Lost is an American serial drama television series. It follows the lives of plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island, after a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles, United States crashes somewhere in the South Pacific. Each episode typically features a primary storyline on the island as well as a secondary storyline from another point in a character's life, though other time-related plot devices change this formula in later episodes. The pilot episode was first broadcast on September 22, 2004,and since then five full seasons have aired. The show airs on the ABC Network in the United States, as well as on regional networks in many other countries.
Due to its large ensemble cast and the cost of filming primarily on location in Oahu, Hawaii, the series is one of the most expensive on television. It was created by Damon Lindelof, J. J. Abrams and Jeffrey Lieber and is produced by ABC Studios, Bad Robot Productions and Grass Skirt Productions. The score is composed by Michael Giacchino. The current executive producers are Abrams, Lindelof, Bryan Burk, Jack Bender and Carlton Cuse.
Critically acclaimed and a popular success, Lost garnered an average of 16 million viewers per episode on ABC during its first year. It has won numerous industry awards including the Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 2005, Best American Import at the British Academy Television Awards in 2005, the Golden Globe for Best Drama in 2006 and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Drama Series. Reflecting its devoted fan base, the series has become a part of American popular culture with references to the story and its elements appearing in other television series, comic books, webcomics, humor magazines, a video game and song lyrics. The show's fictional universe has also been explored through tie-in novels, board and video games, and alternative reality games, The Lost Experience and Find 815.
Lost will conclude in its sixth season with its 121st and final episode airing in May 2010. six will consist of eighteen episodes. Episodes from the first four seasons of the series have begun airing in off-network syndication in the US, distributed by Disney-ABC Domestic Television, on G4 and Syfy.
Season synopses
Season 1 (2004-2005)
Season 1 featured 25 episodes that aired on Wednesdays at 8:00 pm in the United States beginning September 22, 2004. A plane crash strands the surviving passengers of
Oceanic Flight 815 on a seemingly
deserted tropical island, forcing the group of strangers to work together to stay alive. Their survival is threatened by mysterious entities including polar bears, an unseen creature that roams the jungle, and the island's malevolent inhabitants known as the "
Others". They encounter a Frenchwoman named Danielle Rousseau who was shipwrecked on the island over 16 years earlier and find a mysterious metal hatch buried in the ground. An attempt is made to leave the island on a raft.
Season 2 (2005-2006)
Season 2 featured 24 episodes that aired on Wednesdays at 9:00 pm in the United States and Canada beginning September 21, 2005. Most of the story, which continues 45 days after the crash, focuses on the growing conflict between the survivors and the Others, with the continued clash between faith and science being thematic in certain episodes. While some mysteries are resolved, new questions are raised. New characters are introduced, including the tail-section survivors and other island inhabitants. More island mythologies and insights into the survivors' pasts are divulged. The hatch is explored and the existence of the
DHARMA Initiative and its benefactor, the
Hanso Foundation, are revealed. As the truth about the mysterious Others begins to unfold, one of the crash survivors betrays the other castaways, and the cause of the plane crash is revealed.
Season 3 (2006-2007)
Season 3 featured 23 episodes that aired on Wednesdays at 9:00 pm in the United States and Canada beginning October 4, 2006. The series returned from hiatus on February 7, 2007 and was aired at 10:00 pm. The story continues 67 days after the crash. New crash survivors and Others are introduced, as the crash survivors learn about the Others and their history on the mysterious island. One of the Others and a new island inhabitant join the survivors while a survivor defects to the Others. A war between the Others and the survivors comes to a head, and the survivors make contact with a rescue team.
Season 4 (2008)
Season 4 was planned (prior to the
Writers Guild of America strike) to feature 16 episodes, to be broadcast beginning in the US and Canada on January 31, 2008. Due to the writers' strike, the season instead lasted only 14 episodes, consisting of the 8 pre-strike episodes already filmed and aired, and 6 post-strike episodes. The season focuses on the survivors dealing with the arrival of people from the freighter
Kahana, which has come to the Island, and the escape of the
Oceanic Six (their post-island deeds being shown in
flashforwards).
Season 5 (2009)
Season 5 featured 17 episodes that aired on Wednesdays at 9:00 pm in the United States and Canada beginning January 21, 2009. Season five follows two time lines. The first takes place on the island where the remaining survivors erratically jump forward and backward through time until they are finally stranded with the
Dharma Initiative in 1977. The second continues the original timeline which takes place both off the island; and following the Oceanic Six's return to the island on Ajira Airways Flight 316 in 2007.
Season 6 (2010)
On May 7, 2007, ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson announced that Lost will end during the 2009–2010 season with a "highly anticipated and shocking finale.We felt that this was the only way to give Lost a proper creative conclusion," McPherson said. Beginning with the 2007–2008 television season, the final 48 episodes would have been aired as three seasons with 16 episodes each, with Lost concluding in its sixth season. Due to the writers' strike, the fourth season featured 14 episodes, and Seasons 5 had 17 episodes. Season 6 was planned to have 17 episodes, too. However, on June 29 it was announced that the final season will feature an additional hour, which makes the episodes 18.
Executive producers Lindelof and Cuse stated that they "always envisioned
Lost as a show with a beginning, middle, and end," and that by announcing when the show would end that viewers would "have the security of knowing that the story will play out as we've intended." Lindelof and Cuse stated that securing the 2010 series-end date "was immensely liberating" and helped the series rediscover its focus. Lindelof noted, "We're no longer stalling." The producers also plan to wrap up long-standing mysteries, such as the nature of the
smoke monster, the four-toed statue of
Taweret, and the identity of the skeletons from the season one episode "
House of the Rising Sun". Matthew Fox stated in a recent interview that in the final season, the characters of Jack Shephard and John Locke "will come head to head." A third of the way through the final season, the two time lines will be "solidified into one" and "will be very linear - no more flashbacks, nothing." He has also claimed to be the only cast member who knows the ending of the show.
Awards
Capping its successful first season,
Lost won the
Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series and
J. J. Abrams was awarded an Emmy in September 2005 for his work as the director of
Pilot.
Terry O'Quinn and
Naveen Andrews were nominated in the Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series category.
Lost swept the guild awards in 2005, winning the
Writers Guild of America Awards 2005 for outstanding achievement in writing for a dramatic television series, the 2005 Producers Guild Award for best production, the 2005 Director's Guild Award for best direction of a dramatic television program, and the
Screen Actors Guild Awards 2005 for best ensemble cast. It was nominated for a
Golden Globe Award for best television drama series three times (2005–2007), and it won the award in 2006. In 2005,
Matthew Fox and
Naveen Andrews received Golden Globe nominations for
Best Lead Actor in a Drama Series and
Best Supporting Actor respectively, and in 2007,
Evangeline Lilly received a nomination for
Best Actress in a Television Drama Series.
Lost did win the 2005
British Academy of Film and Television Award for Best American Import. In 2006,
Jorge Garcia and
Michelle Rodriguez took home
ALMA Awards for best Supporting Actor and Actress, respectively, in a television series. It won the
Saturn Award for Best Television Series in both 2005 and 2006. In, 2005 Terry O'Quinn won a Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor in a television series, and in 2006, Matthew Fox won for Best Lead Actor.
Lost won consecutive Television Critics Association Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Drama, for both its first and second seasons. Consecutively as well, it won in 2005 and 2006 the
Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Supporting Visual Effects in a Broadcast Program.
Malcolm David Kelley won a
Young Artist Award for his performance as Walt in 2006. In 2005,
Lost was voted
Entertainment Weekly's Entertainer of the Year. The show won a 2005 Prism Award for Charlie's drug storyline in the episodes Pilot, House of the Rising Sun, and The Moth. Further,
Lost was nominated for but did not win a Writer's Guild Award and Producer's Guild Award again in 2007. In June 2007,
Lost beat out over 20 nominated television shows from countries all over the globe to win the Best Drama award at the
Monte Carlo Television Festival. In September 2007 both
Michael Emerson and Terry O'Quinn were nominated for an
Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series, the award going to O'Quinn.
Lost was again nominated for Outstanding Drama Series at the
60th Primetime Emmy Awards. The show also garnered seven other Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Michael Emerson.
Critical reception
Lost was ranked number one in the "Best of 2005 TV Coverage: Critic Top Ten Lists" by Matthew Gilbert of
The Boston Globe, Tom Gliatto of
People Weekly, Charlie McCollum of the
San Jose Mercury News and Robert Bianco of
USA Today.
Time magazine's James Poniewozik named it one of the Top 10 Returning Series of 2007, ranking it at number two. Also that year,
Lost made
Time's list of the 100 Greatest Shows of All Time.
Lost also came 5th on
Empire Magazine 's list of the Top 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. Bill Carter, television reporter of
The New York Times, defined
Lost as "the show with perhaps the most compelling continuing story line in television history". Based on its strong opening,
Reuters dubbed it a "hit drama" noting that "the show appeared to have benefited from an all-out marketing blitz that included radio spots, special screenings and ABC's first billboard advertising campaign in five years."
The first block of episodes of the third season was criticized for raising too many mysteries, and not providing enough answers. Complaints were also made about the limited screen-time for many of the main characters in the first block. Locke, played by Terry O'Quinn, who had tied for the highest second season episode count, appeared in only thirteen of twenty-two episodes in the third season – only two more than guest star M.C. Gainey, who played Tom. Reaction to two new characters, Nikki and Paulo, was generally negative, with Lindelof even acknowledging that the couple was "universally despised" by fans. The decision to split the season, and the American timeslot switch after the hiatus were also criticized. Cuse acknowledged that "no one was happy with the six-episode run." The second block of episodes was critically acclaimed however, with the crew dealing with problems from the first block. More answers were written into the show, and Nikki and Paulo were
killed off. It was also announced that the series would end three seasons after the third season, which Cuse hoped would tell the audience that the writers knew where the story was going.
Don Williams of
BuddyTV dubbed "The Beginning of the End," the first episode of the fourth season, as "the most anticipated season premiere of the year".
Michael Ausiello of
TV Guide later called the final hour of
Lost's fourth season "the most anticipated 60 minutes of television all year." American critics were sent screener DVDs of "The Beginning of the End" and "Confirmed Dead" on January 28, 2008.
Metacritic gave the season a Metascore—a weighted average based on the impressions of a select twelve critical reviews—of 87, earning the second highest Metascore in the
2007–2008 television season after the
fifth and final season of
HBO's
The Wire. In a survey conducted by
TVWeek of professional critics,
Lost was voted the best show on television in the first half of 2008 "by a wide margin", apparently "crack[ing] the top five on nearly every critic's submission" and receiving "nothing but praise". The May 7, 2007 announcement of a 2010 series end date and the introduction of flashforwards were received favorably by critics, as were the season's new characters.
