Revisiting the TV show “Lost” with my two oldest children

I hope you’ll forgive the digression from my usual topics in this column, but I got the itch to write about this without a clear venue for it. However, I think many of you will like this.

One of the things I most looked forward to doing with my kids as they got older was sharing my favorite movies and TV shows with them. That’s been a bit of a mixed bag. None of my kids have much interest in Star Wars, and very little interest in Star Trek. I was obsessed with both franchises as a kid in the 80s and 90s. My son, Noah, is now 14, and my oldest daughter, Marty, is 12. They’re mature enough to enjoy grown-up media content. That’s surprisingly difficult to accommodate in 2025. The internet broke up the old TV network format. We all watch everything on streaming services, and it’s easier than ever to find the kind of TV content you enjoy. But because these streaming services aren’t governed by the kind of FCC guidelines around content that broadcast networks are, there’s nothing to moderate the content of the shows. Almost every new show has R-rated content. Certainly R-rated violence and language, and often R-rated nudity and sexual content as well. There’s very little content available that the whole family can watch that isn’t explicitly made for kids. So I recently began showing them Lost.

Lost itself was an interesting bridge between the old TV model and the current model. It was broadcast on ABC, and I think in 2004 when it debuted it was aired in 4:3 and certainly in standard definition. But it was shot in widescreen on 35mm film, so when it came to the DVD releases, those were in widescreen, and it was pretty easy to transfer to HD. By the end of its run it was broadcast in HD at 16:9. Because it aired on a broadcast network, it’s pretty clean. There are no f-bombs or nudity. The sexual content is rare and mostly suggestive. It was also much more serialized than episodic, with broad storylines spanning entire seasons and in many cases the entire series. It was not the first show to do this, but it was (I think) the first show to really capitalize on this and move the entire TV industry toward this model. (Battlestar Galactica is the other show from this time period to do this, but it was on cable.) Its first three seasons followed the old American TV format of more than 20 episodes per season. The last three seasons all had less than 20 episodes, with the shortest being 14 episodes long due to a writer’s strike. Fans were furious about the “short” seasons at the time, but now every show is 6-10 episodes per season, often with a gap of two years between seasons! My kids were shocked when I told them that season one of Lost has 25 episodes. Lost also bridged the broadcast/streaming gap. Though it aired exclusively on ABC, episodes became available to stream on Hulu 24 hours after airing starting in 2008. (I specifically remember getting a call from a friend who wanted me to ride with him to Chattanooga to pick up a piano in 2006. I said yes, but he had to really twist my arm to get me to do it on Lost night.)

My wife and I didn’t watch Lost’s first season when it aired. We had just gotten married in the summer of 2004, and in the fall of that year, we were still adjusting to married life, grown-up jobs, paying bills, etc. In the spring of 2005, we moved to Tennessee for me to pursue a grad school program. In February 2006, I had to do some media analysis papers for one of my classes, and I picked the pilot episode of Lost. I either purchased it from iTunes or possibly got it from iTunes for free since they used to do with pilot episodes to drive purchases. I was immediately hooked. I still maintain that it’s probably the best TV show pilot ever written and produced. I immediately bought the season one DVD set and binged it. Season two was airing at that point, and I bought the first few episodes on iTunes to get caught up. I was off to the races at that point.

Let me momentarily just skip to the end and say that, like most Lost fans, I was devastated by the way the show ended. I always knew one day I’d get over that hurt enough to want to revisit the show. (Stumble toward the TV one day looking haggard like Jack Shepherd with wild eyes saying, “We have to go back!”) But week-to-week, Lost was the most fun I’ve ever had with a TV show. Each episode was thrilling from start to end. It seemed like it was over as soon as it started. There were always big reveals that you had to wait a week to find out more about. It was endlessly fun to discuss around the water cooler at work the next day. There are moments from the show that still stick with me all these years later, like the opening and closing moments from Season 3, or the episode “The Constant” which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since February 2008. Lost was incredibly well-written, well-cast, and well-shot. And the music by Michael Giacchino, who would go on to score big movie soundtracks, was consistently excellent.

But the show did end disappointingly. And it took me 15 years to heal enough to want to revisit it. And let me tell you, watching it with my oldest kids has been an incredible treat. (We’re only about midway through season one.) I love watching my son and daughter get as excited as I was twenty years ago, literally on the edge of their seats, and begging to watch another one before I send them to bed. They have it easy. I had to watch it over six years! That first season was just so well thought out. You rarely get to see such great television even now, and I’m really glad I can put aside my hurt feelings about the ending of the show and enjoy the ride again.

Interestingly, it’s a show that doesn’t feel too dated. Again, it’s in HD and widescreen. Because they’re on a (mostly) deserted island, there’s less “old technology” on the screen to remind you of the show’s age. And maybe I’m looking at it through the eyes of someone who lived through the period, but the hairstyles and clothes don’t really date the show that much. There are a couple of things that mark its era though. It definitely suffers with that mid-2000s obsession with shaky cam that the Bourne Identity movies unleashed on us. I’m so happy that era is over, because I hated it even when it was current. Also, my kids didn’t understand why the characters were initially so suspicious of Sayid, the character who is a former member of the Iraqi military. The post-9/11 nervousness about airline terrorism and the then-fresh Iraq War are completely alien to them.

One thing that makes watching a show like this challenging with my son in particular is that he’s completely my opposite when it comes to spoilers. I don’t ever want spoilers. I want to let the show play itself out and reveal things in its own time. My son would rather just have all of the information right up front and claims he would enjoy the show more if he did, and he may be right about that from his perspective! In this, he takes after my wife, who is one of those people who opens a new book to the last page first to decide if it’s worth reading. They’re not “wrong” to consume media in this way, but it’s so completely alien to me that on the occasion that he does wear me down into revealing a spoiler, it causes me severe mental anguish to speak it out loud!

I’m excited to see how they process all of the big reveals in this show as we watch it together and whether they’ll feel as let down by the ending as most of us in the original audience were.

Being Right is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.