamboo thing, I was like,
"Holy sh*t, it works."
I looked at it as a rescue, not so much a
kidnapping. I mean, I saw a child with a
group of adults that none of them seemed
to be really responsible, and they were
floating in the ocean,
lost and certain to die.
So I thought I was saving him.
I mean, oh my God, here's actually
another person in a boat, and he's so
so, "Hey, hey, oh,
hey, oh, you do that?"
I don't remember what I said, but that
kind of stuff, all of it. "Well, it's
really great, great, we're
going to have to take the boy."
We're going to have to take the boy.
What? What'd you say?
Ba-ba-ba-bum. Tune in next year.
What?
I was short for my age, so I'm playing a
younger character, but I'm about to be
16, 17. It's time for braces.
It was going to get very clear that
unless we wanted to write, "Oh my God,
Walt is growing up at an advanced rate,"
we sort of have to figure out a way of
dealing with that issue.
Maybe it was a failure of creativity on
our part. Maybe it was just that we were
working so quickly to try to tie up so
many loose ends in the show.
It's one of the failings of the show that
we could not figure out how to do that,
or did not figure out how to do that.
That first season finale, that's all you
wanted to know. There was literally
nothing else that mattered in the world
other than what is in the hatch.
J.J. always wanted the hatch.
He wanted the hatch in the pilot.
And then J.J. goes,
"Yeah, and they find a hatch!" Okay? And
was like, "No idea what that
means," but was like, "Okay."
Just the fact that there's a hatch,
whether, you know, how do we open the
hatch and what is inside
the hatch and what do we find?
I just knew I wanted to know those
answers, but what
those were, I didn't know.
And it was a big struggle between J.J. and
Damon because Damon was like, "If I don't
know what's in the hatch, I'm
not putting it in the show."
And J.J. was like, "But it's the mystery
box. "And Damon was like," Yeah, but what
you don't want is for the audience to
open the mystery box
and find disappointment."
Could you just tell us what's in it?
No. I can't tell you anything.
I want you, I want you
to see it for yourself.
Do you know what's in the hatch?
No, but I'm hoping it's
going to be a g*y nightclub.
Damon runs in and says, "I got it!" And
we're like, "What?" And he goes, "There's
a ladder, and if you go down the ladder,
there's like a room, and inside the room
there's a guy, and if he doesn't type
these numbers into a
computer, the world ends."
And we're like, "That's what's in the
hatch?" He's like, "Yep!"
We're like, "All right!"
By the way, if you told me that, I'd be
like, "It can't be that."
Look, I would never have guessed it. You
asked me what's in the hatch? No. I don't
know what to f*cking tell you. A guy with
a button? Who could
have guessed that? No one.
What is the Dharma Initiative?
I couldn't give you a definite answer as
to what the Dharma Initiative was. It
sounds kind of cool, though.
Dharma is an acronym for the Department
of Heuristics and Research
on Material Applications.
It was one of the first things that Damon
actually pitched to the room. He said
that in his conception, there had been a
corporation called
the Medusa Corporation.
There was always an idea that a group of
scientists kind of got together and
designed all of this tech.
The Dharma Initiative met its untimely
demise once the Hanso Foundation cut its
funding, and then that's when they were
met with the hostels or the others.
I'm James. I'm Terrie. I'm Woody.
We're the others.
That wasn't very unison guys.
That was terrible. Wow.
The others are mysterious other people
who live on the island.
Usually background actors are just
standing around, you know? Not us.
It started off with passing around the
mud jar. So we'd pass around the mud jar.
Remember, we'd just get all muddied up.
Grime. And they didn't want
us ever to wash our clothes.
I remember one time I came back next
season, and my candy wrappers from season
before were still in my pockets. They
don't wash the clothes.
They don't wash costumes.
That's the shot right there.
We would have to sneak. We have to sneak
our photos. And take photos.
Chck, chck. And that's
how we get our photos.
I'm Jonathan Mankuta, and I'm known to
Lost Fans as the big
mean other of season six.
So ABC decided, you know what? We don't
need all this. We're gonna dump some of
the Other's stuff. Dump
some of the Other's stuff?
I said, "no, no, no. I'll take it. You
just let me know where you're throwing it
out. "And they
basically said," yeah, that
dumpster over there."
And in that dumpster, I pulled out beer
cans, Dharma food. I mean, I was saving
pieces of the show, you know?
Because as a fan, it's important. It's
history. It's TV history.
The attention to detail on the show, on
the props, on the costumes is incredible.
A lot of the Dharma products themselves
were real food. Dharma beer was O'Doul's.
It was O'Doul's non-alcoholic beer, so
that Sawyer could just pop an O'Doul's
and look like he's drinking beer.
Dharmalars were Mallomars. The Mallomars
cookies. The chocolate-covered
marshmallow with graham. Oh, God, those
are delicious, aren't they?
Do you remember the numbers?
No. God, no, I don't.
But I'm sure Jorge does.
The numbers!
4, 8, 15, 16, 21... 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.
We'll edit that out.
You know the lost numbers?
No. No, Michael, Michael has them.
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42. That's an intriguing
mystery. What's with the numbers?
I don't remember the
numbers, do other people?
No way. Not a million years, no.
No. No. 43. No.
4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.
Never knew them. Let me try. Let me try
so I can embarrass myself
and make the fans feel great.
8, 16, 24, 36, 48.
42, 38. Hike!
I don't remember the
numbers, but I know what they mean.
What do they mean?
That's the thing. Everyone's like, "We
don't know what, we never found out."
You found out what the numbers meant from
the Lost Experience.
It's on you guys now. You point, I go.
May the force be with you.
It was like an internet scavenger hunt
that led to a secret recording.
I'm Alvar Hanso.
That was at the very end. It was revealed
that those numbers were the variable for
what would wipe out
30% of the population.
If you were able to change just one of
those numbers, you would keep humanity.
And then somehow, it turns out that those
variables are people.
It got really overboard with the numbers.
I think my favorite was
like the soccer team jerseys.
I would hide them in SNL sketches.
Okay, I'm in 23C. That's right.
No one knows this besides me. No one
cares. There's no jokes in it.
Like I would just shoehorn Lost references
into SNL sketches constantly.
Hi, I'm Hurley from Lost.
You know what? I got a
theory about your show.
Yeah? What's that? Yeah. You guys got no
idea what's going on on that island.
I think on my dating
app, I once said like my
measurements are 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42.
I also sometimes said
that that's my phone number.
I just remembered the numbers because I'm
a degenerate card player.
How many people are doing this? How many
people are playing that number?
I've never played it on the lottery, but
how many people are playing
those numbers on the lottery?
I was like, wouldn't it be weird if these
numbers actually won?
And for this MTSU student, the numbers
did win in last night's
Mega Millions lottery.
Which I don't know why you would play
this number because then that means
you've got to share the money with all
these people if it ever does come up.
Brian and an estimated 25,000 other Lost
fans decided to play those same numbers
in the real Mega
Millions lottery, and they won.
A lot of people ask me if I ever actually
played these numbers
in the lottery myself.
My answer is always the
same. No. The numbers are bad.
When we were starting out and trying to
figure out what the sound of this thing
is going to be, I remember
some execs at ABC being like,
"Oh, it'd be great if it were like a
jungle thing with
flutes and this and that."
