The Legacy of Lost
Carton Cuse (Executive Producer/Co-Showrunner): It is kind of mind-blowing to me that it's 10 years from when it all started, but it's exciting. I think that for all of us -- we recognized this when we were doing it -- we were doing something special and singular. You're really fortunate if a show comes along in your career that has that kind of attention and is in the zeitgeist for as long as Lost was. I think we all share a special bond from having taken that trip together.Terry O'Quinn ("John Locke"): Somebody asked me earlier today about how Lost sort of "made" television and took off. My immediate reaction to that was, I think Lost and other things like that blew it up. I don't think the formula -- all of a sudden, there was no formula. There's no particular formula for Lost. I mean, I think there were a few attempts to follow it and copy it, but it's a one-off, you know? So I think it basically said, "Okay, all the rules have changed, but we don't know what they are. So it was a big deal to me personally simply for its own experience. It was a happy place to work. It was a happy set. We were all excited. Josh Holloway ("James 'Sawyer' Ford"): [Sawyer’s] still there. All the other crazy characters I've ever created, they live, because for me, the way I create a character is, I find that perspective in my own self and blow it up and then let the other things drop away. They don't disappear, and I don't disappear. It's all from me. So yes, Sawyer's still there because he's me. It's just an aspect of me that I blew up, really. It just makes me smile. Yes, I'm proud of the legacy of that show and of that character work and that stuff. It feels complete and good.
Adam Horowitz (Writer): It feels beyond surreal and amazing [that it's been ten years]. There was no more profound experience you can ask as a staff writer coming up in the world of television than to have the experience we had working for Damon and Carlton on that show.
Edward Kitsis (Writer): It feels like it was yesterday in a lot of ways. You know, we talk to everyone still -- we're seeing Carlton on Monday for lunch; we talk to Damon all the time. It's funny how it was such a profound experience creatively and we made these lifelong friendships. So it feels like we've known these people our whole lives, but when you tell me it's been 10 years, I'm like, "No it isn't!"
Henry Ian Cusick ("Desmond Hume"): I'm very proud of Lost. I'm very proud that I'm involved with that. That show, you can get so much out of it, not just from the action or the romance or the drama or the international cast, but the spiritual aspects. It was such a rich, rich show. I think people will watch that again and go, "Oh…!” I don't know. It was just a bit of magic.
Cuse: I loved the writers room on Lost. I loved the people who we wrote the show with. I loved the camaraderie of it, and I loved the freedom we had to do a lot of crazy storytelling.
O’ Quinn: It was the first time in my whole career that I'd ever watched everything I did on screen. I watched it on television. I watched it on DVD. Before that, I'd never really been able to watch it happy and comfortably, but I like my character, and I liked my work. I like John Locke. I thought it was fun to watch. That was unique for me.
Kitsis: For me, it's the characters and the way their story was told. It was just so fresh and new and fun to watch. Lost became a community. So there were people who counted on it every once a week. I remember when Season 1 started, there were a couple sites, but by the end of it, it was recaps and this and the whole world -- it kind of took off.
Horowitz: I can only imagine our experience on Lost if Twitter had been around. It would have been very different!
For more on Lost's legacy, check out what Damon Lindelof (co-creator/executive producer/co-showrunner), Ian Somerhalder ("Boone Carlyle"), Maggie Grace ("Shannon Rutherford,"), Jorge Garcia ("Hugo 'Hurley' Reyes") and Cusick told us:
The Ending
To say the ending of Lost is controversial is an understatement. From the moment it aired, it divided audiences, with some enjoying its more spiritual, contemplative conclusion, while others loathed it, feeling it didn't deliver the answers fans had long believed were coming.
O'Quinn: For me, Lost was all about the journey. By the last month of shooting, I almost had one foot out the door just because I knew it was ending. I didn't want it to end, but I thought they made a good decision. In a way, it didn't really matter to me how it ended. I knew in Season 4 or 5 that they had so many balls in the air they would never be able to catch them all. So, to me, I don't even know. I think Damon has said that people say they went to heaven, and Damon said, "No." But it looked to me like they went to heaven. That's where I think I went! I don't know where those other guys went. Cuse: There was no ending of the show that would have pleased all people, but every day there are positive comments on my Twitter feed of people who have found it or are discovering it or just watching it or re-watching it. I think we made the ending of the show that we wanted to make. We told the story that we wanted to tell, and I stand by it. I'm proud of it. It's enormously rewarding that it's meant so much to a lot of people. As a storyteller, you can't ask for anything more than that.
Daniel Dae Kim ("Jin-Soo Kwon"): I did a talk show with Jimmy Fallon, and one of my biggest regrets of that appearance was that I started a story about how people come up to me and say that they didn't like the finale. I wanted to finish the story by saying, "But I loved it." We got moved on to a different topic, and I never got a chance to say that I actually did really like the finale. More than the minutia of the show and the logic of the show, I cared about the characters. I liked seeing that the characters, A) ended up together in some way, and B) that there was a place of rest for them. I don’t think it was possible to extrapolate on the rest of their lives because I’m sure they were very separate and disparate and the subject of their own respective series. But the fact is, who you choose to spend eternity with is a thoughtful and beautiful question. That was what I was more concerned with than all the numbers and formulas and time travel. Not that I'm saying those weren't important elements of the show, I'm just saying that the characters are the most important to me.
Elizabeth Mitchell ("Juliet Burke"): I’ll be highly unpopular, but I loved it, and I’ll tell you why. I’m a big fan of eastern philosophy, and I’m a big fan of the fact that there’s a big mystery. I loved the fact that it ended in a mystery and the fact that the island was magic -- or something to that extent -- something unexplainable. I don’t have a problem with the fact that it wasn’t explained, because there are so many things in life that aren’t. For us to say, “Oh, no, it has to be!” Really? I know we search for that and it makes us feel safe, but does it really make us happy? Probably not. So I liked it.
Lost: The Complete Collection Blu-ray Review
O'Quinn: My story was tied up, and I was satisfied. I'm very selfish that way. I may have felt different as a fan of the show, but I wasn't a fan of the show. I was a member of the cast. The experience I had was wonderful, and it was complete and satisfying for me.For more on Lost's ending, check out what Lindelof, Somerhalder, Grace, Garcia, Cusick and Malcolm David Kelley ("Walt") told us:
Cable Ready?
While Lost debuted after Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey began to show just what scripted cable TV was capable of, the years that would follow would see a bevy of acclaimed, risk-taking series launch on channels like HBO, AMC, FX and Showtime. So would Lost have benefited from being on cable instead of network TV? We asked Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse...