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'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 shit, 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,

shooting 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

fucking pilot, they revealed her to be a

great natural fucking 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

balls 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 balls

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

kill that character? No way. So J.J.'s like

"Oh, I got a guy we can kill."

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 shooting 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, fuck. This is real man.

This is like they're not fucking 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

shooting 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 shooting.

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 shooting.
And I remember saying to

him, you tell me what the ending is for

this thing and I'll shoot 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, shooting 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 killed 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 fuck, 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 shit.

This is happening now, actually. I got

full on goosebumps. Like, this is fucking

cool, man. It's like

nothing we'd ever seen.

There was such a purity in shooting 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 shit.

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 shooting 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 shooting 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 shooting 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 fiancé 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

fucking Looking Glass because I've been

in this business 50 years

and nobody ever gave a fuck.

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 fucking 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

diversity. Here is subtitles.

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 gay. 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 shit 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 Exposé and now it's like the

most polarizing episode

of Lost in the run, right?

Razzle dazzle!

I feel like Exposé gets a bad rap.

Exposé'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 shooting 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

fuck 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 fucking 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 shit, 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 gay 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 fucking 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 shooting

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 killed them? That's

crazy. I forgot about that. Like,

Michael's a good guy. He's murder,

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 killed 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 guns, 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 bomb. 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, "Fuck

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 shoot

different people in the coffin.

Josh is like, "What the fuck 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 shoot 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 shit! 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, shit. 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 kill 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

killing 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, shoot. 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 cocktails 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 explosion?

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 shit, 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 fuck 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 fuck 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 abusive 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 racist 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 abusive.

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, gang 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 racist 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 kill 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-ass 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?

Fuck 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.