And I was like, "Meh, I don't think so. I
think it needs to be a
little weirder than that."
And I remember when they were sh**ting
the pilot, I talked to Bryan Burk, and
he goes, "I'm walking on the beach, and
there are just pieces of
the airplane all around me."
I told them we were just surrounded by
all these plane parts, and he said,
"Well, if you could pack them up, and
bring them back, but maybe I
can use them in the score."
The airplane parts were a big part of the
percussion setup, and they would bang on
the airplane things and use
them as drums, essentially.
They gave me such freedom to just do what
I wanted with the
shows, and it was incredible.
And I think that's why it remains one of
my favorite things that I've done,
because I feel like of all the scores,
it's probably the most me.
Most of the commercial breaks, especially
in the first season, it
was like, "Wahh!" That sound.
I would make fun of him a lot about the
trombone falls that he
would do at the end of, you know I'm like
You can't end every act with a "Bwahh!"
You can't, come on, give
us one act out that doesn't.
I remember J.J. calling me and he goes, "Do
we have to do that at
every single commercial break?"
And I was like, "Yes, we do."
From the very early days, we were
hearing, "You're making this up as you go
along. You don't know the
answers to any of these mysteries."
And when you reveal the answers to these
mysteries, we're
going to be disappointed.
At the time when we were doing, you know,
22 episodes a year, it was unrealistic to
assume that if you were going to do a
five or six year show, that you were
going to know, you
know, every step of the way.
I don't think they could have known
everything. I just don't.
They couldn't have anticipated some of
the cast departures.
They couldn't have anticipated which cast
members were going to pop.
And so because of those variables, they
could not have had everything mapped out.
The journey of Lost is like a road trip
from New York to Los Angeles.
You know you're going to hit certain
cities along the way, but you don't
exactly know how you're going to get
there and how long you're going to stay.
Damon had a great attitude about stuff.
He was like, "You know, you paint
yourself in a corner, just
start climbing the walls."
And I was like, "All right."
We were definitely making stuff up as we
went along because you can only basically
lay the track that's right in front of
you so that the train keeps moving.
And then the train has to slow down in
order for you to start
designing more track.
I think a lot of the character journeys
changed and evolved based on the
brilliant performances that were being
given by the actors in the show.
Like with Michael Emerson's character, he
was booked for three episodes.
And the moment he said, "Got any milk?"
You guys got any milk?
Damon and Carlton called me and said,
"We've got to keep him. He's a genius."
I remember a couple from New Zealand.
They crossed the street on two
consecutive days to tell me
that I had ruined the show.
And I thought, "What did you
think that show was about?"
Did you think it was like Fantasy Island
or something? That it was going to be a
fun romance with lots
of attractive castaways?
It's a bigger agenda than that, y'all.
You know, there's stakes
here. There's villainy.
No one really knew what was going to
happen, which was fun and exciting, but
also there was a practicality
of it of, "Oh, well, hang on.
Am I going to be working anymore? What's
happening? Am I going to get the script
tomorrow that's saying, "Oh, Claire falls
down the well. Bye."
There were a lot of WTF moments on Lost
and a lot of very shockingly sad moments.
When Michael shot Ana Lucia and Libby, I
jumped off my couch. I
could not believe it.
And also Michael k*lled them? That's
crazy. I forgot about that. Like,
Michael's a good guy. He's m*rder,
straight up murdering people.
The Tailies were a way of bringing in new
story, bringing in new characters, and
mixing things up a little bit.
It wasn't like we all sat in the room and
said, "Hey, let's introduce a bunch of
new characters and
then get rid of them all."
There were problems sometimes with the
characters, sometimes with the actor
playing the character, sometimes both.
There were a few people who had trouble
with the law, which
probably didn't look great.
Cynthia Watros and Michelle Rodriguez. It
was coincidental.
Apparently they both got DUIs.
The fact that the name of the episode
they were both k*lled off in
is called 'Two for the Road'.
Yeah, if you get in trouble with the
police, then your character dies
immediately the next day.
That's what happens on Lost.
I'm sure that the scrapes with the Law
didn't help, but some of the main
characters also had scrapes with the Law
and they managed to stay on the show.
So, you know, you can't just say, "Well,
this person got a DUI and that's why they
got kicked off the show."
The reality is always
more subtle and more nuanced.
You know, the actor who played Mr. Eko,
that character was going to be a very
significant character.
And they had to pivot because he didn't
want to live in Hawaii and commit to
living in Hawaii to be on a show for
another four or five seasons.
Did you see that? Did you see that?
That's the dinosaur
I'm telling you about.
You know, I don't know what it is still
to this day, but the
dinosaur sounds pretty good.
For the monster, I think that the working
idea was that it was like the movie
Forbidden Planet, which was that there
was some sort of a security system that
had been designed and it presented as
whatever it was that
you were most afraid of.
And maybe nanotechnology was involved.
It's so funny, when you said, "What is
the smoke monster?" My first thought was,
"It's just the sound in the cabs."
What used to happen is whenever you used to
get out of a cab, the receipt
would come up and be
like, chck chck chck chck
The sound you're hearing is the receipt
thing, but the reason why I
wanted it is so subconsciously.
Anyone in New York City would be
walking around and they'd be hearing this
familiar sound and they wouldn't know why
they'd be hearing...
chck chck chck chck
I just wish we had gotten,
I mean just a little bit
further with the tailies. I think all in
all, I mean, who do
we have left, Bernard?
There's this thing called a podcast, and
people talk, and it's sort of like the
radio. But it's not the radio.
Did I listen to any
Lost podcasts? All of them.
They kind of became my drive time
listening, going into set, because the
commute for Lost was an hour.
You're interviewing Ryan for this?
Oh yeah
Well, you know, there was a photo of Ryan,
basically like a wanted poster, like, "Keep
an eye out for this guy, because he's
going to spoil the show."
And I knew who he was, because I
listened to his podcast.
Ryan, first off, is just one of the best
people. Sweet, kind,
soft-spoken, true nerd.
And he and his wife, Jen, did this
podcast called The Transmission.
They look like your typical Mililani
family. But when the kids go to bed...
Aloha, welcome. You've
tuned into The Transmission.
Jen and Ryan Ozawa turn into
internationally known podcasters.
They had the most amazing Lost podcast,
Ryan and Jen, and they were very fine
with sharing spoilers, and
no one judged them for it.
So, Hawaii Law is unique in that anybody
has access to any beach, public access to
shorelines or PASH, so they can't stop
you from coming and watching or, frankly,
walking through the set.
They really wouldn't care until I would
pick up a camera, and then they would
leap into action and stand
right in front of the camera.
At the time, I would say it was a
friendly, you know,
cat-and-mouse situation.
I tried to be the best stalker I could be
and not really get in their way.
I think that in terms of the crew, we
kind of came to a general understanding
that I'm going to do
what I'm going to do.
Fans got a fan.
Productions got a production.
I never saw Ryan as a problem to the
show. I saw him as a fan, and so I like
the fact that he had a podcast out there
about the show, and they were talking
about the mysteries of it.
Their website and internet broadcast get
at least 20,000 hits each week.
It was definitely a family affair. We had
Kate do kind of the intros
when she was old enough.
I do have memories of sitting in front of
a microphone, Dad giving me a piece of
paper, and he's like, "Okay, say this."
Transmission, episode
43, November 8, 2008.
I remember staying up late to watch my
parents watch the show, basically,
because I didn't know what was going on.
Colleen, is my hair look OK?
My name is Jay Glatfelter.
Jack Glatfelter.
We are Jay and Jack.
Our podcast is The Lost
Podcast with Jay and Jack.
Do you know that, side note, do you know
that Jay and Jack, the older guy, his
dad, do you know that he
auditioned for Survivor once?
The reason I believe I make The Ultimate
Survivor, I'm a very competitive person.
I have the ability to push myself to the
limit, and I will never let myself quit.
Just a weird fact from Bobby Moynihan.
Well, I didn't know what a podcast was.
He kept mentioning this podcast thing. I
go, "Yeah, whatever kid."
It's just, it gets so fun to just debate
and talk about it, you know?
And I think that's what makes this show,
Lost, so good, and why you have well over
100 Lost podcasts about it, because it
brings up such great discussion.
If you don't mind talking a bit about
Colleen, didn't you guys meet through the
podcast or something?
Yeah. No, it's crazy. Because of this TV
show, I met my wife, and then my kids
exist because of this TV show.
My name is Colleen Glatfelter.
I am the wife of Jay, of Jay and Jack.
And the mother of Zach and
Alex, and I am a Lost fan.
I had listened to podcasts and was like,
"Let me check out to see
if there's any Lost ones."
I was like, "Oh, hey, there's Jay. That's
the voice. Now he's got a
real face. He's a person."
And then I was like, "He's kind of cute,
and he's super nice."
Now I'm getting bright red.
Steve Jobs went up on stage and said,
"Look at iTunes. It's amazing. You can go
on iTunes and you can download Lost."
There will be an episode of Lost
broadcast tonight. You
can buy it tomorrow.
And what happened was, people would be
like, "I want to do that."
They downloaded iTunes, they searched for
Lost, and they got us.
They're like one of the most popular
podcasters in the country. I was just
being told that more
popular than ESPN, NPR's podcast.
I mean, there's some heavyweights out
there, and they're topping 'em.
I didn't check the list obsessively. I
never checked the top ten.
Yeah, we always checked the top ten.
Hi, I'm Chris, and I produce the
Official Lost Podcast.
I took the idea to the publicist for Lost
at the time, and I said, "Hey, we should
do a podcast for Lost."
He looked at me and
said, "What's a podcast?"
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the
Official Lost Podcast hosted by ABC.com.
Every show has a
podcast now that is official.
Everybody tried to mimic the format that
Lost did, and Lost kind of
just sort of trailblazed it.
Okay, can you hold that a little more?
As Lost continued to be a massive
success, the writers knew that they
wouldn't be able to keep telling the
story of the survivors of the crash of
Oceanic flight 815 without
knowing when the show would end.
Okay, it's a massive hit show. The
business of television is to keep hits on
the air for as long as possible.
This is not the era of limited series.
This is the era of if you have a great
idea for a television show and it's a
hit, we're going to
make you do it forever.
So when we get into season three, we get
Jack, Kate, and Sawyer trapped on Hydra
island with no way out. The Lost writers
are creating a
metaphor for their own plight.
They're looking around at the board going,
"We gotta do 22 episodes? Like,
maybe some of them have to be bad."
The question was, "How do you keep the
show going?" And my answer was always,
"Well, you can't keep it going forever
because it's a mystery show."
I have to give initial credit to Stephen
King. We went and we did an interview
with Stephen King in Maine, and one of
the things that he said to us was, "You
guys are going to need to end your show."
I know that Damon, J.J., Carlton, everyone
wanted this to have a proper resolution,
but it was something they
had to really fight for.
I was obsessed with getting an end date,
and nobody else wanted to have the
conversation or
envisioned it as possible.
So when we said we want to negotiate an
end date, they were just like, that was
crazy. But we stuck to our g*ns, and
Damon and I threatened to quit the show
if we didn't get an end date.
Right about the time they get that in
season three, Lost reframes and reboots
with a completely kind of new approach to
storytelling. We get this fantastic
stretch of episodes.
Because of shows like Lost, I think shows
are more willing to be like, "No, we
gotta end it here in season five so we
can stick the landing."
And I think because Lost didn't stick the
landing in certain people's eyes, other
shows have benefited from that.
I don't think you make a show now without
thinking about the end game
because of shows like Lost.
When I started writing about Lost, the
word spoiler was sort of new to me and I
think to a lot of the Lost community.
Every interviewer would be like, "What
can you tell us?" But they knew that we
couldn't say anything. You know,
everybody was trying to
get to scoop, you know?
We had to keep it under wraps. And I'm
like, "Bro, I'm only getting portions of
the script. I really can't
even tell you if I wanted to," you know.
They would messenger our scripts in these
unmarked envelopes
like to our front doorstep.
Sometimes we'd only get pages.
Script security became a big deal on that
show and it has been a big deal on every
show I've worked on since then.
You know, God, we got like red scripts so
you couldn't photocopy them. Now people
would be like, "Why is it
red?" Just take a picture.
And it was nerve-wracking because your
name was on every script so you had to
make sure no one took that thing and
leaked it out. And people did.
I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. I
was like, "This is not the formula for
the next atom b*mb. This is a TV show and
you're asking me to put a lock box
outside of my front door so you can
deliver my scripts."
I was a stubborn kid who was like, "f*ck
that. I am not doing
it." And I never did.
I was never a believer in having to do
red scripts or to keep scenes away from
the actors. These are the people that I
trust the most, the actors and the crew.
We had to sh**t
different people in the coffin.
Josh is like, "What the f*ck does this
mean? Am I dead?" And it's like, you
couldn't tell Josh that he was the
herring, because you're actually asking
the actor to come in and sh**t a piece of
film that's never going to be in the show
just to kind of throw
people off the scent.
But it's difficult because someone like
me, I talk too much and I'm too open
anyway so it's hard. I
have to really go, "Oh."
I kind of liked you that people would ask
me, "What about this?" And you know I
can't tell you. I like that. Because
doesn't it build that Christmas morning
feeling, that feeling of like, "I am
looking forward to something." And yes, I
want to know but I
don't really want to know.
J.J.'s attitude about spoilers is like,
"Listen, if I want to give you a present,
I want to be able to wrap it and present
it to you the way I wanted it to present
it to you." And a spoiler is
like, "Here, I got you a watch."
If you tell someone, "I know what happens
in the Lost finale, do you want to know?"
It's almost too tempting to resist.
There were sites that specifically got
hits because they would post spoilers.
Have you had anybody tell you that they
were spoiled for the season three? Okay.
So I was on Dark UFO all the time and I
went there, I clicked on it. It was all
my fault. You know, I was like, "I want
to know. Tell me about it."
The flash forward. I mean, actually I
could talk about it and I just got
goosebumps because that was a
game-changing moment for television.
We have to go back, Kate.
We have to go back!
Jack, with the beard standing there
screaming, "We have to go back," I was
standing up in my living room, staring at
the TV, going, "What?"
Like, "Holy sh*t! This is the..." And
trying to explain to people who weren't
on the... We all weren't at the same
place as it was happening of like, "Wait,
what's happening?" Like,
Yeah, sh*t. It's so good.
