15 Years Ago, 'Lost' Changed Television Forever

Coming just a few years after the success of Cast Away as well as the game-changing reality show Survivor, Lost might have seemed like an obvious win on paper, combining the recent fad of remote islands with dramatic stakes. But the pilot episode that aired 15 years ago, on September 22, 2004, was as ever-changing and surprising in its conception as it was to the millions of viewers who flocked to ABC on premiere night. The setup of the show was deceptively, almost maddeningly simple: what would happen to the disparate survivors of a plane that crash-lands in the middle of a tropical paradise harboring a few secrets of its own?The task of bringing this show to life first fell to writer Jeffrey Lieber, who wrote a pilot in the fall of 2003 that failed to impress ABC executives. The following January, Lloyd Braun, then-chairman of ABC Entertainment, asked J.J. Abrams, best known then as the creator of Alias and Felicity, to take a crack at the idea. Abrams agreed as long as he had a writing partner for the job. Damon Lindelof, then known for his work on the NBC procedural Crossing Jordan, was that writing partner. Their work so impressed ABC that the 21-page outline they came up with was approved to be turned into a two-hour pilot episode.Over the next 12 weeks, the show was cast with a diverse ensemble. Abrams himself would direct the two-hour pilot, which found its male character from the aforementioned opening moments later in the game. As diehard fans of the show already know, Dr. Jack Shephard wasn't going to be an integral figure in the original conception; in fact, in the pilot script, he died halfway through. As Abrams told Entertainment Weekly years later, ABC "really resented" that twist. (Had Shephard been killed off mid-pilot, it's possible he would've been played by Michael Keaton.)

Prior to Lost, there had been a few daring visual experiments in modern network TV. Perhaps the most notable, and the most successful, was the Fox action drama 24. The conceit of the show was that each episode was designed to take place in real time over a single hour. Each season, thus, took place over the span of 24 straight hours in the life of secret agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) as he attempted to stop various worldwide calamities from occurring. The show invoked split screens, digital readouts, rapid-fire editing, and more, to get across the sense of real-time suspense and action. After its pilot, Lost wouldn't hem itself into such a specific timeline, but revealed itself to be many different shows in one. Yes, there was always the tension of what was happening to the survivors on the island as they attempted to be rescued by anyone from the outside world. But depending on which character took the flashback spotlight in a given week, the show's template was malleable enough that it could change. If Kate was the character of the week, the show could be a blend of star-crossed romance and action. With Jack, the show was a melodramatic medical procedural. The flashback episodes featuring South Korean married couple Jin and Sun (Daniel Dae Kim and Yunjin Kim) turned the show into a perceptive look at a different culture's presentation of gender roles. And so on.Within the pilot, many of the characters' pasts are hinted at, as is the inevitable rancor among them. One of the more heroic characters on the show, Sayid (Naveen Andrews), is treated kindly enough until many of the American characters grow wary after hearing that he had been in the Iraqi Republican Guard, leading to tussling with the Southern-fried con artist Sawyer. What's remarkable now is how so much of the show's storytelling felt grand even in its first episode, grander than the small screen would normally allow. Minor character dramas would play out on such a large stage, with life or death hanging every week in the balance.

Leaving aside Abrams' career and how high he's risen since the Lost pilot, Lost didn't just inspire a handful or two of copycat genre dramas. (Remember Flash Forward? The Nine? Vanished? Sure you do.) What the show proved, both in its pilot and over six seasons, was that network television no longer had to be hemmed in. The way that Abrams reveals what Jack is seeing after waking up in the forest — the way he and cinematographer Larry Fong gradually allow us to understand the severity and massive size of the tragedy of Oceanic Flight 815 — was akin to a boxy, pan-and-scan aspect ratio being expanded to CinemaScope. We are now in an era where major films feel more like massive-length installments in overarching TV series, and where TV creators are constantly talking about making seasons the equivalent of a 12-hour movie. (To cherry-pick an example, the speculation that Andy Muschietti may have a 6-plus hour version of the two It films that would mix and match when you see the young and older versions of the Losers Club really just sounds like Muschietti has a miniseries-length version of It.) The blend of storylines, the scope of big-screen storytelling on a small screen, and the vast ensembles never existed before in this specific package of ingredients the way they did on Lost.When it premiered in the fall of 2004, Lost felt like a risk because it was something unlike just about anything else on TV. Unlike most procedurals, Lost required you to watch each episode — sure, you could pick up some of the broad details, but you'd be pretty...well, lost without knowing each hour backwards and forwards. Unlike the rest of scripted network TV, Lost didn't often feel as if it was being shot on the same old soundstage, in the same old hospital or courtroom or office setting. Lost was a wildly ambitious show from its first two hours, with a multicultural cast, a roller-coaster pace, and a bevy of twists that only hinted at the wildness to come over the next six years. Abrams has gone onto massive international acclaim, and Lindelof is just weeks away from unveiling his take on the seminal graphic novel Watchmen. That show will premiere on HBO, if only because of that premium channel's ability to house R-rated content. But whatever it looks like, and however breathlessly tense it feels, it'll only be there as a heady mix of genre and adult content because of Lost.