Almost a decade ago, I started down a dark path. A 12-year-old with no social skills, I spent virtually all of my after school time with my dog, my parents, and TV. One Wednesday night early in the school year, I sat down to watch some primetime and caught an episode of Lost (the tremendously engaging Raised by Another) and came away a fan for life. And, despite what most might assume, I’ve never regretted it.
Nine years after the premiere and three years after the finale, declaring yourself a Lost fan now comes with an inevitable follow up discussion. Of the show’s 121 episodes, all anyone seems to care about is one: How did you feel about The End?
The show premiered to an enormous audience in a hugely transitional year, and remained heavily talked about even when its ratings no longer warranted it. Every frame, line, and detail was treated as having a predetermined purpose, and it was largely because the showrunners presented it that way. So when The End came and it turned out every peculiar visual wasn’t a meaningful piece of what everyone assumed would be a complex scientific mythology, viewers were mad, and stubborn non-viewers were irritatingly gleeful. These reactions were fitting for 2010, but the conversation has stayed there ever since, the finale hanging over any discussion like a concrete punctuation mark. If getting the hell over it already isn’t an option, I at least think its important to examine the value of the show outside of its final season.
We have to go back.
Lost is the show that taught me how to watch television—a skill that’s annoyingly come to be central to my identity. Especially in the first season, every episode was structured like pieces of a mystery begging to be solved. I found myself going on forums (first the official ABC ones, then TWoP when I became more obsessed) and desperately reading theories and discussions for hours at a time, looking for a meaning that made sense. No longer trusting the TV Guide recaps to sufficiently fill me in, I made an effort to watch the first string of episodes I’d missed. For probably the first time, I rewatched episodes before they became reruns, and then rewatched them again. Always chronologically. When I got to college, I even arranged my schedule to have Wednesday nights free for the final season, only to find out the show moved to Thursday and changing all my classes so that I’d still be able to watch the finale live.
The finale ended up being on a Sunday night, but that’s not the point.
I was in junior high school when Lost premiered, and was discussing the finale online minutes before a college final. For me, and I suspect for a lot of people my age, it was one of the first shows that really indicated how much television can do and—much more importantly—how much attention television should command. It’s been nearly a decade, and today I can’t fall in love with a show without needing to rewatch and rewind every episode to catch every detail, and then discuss those details with other fans, and then read every Q&A with the creators and cast, and then buy the DVDs and listen to the commentary so I can hear more and finally bore my friends over beers as the subject matter expert over tiny TV details. If Lost hadn’t been there to entice me as a geeky preteen, I probably wouldn’t have been so quick to watch Breaking Bad, Mad Men, or even Community. I almost definitely wouldn’t have looked for and loved old episodes of The Wire, Twin Peaks, or The Sopranos. Most of these shows may be more flawless, more meaningful, or more bold, but Lost was one of the first mainstream “event” shows to embrace more complex storytelling, and taught me how to embrace it, too.
It was easy to fall in love with, but difficult to love. The summer after season one, I recall a lot of discussion about whether Lost could really be referred to as a cult show when it had regularly pulled in impressive ratings. It exposed a dissonance that I think contributes a lot to the disappointing reputation Lost now has: while the core fanbase was geeky and obsessive like that of a cult show, the ratings—roughly equal to the numbers The Big Bang Theory has now—indicated a more mainstream audience. Geeks were never the show’s only audience, but when a show embraces conventionally “nerdy” elements we assume it’s for our eyes only. From the start, Lost tried to combine mythology with character moments, and its ultimate failure was that it couldn’t balance both sides of the equation. Devin Faraci compared Lost to a duplicitous ex, but my experience was more akin to that of a high school sweetheart. It was an earnest, confused teen that loved exploring all these cool things but still wanted to come home every night and please his parents. Lost is basically just Lindsay Weir.
So that cool teen graduated and ended up majoring in Marketing rather than Philosophy or Physics. It’s disappointing, but not deceitful, and in the end he still influenced my point of view more than I might want to admit. I don’t feel cheated when I rewatch episodes (still chronologically, with a few skipped episodes here or there). The thrills are still vivid and the more painful moments are dulled, like the memory of any awkward but important first love.
Thanks, Lost.
favorite show ever 
I definitely agree with this, and it does suck that Lost has been reduced to just it’s finale. I kinda feel the same thing has happened to Battlestar Galactica too; it’s the sort of thing that needs to be revisited and reconsidered with time, I guess. What happened to the days of Buffy where a show can fall off later on in it’s run and still be fondly remembered?
I can’t comment on BSG yet, but I think the core difference between reactions to Lost and Buffy is that a lot of the great moments of Lost structurally hinge on the promise of payoff down the line, so the bitterness if more understandable, if a little reductive. If you rewatch a great episode like The Shape of Things to Come (a.k.a.that episode I constantly tell you to rewatch), some of the iconic moments like Ben summoning the smoke monster or his cryptic bedtime meeting with Widmore get less exciting if you remember that those storylines kind of sort of fizzled out.* Meanwhile even if you disliked the later seasons of Buffy, you could still watch an episode like Passion or Doppelgangland without feeling cheated.
*Please still rewatch it, it’s the best.