When Charlie holds up the Not Penny's
Boat thing, it was another one of those
moments where I was like, both shocked,
but I was screaming and cheering at the
same time, and there
just isn't anything like it.
So why did you k*ll Charlie?
They told me to. I was told to. I
remember being on the set and here comes
Dominic walking and we're about 50 feet
away and I start shaking my head.
And before I could say anything, he
looked at me and he says,
"It's alright, Andrew. It's alright."
And when I shot it, we did a few takes of
Dom in the tank and I remember he pushed
off. I said, "Push off and if you want to
get embryonic or whatever
you want to do, go for it."
And he pushed off and then crossed
himself. And it was so moving.
And, I think J.J., when he saw the episode,
"Oh my God, what you had Dom do there
cross himself was
devastating." I said, "It wasn't me."
I may be smart enough to know when it's
brilliant and say thank you to the
actors, but that was Dom.
Boy, I am hated for that. Hated for a lot
of reasons in different roles, but
k*lling Charlie is top of the list.
I've seen some Not Penny's Boat. It
happens in airports actually that people
will write it on their hand and just hold
up their hand to me
and not make eye contact.
And I'm like, "Yep, I see you." So do my
kids who don't know what's happening.
God forbid I post something on Instagram
that's anywhere near a boat. It's all
anyone wants to comment is, is that
Penny's Boat? Not Penny's
Boat. Kind of like Penny's Boat.
Today we're counting down our picks for
the best TV episodes of
all time. The Constant.
Star-crossed Lovers is a story as old as
time, thwarted by family. Again, a trope
we know from literature. Thwarted by tears
in the space-time continuum is
perhaps a more unusual trope.
I like the way they did the time travel
in that, because later on they did the
shaky dance. But I like
that it was just in his head.
I think the Constant is unique in the
story in that it's a very stand-alone
episode. And it goes to the crux of what
the show is about in terms of science
fiction and love and what people will do
for love and the lengths they'll go to.
This is my wedding ring. And my wedding
ring has an inscription on the inside and
it says, "And you have her," which is the
last line of Penny's letter to Desmond.
Because all we really need to survive is
one person who truly
loves us. And you have her.
In my wedding vows, yeah, I said my wife
is my Constant and she said the same
thing. And it was sweet.
I have to say, I didn't know that people
had me in their wedding vows. That feels
really full-on. I haven't seen that for a
long time. It's unbelievably moving to be
remembered and in a way that is really
meaningful to people.
I love having my framed Desmond and Penny
photo because people that get it love it
and people that don't are just like, "Who
are those people?" And
then I get to talk about Lost.
Wow. Framed photo of a
fictional couple. Sure, why not?
Hello, stranger.
Hello.
How are you?
How are you?
I'm sitting here doing an
interview for a Lost documentary.
Okay, so they said to me that you've
never watched the show. I can't believe
you've never watched our
scene. You know the Constant.
I've watched our scene.
Oh you've watched that
scene. Just the scene.
But you never watched the whole
ep... you watched the whole episode?
I can't remember.
That's so funny.
I get just so many people
who will just sidle up to me
and go "that was, that
was my favorite episode"
Oh, that's nice.
Oh, sh**t. Oh, can you hear me now?
You know, we're in the
North Shore, so um...
Ah, I lost her.
My honeymoon um was, you know, what all
adults do for their honeymoon. We went on
a Lost tour. I remember standing on the
beach going like, "It's just a beach!"
But they shot Lost
here and I'm very happy.
I always felt when I went to Hawaii to
work on Lost that in a way my experience
was a parallel of the
character's experience.
I flew into the middle of the vast ocean
and landed on a strange island and I had
this magical, adventurous experience.
Anyone who goes to Hawaii, you get off
and you get the impact of that air. It's
like nothing you've ever experienced.
There's some quality in it.
It's just so, it's beautiful.
It's almost mystical. But
we have to go back, you know?
I remember coming out to work every day
and thinking, "This is our office for the
day. This is where I get to work." And I
never took that for granted.
And look, it's just beautiful, right?
Hi, it's Ella here and welcome to Camp
Erdman. You guys might know it as the
Others Village. How I
know it is a summer camp.
I've been going here since I was about
nine years old and it's a lot of fun.
These houses, though, they're not what
you think they are. Let's see
what they actually look like.
Welcome to the cabin. There are 16 bunk
beds in each cabin. They're pretty
comfortable. And not a lot of people
believe me when I say this, but I was on
the show. I was baby Aaron.
Ella was supposed to cry and she did. She
cried right on command.
So the casting ladies decided to have a
reunion of all the baby Aarons. So they
invited all the moms and all the babies
to get together in the park.
And this was pretty hilarious to see all
these baby Aaron clones
looking identical
together. They put them all in these baby
Aaron t-shirts. This is Ella
right in the middle crying.
Which you're very good at your specialty.
Do you want to read the letter you
wrote home to me from camp?
I told some counsellors that I am in
Lost, but they don't believe me. So it'd
be cool if you sent a letter and say I am
in Lost so they will
believe me. Love ya. Love Ella.
So I did.
Hawaii for me was so beautiful and
combining it with Lost with that
experience, it was all
just roses, you know.
It's where people go for holiday, you
know, and we got to work there.
And I could actually like make my coffee
and then just walk down the beach to the
set. And that was pretty
great. That was pretty exotic.
We lived really close together. We could
walk to each other's
houses. It was, it was a
really innocent time.
So we hung out together. The show would air
and whoever was featured, would have to
host a party. And we'd have a party at
their house, big dinner and c*ck and
sit and watch the show all together.
The Aloha is real. People are just a
little bit more respectful. I still smile
when I see the water. I go, "huh, it's a
great day." Good water. How's the water
today? It's flat. You know what I mean?
It's like, oh, today's glassy.
And I will say this, I will say this.
Even after 20 years, every time I work
and I travel and I come home, as soon as
the plane touches down and that door
opens and the island air just comes into
the plane, I'm just so happy to be home.
And to be living here.
And that's because of Lost.
I love Hawaiians. They really
embraced us and the show also, I think,
because we embraced Hawaii. We had a lot
of locals on the crew. We'd bring in local
priests, you know, to bless the set.
Our call sheets had a Hawaiian word of
the day. The culture was so respected.
And in Lost, whenever you saw those
beautiful, vast views, you fell in love
with that. And Hawaii was represented in
a way that I don't think it had been
represented prior. So
it was quite beautiful.
I think Hawaii was real excited to have
Lost here, exclusively here. You know, I
mean, we shot and it would look like
Boston or we shot and it looked like
Kuwait. It was all shot here.
Lost really made an effort to hire local
people and give back to the economy here.
I don't think I've ever done a show with
quite as long hours as I did on Lost.
There was a sense of fulfillment because
it was such a popular
show and everybody loved it.
The fandom of it all and being on
a show that just is off the charts. I
mean, I still have people look at me
like, "You worked on Lost?"
It's shows like Lost that really invest in
in us and I think give
us the future to build.
And to be able to create the jobs where
people not only make a living but can
have a life. That's significant.
We knew the show was hard and we were
doing some crazy things, safe, safely.
I think for us, our film family in Hawaii
is a really, really tight
community, you know, here.
I embraced being in Hawaii. I loved the
Hawaiian community. I miss them.
