The Quarantine Stream: ‘Lost’ is an Intriguing, Game-Changing Piece of TV History

(Welcome to The Quarantine Stream, a new series where the /Film team shares what they’ve been watching while social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The Show: Lost

Where You Can Stream It: Hulu

The Pitch: A plane crashes on a mysterious tropical island, and the survivors quickly realize they’re not alone.

Why It’s Essential Quarantine Viewing: Even setting aside the timely aspect of the second season’s quarantine subplot for one of its characters, now is a great time to revisit Lost – or to get into it for the first time. In many ways, this series serves as the bridge between mystery-centric shows like Twin Peaks or The X-Files and sprawling, mega-budget, massively-watched epics like Game of Thrones. But while it’s fascinating to examine the show as a pop culture artifact of the mid-2000s, it’s also still so damn good that it’s all-too-easy to get genuinely sucked in by its story and characters.

Let’s get this out of the way right up top: I’m a defender of the show’s final season and especially its series finale, which pays off its characters in ways that I felt to be incredibly satisfying. Was every single mystery answered? No. Would I have appreciated it if more loose ends were tied up as the series hurtled toward its conclusion? Sure. We can have that conversation all day long, but looking at the show from a macro sense, the primary feeling I walk away with is gratitude for how many incredible moments it generated along the way.

The story behind the creation of Lost has been mythologized almost as much as some of the detailed mythology within the show itself, so I won’t recount that here. But however you feel about people like J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof today, Lost‘s premiere episode in 2004 firmly established them both as major figures in entertainment. As we discussed on a recent episode of /Film Daily, I think the show’s two-hour pilot is the best TV pilot of all time. It’s a thrilling, technically polished, perfectly paced slice of pop storytelling – one in which every character’s actions serve as shorthand for who they are, when we haven’t even been properly introduced to them yet.

And don’t sleep on Michael Giacchino’s score, which is alternately pulse-pounding and devastatingly emotional. Simply put, it’s the best TV score ever composed.

I’m not here to claim Lost is flawless. But if you’ve been on the fence about it because you’ve heard mixed or negative things about the way the show wraps up, I’m here to tell you that there’s so much good stuff along the way that diving in is absolutely worth your while. After all, as the old saying goes: it’s better to have loved Lost than to have never loved Lost at all. Pretty sure that’s correct. Don’t fact check that.

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