Alan Sepinwall, writing for Grantland, recounts the origins of the hit TV show LOST, as told by the people who made it, in an exclusive first serial excerpt from The Revolution Was Televised:
On vacation with his family in Hawaii, Braun watched his network’s broadcast of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away, then went down to the beach to watch the sunset and meet up with his wife and kids. As he waited, he began pondering the idea of doing Cast Awayas a TV show, but couldn’t figure out how to make it work with only one actor and one volleyball.
“And then the notion of Survivor popped into my head,” recalls Braun. “I don’t know why. And I put it all together: What if there was a plane that crashed and a dozen people survived, and nobody knew each other. Your past was almost irrelevant. You could reinvent who you were. You had to figure out — how do you survive? What do you use for shelter, for water? Is it like Lord of the Flies? How do we get off the island, how do you get home? And I start to get very excited about the idea, and I start thinking about the title Lost.”
Also interesting and surprising was how one of the writers of LOST, Damon Lindelof, reacted to the show’s premiere:
Lindelof, on the other hand? He describes his response to those huge premiere ratings as “Terror, depression, anxiety, anxiety attacks. I’m not exaggerating. Everybody who was around me at the time knows I pretty much wanted to die, and knowing that wasn’t going to happen unless I took matters into my hands, I just wanted to quit. But there was literally no one to quit to.”
Cuse says, “I remember [Lindelof] coming in with the ratings after the opening episode, and he looked completely miserable. He said, ‘Does this mean we have to keep fucking doing this?’ If you’re a producer in television, this is like getting a winning lottery ticket: having a show that’s not only critically acclaimed but gets big ratings. But it was daunting to have to sustain this thing.”
I’ve placed Alan Sepinwall’s The Revolution was Televised on my Christmas wish-list.
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As some of you may know, LOST is my favorite TV show (to this day). Here was my reflection six months after the show ended.
(hat tip: Longreads)
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