Our whole community there was so
beautiful. Hawaii is just...
I kind of just need to take a
moment. It's such a special...
It's not even just a special place. It's
a special vibe. It's a special
everything there. The energy.
And I haven't been back and I need to go
back. We have to go back.
It was a very long time to be literally
stranded on an island. All of us
relocated to live in Hawaii for the show.
There would be weeks that might go by
without me being called on at all. The
blessings of a big cast.
So I would get a little stir crazy. I
realized that if I wasn't working there,
I would have a hard time living there.
I can only listen to so much
Jack Johnson in the elevator.
Terry O'Quinn and Josh Holloway and
Naveen Andrews would bring their guitars
and we would all, in between setups, just
sit and talk and sing.
A lot of the cast are really good
singers. And so we would
just have sing-alongs on set.
And, you know, when they would call us to
work, we'd be like, "Oh, come on!"
We've got one more song!
Oh!
There's a tree on the set just outside of
Haleiwa, Hawaii that still
bears the mark of all my practice.
I have a few of these, actually. It
started out with knives that had wooden
handles and I kept breaking them.
Yeah. See, the tip's a little worn from
being buried in that tree.
Oh, well, good times.
People have the illusion that you can
just be anywhere and throw a knife and
hit something or somebody.
And um, and I had to be
the proper distance. The
knife's going to spin so many
times over so much distance.
I still have a knife by my bed. If you
come into my house and you break down the
door and you stop the proper distance
away, I'll stick you.
I've seen people with tattoos of 'Not
Penny's Boat' and all kinds
of things on their body parts.
And I'm like, "Wow, you, you really have me
with you forever now."
I saw a very elaborate and detailed and
lifelike tattoo of Benjamin Linus's
freaking face on somebody's body.
I thought, "Well, that's cool. It's
flattering, but you
can't ever erase it now."
We made an episode called "Stranger in
a Strange Land" where we learn
how Jack gets his tattoos.
Next Wednesday, your tattoos, the answers
are finally revealed.
What is the significance of Jack's
tattoos? I don't know. It's a five. He
was on Party of Five. I'm
assuming that like, who cares?
The fact that Bai Ling was
in Lost makes me laugh.
How? Why? Sure. Great.
Getting Lost doc. Bai Ling, take one.
I said, "What is "Lost"? It's a show. I
never watch it. I have no clue.
I said, "Wow, it's so good." It's like a
very good quality of
movie when I watched it.
I did not know what I jumped into. Oh my
God, you not believe it.
Wherever I go, Lost, you're lost.
I said, "I just basically guest star in one
episode, but everybody." As if I was in
the whole season. I don't know why.
She has a secret doing this tattoo which
is connected to the
That means some you fly high, you're
destiny somewhere else.
The show was such a big deal, especially
in its final season, that there was a
whole controversy about the State of the
Union preempting a Lost episode.
I don't foresee a scenario in which
millions of people that hope to finally
get some conclusion in Lost are
preempted by the President.
Obama's like, "We're canceling. Play
Lost. Please, just
let the Losties shut up."
Yeah, I mean that's
how big of a deal it was.
The whole nation was like, "I'm sorry,
I'd love to know how the country's doing,
but as long as it doesn't affect Lost."
Thanks. Okay, okay.
Here we go, here we go. One more.
The final episode of Lost was the most
anticipated television event of 2010.
Even though the number of weekly viewers
had declined from its peak in the second
season, over 13 million people tuned in
to see how the show would end.
To this day, the finale of Lost remains
one of the most divisive and polarizing
episodes of television that ever aired.
Let's talk about the finale.
Oh, God. Great. My favorite subject.
That's going to be on my headstone. He's
still talking about the finale. Here lies
Damon Lindelof. He was dead the whole time.
On the inside.
As you probably know, Sunday night is the
series finale of Lost.
How will it all end?
The final episode of Lost was one of
the great pop culture television events
of the 21st century.
I mean, you couldn't escape it. It was
the most anticipated finale.
This Sunday, 7/6 Central,
ABC's Lost series finale.
A lot of people have been waiting six
years for this. They're planning viewing
parties all over the country.
Unless you've been on a desert island
yourself, you probably know that ABC's
hit show Lost will
end this Sunday night.
This is the
television event of the decade.
I have no idea how it can be wrapped up,
but good luck to all
concerned and here we go.
And that whole writer's room. We had some
of the most crackerjack
scribes in the industry. Dang.
I remember feeling that whole last season
I was getting scared the closer we got to
the end of like, "They're
not telling us stuff now.
There's no way that it's all
going to be answered tonight."
You can't wrap up a show like Lost with
a little pink ribbon and
say, "Here's your finale."
I mean, you can, but I think
that would be kind of shitty.
And it can't be like any other show
because it wasn't like any other show. It
was operating on a lot of levels.
Some of them, I'll go ahead and say, were
spiritual. A lot of philosophy. A lot of
reference to ancient
literatures and mythologies.
It was a big picture show. It was like a
thing that was exploding like a nuclear
thing that was exploding
outward in all directions.
So when it comes time to wrap it up, what
can you do but bring it all back into the
core of the original expl*si*n?
I think sometimes people, they wanted
something simpler or they wanted
neatness, I think, or cleverness. Thank
God we weren't clever in the end. It
meant more than that.
The longer a story goes, the deeper of an
investment someone has in it. So the more
hours that someone invests in Lost and
those hours aren't just time spent
watching the show but talking about the
show, anticipating the show.
If you watched it from the pilot to the
end of season six, you probably invested
close to a thousand hours of your
emotional energy into Lost.
And so for every hour that someone
invests in "Lost," the ending has to be
that much better for
them. That's fair, right?
Ending anything is really challenging and
ending a show that people don't want to
have end is even more challenging. It's
hard. Like, you try it.
Everyone's going to have their own
opinion. Everyone's going to want
something different. Everyone's going to
be like, "I wanted this, I wanted that, I
wanted to hear about that."
I don't know. I like that
they kept true to themselves
as far as keeping a lot
up to the imagination.
To me, the most important part of the
show was the characters. And what the
finale did is, I felt, gave closure to
the characters and their story together.
Like, life, it's about the journey. It's
not about that ending. So, and that was
the sort of takeaway. I always felt it
was about the journey.
I loved the finale. I really did. And I
think if you were that invested in the
characters especially, you couldn't not
be affected by the finale because I just
cared so much about all of those people.
I was so happy to go back and get to see
everybody. I really loved the way they
decided to kind of wrap things up with
the characters, you know? I thought there
was something beautiful there.
Felt like a love letter.
We'll go Dutch! I love that scene so much.
As often in the course of Lost, I was
confused by the finale. I didn't know
what's, the water's all going out of
this. What's, I don't quite understand.
I knew there would have to be a
confrontation between the light and the
dark. And I was happy to
be representing one side.
I love the finale because I feel like
they were so true to who the characters
were and what the show
ultimately was about.
And I do think that, look, when you have
a show that inherently has some massive
and significant questions, at a certain
point there probably
isn't an answer to that, that thing.
I can understand some people waiting for
a particular thing that they wanted to
understand and not getting that answer.
But that's what life is. We don't
always get the answer.
All these questions, even Lost, you have
a lot of questions. But I believe in our
mysterious world, a lot of questions are
meant not to have an answer. You just
have to accept it because it's a mystery.
We all saw what happened with Star Wars
when they answered too many questions.
People didn't love it.
What are you doing?
Checking your blood for infections.
Lost is not the only show
that people, you know
didn't like the ending.
You know, think about how the Sopranos
ended and people didn't like that.
There's always backlash, particularly
with a ravening audience
like the Lost audience.
Half this country votes red and half
votes blue. How could you
possibly agree on the Lost finale?
I've watched a lot of shows where I
thought the show was going to go
somewhere and the ending was like, wait a
minute, wait a minute. You know, we don't
want to go into that
because... I was a huge
Game of Thrones fan.
Yeah, I didn't like Game of Thrones. I
don't want to talk about
that. I'm going to get angry.
Oh sh*t, I'm those people.
Yeah, but hold on. Sometimes
finales are bad. Lost and
Sopranos, they're
divisive. Then there's bad.
Today we're counting down our picks for
the top 10 worst series finales.
Nothing riles me up more than seeing one
of those clickbait articles that says
worst finales of all time. Listen, didn't
your mom teach you if you don't have
anything nice to say, don't
publish it on the internet.
The show went downhill fast and contained
an ending, which was just insulting.
Let's meet in a church because this is
purgatory. What absolute nonsense.
I'll admit there are people who come up
to me and say like, "Hey man, love the
show, hated the finale."
Love the show, but the ending sucked.
How many times have I heard that?
It doesn't bother me. I know that opinion
is out there and people are very liberal
about sharing that opinion with me in the
subways or on the streets or in the
restrooms, you know.
There was a period there after when Lost
aired where like, if you were like, "I'm a
Lost fan," people were like,
"Oh, you like that dumb show?"
I'm not a violent man, but anyone who
doesn't like Lost, I'm going to beat up.
I feel like
I'm a really nice boy. I really am.
But if you're not a Lost
fan, get the f*ck out of my way.
I think that people felt very defensive.
I feel like we felt some sort of
ownership and like protective.
I just, I was so angry that people were
so angry. Like it made me angry. And it's
like, they created this incredible thing
and then they ended it. How they want.
Guess what? It's their
show. It's not your show.
Some people were happy and there were, I
mean, there were some people who were
very upset. They were probably enjoying
the show so much that it
wasn't that they were judging.
And I'm sure we'll get a lot of calls
about this. It wasn't that they were
judging the quality or that they felt
cheated. They just never wanted it to end.
I didn't want Lost to end. I thought there
was more story. I wasn't
finished with Desmond.
I was very sad to see it go.
People were suspicious we were dead the
whole time from the get-go.
It's very, very frustrating and annoying
to talk to people who think they've got
it figured out. And then they say one
thing and you go, oh, you don't know that
not everyone was dead, at the end, like
you didn't see that interview with Damon
Lindelof where he chewed that guy out.
Within three or four episodes of the
first season of the show, they were like,
it's purgatory, right? They're all dead.
And we kept saying, we swear
to God, they are not all dead.
It was like a shared fantasy, I mean. No.
So, so, so the things that were going on
on the island
were happening in the actual world. Yes.
The ending of Lost is everything that
happened happened. All of that stuff
happened, except for some of the stuff
over here. This didn't happen. This was
like a little area we all built for each
other to wait to go to heaven together.
So that, that didn't happen.
I'm not a hugely religious person, but
the end of Lost kind of gave me this
thing of like, you take what you need
with you and you leave behind what you
don't need. God, how, how long is this
documentary? I could talk
about it for 12 years. I have been.
I think the reason why they're so angry
about the ending is that for six years,
we asked the big questions of life. Like
the biggies. Why are we here? What is
this? What is our purpose? And because we
would ask those big questions, then
people would sit around together and they
would discuss them. These
big, important questions.
And then I think what they were hoping
for or assuming would happen is that
somebody's going to come along and offer
you the answer and that the finale would
be this great big aha. That's what the
show is saying. Why we're here? Is there
a God? What's going on? Is this real? Is
it a Holodeck? We were
going to get the big one.
But to put this into perspective, this is
the answer that every major world
religion has been trying to answer for
millennia. And this TV show was meant to
deliver that answer. Instead, they chose
to make the ending the big final question
that you could take away and you could
try and dig into it with your family.
Go back to the water cooler and go, what
the f*ck was that? And essentially what
they asked you to do is go within
yourself and search for your own answers.
And I don't think there's a more noble
way of sending people off into their
lives after bringing them on a journey
than to say "the answers
are within you. Go find them."
At the end of the day, I do think that at
the risk of sounding completely and
totally arrogant and pompous about it, TV
shows are popular entertainment, but the
ones that are reaching to be innovative
and different and emotionally evocative
are also bordering on, if not actual art.
And whether Lost is art or not is not for
me to say. It was my
intention for it to be art.
There's responsibilities of the writers
and the actors that's part of painting
the picture to fulfill. But by the same
token, it's part of your jazz to suspend
the imagination and let it fly. Because
if you don't let it fly,
you never will be satisfied.
I felt like the passionate dissension
um, about the Lost
ending was good because it
meant that everybody cared. I mean, what
do we talk about? We talk about things we
love or things we hate.
We don't care about the gray.
One of the facets of greatness is to be
also misunderstood or misinterpreted. And
we were often misinterpreted. And I think,
I think our writers
felt a little assailed, a
little beleaguered and felt like they had
to explain themselves or make apologies
or something. I felt
like, no, no. Skip that.
Moving on.
Times were different. There was what I
call the TV writer omerta, the code of
silence. You know, you didn't talk about
toxic work environments. You didn't talk
about a*usive bosses and you sure as
shellac didn't call anything out.
Some new stories have surfaced about the
chaotic and toxic writers
room of the hit ABC drama Lost.
Mo Ryan published a piece in Vanity
Fair, which is also in her book about the
Lost writers room and how it was a
horrible toxic environment, particularly
for women and people of color. The brunt
of that was then put on Damon Lindelof
and Carlton Cuse as head
writers and showrunners.
That was a pretty hard pill to swallow.
That was a pretty hard pill to swallow
because I was that person who defended
the show tooth and nail. And then I find
out that there was like
racism and bigotry and sexism.
I had to really reassess my relationship
with the show because it's so ingrained
in my everyday life. Has this been ruined
for me? Do I let it go? Because I want no
part of bigotry. I want no part of
bullying and harassment.
I have seen so many stories like this
come through about just horrible,
difficult workplaces in Hollywood that I
see them and I don't
necessarily go "Ah, that
one too?" I'm just
like, "ah... that one too."
The problem is not just what happened on
the show Lost. It's it's systemic and
it's about all of Hollywood.
Everybody says, oh, that was just the
time. And it's like, yeah, it was. But
also a lot of people could have done
better at that time. They were grown ups
and they weren't making good decisions.
There were some difficulties in Damon's
stewardship of the show. The writing
environment became extraordinarily toxic.
Minority writers have come out to say that
there was a lot of bullying and a lot of
it was r*cist bullying and a lot of it
was misogynistic bullying in the writers
room. And I can corroborate that.
Well some people will
be like, "well, a toxic
work environment, you just need that for
a show like Lost to exist." I disagree. I
don't want to explain it
to you, but that's not true.
I know that they went out of their way to
make sure that they had diverse
representation in the writers room. But
then to find out that they had these
people there and they were wasting their
talents, they didn't allow them to speak.
I'm like, I felt like a
lot of that was optics.
I will say if the writers room of Lost
was less toxic, I think the show might
have been better. And that's kind of a
sad thing to think. A show that I love so
much would have been better if they were
just nicer to the writers.
When you talk about the interpersonal
relationships within the writers room and
the kind of bullying and teasing and
currying for favor and all of that, a lot
of that did take the form of jokes about
race and class and gender that were
completely inappropriate and a*usive.
It was very, very hurtful, like
especially some of this stuff about like
Mr. Eko. I mean, as a
black person, that was shocking.
When Lost started, it's like a diverse
cast. There are multiple black people on
the show. Not every show had that. But
then towards the end of the show, you
start to realize that they're focusing
more on these four white leads.
The people of color were just kind of
moved to the side, slower and slower and
slower and then faster
and faster and faster.
The episode in the last season when we
lose Sun and Jin and Sayid, like all in
one fell swoop, it felt very like, oh my
God, all these characters are just gone.
And they all are characters of color. And
it just felt like a very unceremonious
way for them to go out. And I think
people felt that at the time.
Working on a show with a Latino character
as one of the leads and then having to
write material like, oh, he's still fat
because he hoarded away a tub of ranch
dressing. Isn't that hilarious?
You know, um, because
that kind of humor is the stock
and trade of the writers room is really
difficult to brook. That shows up on
screen, but that's also a staff that when
Michelle Rodriguez got a DUI, you know,
two of the senior level
producers put up her mugshot.
Along with Cynthia Watros' mugshot,
right? And made jokes about how Michelle
had sold Cynthia Watros for cigarettes in
the Hawaiian prison because she was a
wily Latina with, you
know, g*ng experience.
I talk about that so that it doesn't
happen again so that other shows that
come after us are better.
And it's leading by example, you know,
having a room that is positive and not
making r*cist jokes. Just, just if you just
don't do it, people
will continue to not do it.
Not everybody was the bad guy. There was
a lot of people that came to work every
day just trying to do their best and got,
you know, got mistreated. Like, I would
like for those people to feel like the
efforts that they put in was worth it.
I think it is a disservice to those
people to say, I'm never going to watch
Lost again because that's something that
they literally put their like sweat,
blood and tears into making.
I think we need to acknowledge it.
I think we need to really demand better
from the people that make shows.
At the end of the day, the show was
always going to be hard, but that's no
excuse for the toxicity that
occurred in that writers room.
My position is that it all happened
exactly as they said it did.
The thing that I probably feel the worst
about, that I was so wrapped up in my own
emotional process that I could not see,
experience or care about
anyone else's emotional process.
And when you're the boss of a thing,
that's not the way to run a show. The
idea that it was a boys club or that I
showed favoritism towards guys who look
like me or had the same
experience is spot on.
So what I would probably describe as
favoritism is analogous to racism or
sexism. This is now a part of the show's
legacy and I wish that it wasn't, but
it's my fault that it is.
Yeah I, you know I
think there was an overly
permissive culture in the writers room on
Lost and, you know, we
didn't understand at the time
the fact that the culture of the show was
harming people and, you know, I really
regret that that was the case.
And as a showrunner, I have
responsibility for that culture and I
wish we had done a better job and I'm
very sorry about it.
I felt betrayed, which is strange because
I am just a fan and I'm so proud of
people for coming forward to talk about
it. I think it's important for Lost fans
to know that it's not perfect and life
isn't perfect and it's
messy and so was this show.
How I choose to think about any of those
situations is does the person seem to
have owned up to it? Did they learn from
it? Had they atoned for it? What are they
doing now? A lot of times, to me, actions
speak louder than words.
It's really difficult
because you do, you do put
these people on a pedestal. Maybe those
people have changed, maybe they've
learned, maybe they treat people better.
And I think that we all can do that. I
think Lost has taught us that. It shows
us the flashback and then it shows us
what's going on. Lost shows us who we
used to be, how we can be, and
ultimately, maybe what
we should strive to be.
At the end of the day, I
was as big a fan of Lost as anybody. As
miserable as it was and as miserable as
it got, the thing that makes all of that
worthwhile is that so
many people love the show.
You know, you can go through your life in
this business and think, "I'm not doing
crap for the world. I'm just making a
living doing some
schmaltz and some of that." But, you know.
A guy got up and told a story and he was
a doctor. And he said, "Well, I had this
patient and she had a tumor in her
brain. "She said," I just want to stay
alive long enough to
see the end of Lost."
And I was like, "Wow."
And he said, "And um,
ten years later, she's still my patient."
To this day, the show means so much to so
many people. I've heard of fans who were
like, "I wanted to k*ll myself." And that
show kept me going because I wanted to
see what happened next week.
People who were stuck in a hospital with
no one at their bedside except us, you
know? And like, that's
the magic of what we do.
It's so superficial on so many levels and
can feel disgusting.
It can feel like, "What are we doing?
Where it's not brain
surgery. We're not like saving
lives." And then you hear these stories
and you go, "Wait, we did.
We literally did save a life."
How did that happen?
Give me a second. Sorry.
I relied on Lost. It was my savior. It
was my rescue. It was my escape from
the darkest time in my life.
I had to be in the hospital for a couple
weeks throughout the chemo, and it made
me very, very, very sick. There's times I
couldn't remember being
awake or anything like that.
So the only time I can try to make myself
stay awake was when Lost was on.
As long as I'm pretending that I'm on
this island, this magical island where
miracles happen, and these beautiful
people are having
these wonderful adventures.
I wasn't a sick person fighting cancer.
Not for that time anyway. So for that
hour, I wasn't sick. And the writers of
Lost didn't set out to
hold the hand of a stranger.
But in some weird way, they held my hand
through that whole entire six years
and I really needed that.
So it means everything.
Lost is not just a television show.
It changed my life tremendously.
People used to make fun
of me. "Oh, you're obsessed
with a television show. You spend all
your spare time writing
about a television show."
And then the television show ended. And I
had met people from all over the world
online, and I started meeting them in
person at events. And we started hanging
out together in real life. And then we
created Cancer Gets Lost.
One of the greatest things to come out of
Lost fandom is Cancer Gets Lost. It began
by auctioning off Lost memorabilia.
The idea that Cancer Gets Lost was
created at all out of the community of
this series. It's a beautiful thing and
maybe the best thing that
could come of a show like this.
At the time, I had a friend, a young
friend with a brain tumor, and I wanted
to do something for
her. So I wrote about it
on my blog. Jorge Garcia,
who I had never met
had reached out saying, "Would
you like a small piece of
Oceanic 815? I could sign
it and you can auction it off."
People really come together
and you really learn how
wonderful fans can be in a
time of sadness and crisis.
I was 14.
I remember going with her to a
special area, of I
believe it was Macy's, to
pick out bras. That are made specifically
for breast cancer patients. That is when
I was like, "Oh, okay.
Life is going to change now."
When she was diagnosed, it happened very
quickly. She fought it very hard, but she
was cancer free for 10 years. And those
were pretty incredible years getting to
see the kids mostly grow
up and come into their own.
The first occurrence that you beat and
that you're cancer free, that's amazing.
But if it comes back, that's the last
time. So we knew when it came back that
she was metastatic that it was just a
matter of managing it
and not beating it anymore.
She got to read every book that she
wanted. She got to drink every Coca-Cola
she wanted. She kind of lived that
Yolo life toward the end there.
It's kind of indicative, again, of this
community where there's just a stranger
on the internet feeling like they are
family. Like when I met
their kids for the first time, I was like,
"Oh, this is Uncle Jay."
You know? like
And so that level of connection is so
special, so losing her
was just devastating.
I love Jen and I miss her a lot.
Jen passed from cancer.
Wow.
Sorry. I miss Jen.
Jen represented the best of the Lost Fan
community. She was hilarious, super
whip-smart, was everybody's friend. Like
if you talk about the best possible Lost
Fan, there's a picture of Jen Ozawa.
I hear frequently that I'm a lot like her.
And I think that's the biggest
compliment you could ever give me.
Crouching behind the staircase, trying to
listen to my parents do their podcast
without making any noise, because I was
supposed to be in bed,
and I was not. And now I'm here.
What do you think Jen would
think about this documentary?
Mom should be here. She would
love this. Are you kidding me?
There was a voice inside that she really
was trying to figure out how to
articulate. I think the podcast was a
great outlet for that, but you
know, it's a shame because...
I don't think she was done.
She could have done a lot more.
I miss her every day,
and I wish she was here.
I think Lost certainly helped us process
things that we were going through. I
mean, these are things that really matter
about a network television show, is that
we form these connections with people who
care about each other.
If I were to sum it up in a word, it
would be community. You know, making
friends and pen pals with people in
Missouri as well as Sri Lanka
Like, that's amazing.
I think the fan community was what kept
her going, I mean, both before and after
her diagnosis. To this day when people
will comment on one of the social media
platforms, like, "Oh, you and Jen were so
great, and X, Y, and Z, that means the
world," to be remembered.
I love that. She would love that.
I hope that when people talk about the
shows that defined an era of television,
that Lost is among them.
There isn't a job that I have gotten
since Lost where someone hasn't said to
me, "I loved you on that show."
No one has said to me,
"What's Lost? Never heard of it."
I never finished watching the show.
Sorry, Damon.
I just think it's so effing awesome that
I was a part of something that mattered
so much. It was awesome.
I miss it so much.
One of the cool things about Lost is that
you can still ask questions about it. Not
everything is answered. I mean, what's
more boring than a completed puzzle?
And even comparing it to something that's
made right now. I mean, God, we're doing
a documentary 20 years later about a
freaking kick-a*s show that I still love
and I'm so lucky that
I got to be part of.
It was so central and so primary for a
period of time. And then literally my
involvement became, like, as a viewer, as
a fan, sort of
watching what was being done.
Like, I would watch episodes of that show
and, like, my breath was taken away
because it was just so thought-provoking
and emotional and unexpected and the
scope of it and the scale of it,
especially at that time.
Because so many incredible people,
I think, were doing the best
possible work on that show.
I'm so grateful, not just for what it did
for my career, but what it did to break
ground for diversity on television.
The fact that you had two series regulars
on a network show speaking a language
other than English and you were expected
to sympathize with them, not consider
them enemies or other or
some kind of stereotype.
When you start having the conversation
about diversity and inclusion in media,
you must include Lost
in that conversation.
I mean, maybe the legacy is that you do
take a moment to put yourself right in
there in someone else's shoes.
In life, we get into a lot of trouble. If
we make someone else an other, right,
I would never be like
them. I would never do that.
You know, I would never say that.
And I think the wonderful thing about the
perspective of Lost is we start to have
empathy and compassion
because we can see the why of it.
This TV show changed my life
in every single conceivable way.
I have no idea where I would be and what
I would be doing right now
if Lost hadn't existed.
I wouldn't have the life partner that I
have who is the greatest gift of my life.
I wouldn't have my sons. I mean, I might
have children, but not those ones.
I think because I had a difficult
journey, it's just so important for me to
say how honored I feel to have been a
part of Lost, to have been a part of that
moment in history, for television, to
have been a part of the beautiful group
of cast that I worked with.
I think it's important that people know
that I'm proud of it and I'm really
grateful that they love it.
That means a lot to me.
The friendships that formed out of it and
this shared love of something was as
powerful, I think, to me,
to the fans as the show.
And I think remembering that time now,
when we all loved this thing and we all
literally took the time to sit down in
front of a television
together,
is Lost.
I look at everything it gave me and I
look at everything that it did for me and
I don't mean materially.
I mean also spiritually.
Being involved with something that
connected that way with an audience is
something that profoundly affects you.
You know, when people think back on Lost,
I hope that they also identify with the
moments in their life that were going on
at the time they watched it.
I loved how it makes this argument for
the importance of community.
Live together, die alone.
Lost fandom is like very
dear to me in a way that I don't
even know I have words to express other
than I'm just so grateful for it.
I don't think it lightly that it meant a
lot to a lot of people. The show was a
It was a great ride. Come
on, it was a great ride, right?
See you in another life, brother.
There's a very, very
corny line in the finale
Where are we, Dad?
This is a place that you all made
together so that you
could find one another.
And I think that that's what Lost is on a
meta level. And I think that all we ever
want in human existence
is to find our people.
And the fact that Lost, this television
show, created a space for some to find
their people. And that community not only
existed for the time that the
show was on, but persevered.
The community in Lost has been my savior.
And the friends that I've made along the
way are truly going to be sitting on
those church pews with me at the end.
I have everything in my life right now as
a result of this one show, which I am
forever grateful for it. So Lost will
always be special to me.
The community seemed to just get tighter
and tighter even though the show had
ended. Like these are, they're my people
now. You know, that's my community.
The fact that we're sitting and talking
about it now, 20 years after its
inception, whether its legacy as a
qualitative piece of television is good
or bad, it matters to
me. Of course it does.
But the thing that is vastly more
important is this other thing, which is
that it matters to the community who
invested in it. That they cared about it.
And that they struggle and wrestle with
it and are still engaged by it.
I'm just immensely grateful that
that community still
exists and that there are
people who will, you know, watch your
documentary because
they care about the show.
So yeah, it means the world to me.
Do you remember the lost numbers?
The lost numbers? Oh, all of the numbers?
f*ck you! What are you
talking about? Do I remember? No!
I mean the numbers are bad, right? So...
Oh my God. Oh, eight!
Six, seven, five,
three oh nine?
It's funny, my kids would be able to
rattle off the numbers like that.
Four, eight, fifteen, sixteen,
twenty-three, forty-two.
Four, eight, fifteen, sixteen,
twenty-three, forty-two.
When I very first met my boyfriend years
before we dated, he was wearing a t-shirt
with the numbers on.
Four, eight, fifteen, sixteen,
twenty-three, forty-two. And I didn't
even have to look
down at my shirt either.
What do you think? I don't know the lost
numbers. The numbers are four, eight,
fifteen, sixteen,
twenty-three, and forty-two.
And let me explain why I know them.
Were there any actors you
didn't get to interview?
Yeah, we never got Matthew Fox.
Seriously? You never got
Foxy? Come on. Really?
That's too bad. His loss.
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Getting LOST (2024)
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