20 years ago today, the ABC series Lost premiered.
Amy Welborn wrote about the show at Angelus News:
It was a time, my children. A time when a television series might have as many as 25 episodes in a season and — even stranger — the gap between those seasons was measured in months, not years. It was also a time when a smart, entertaining television series was born and lived at that pace, directed, not at an algorithmic niche with the virtue signaling to prove it, but at a broad general audience and was wildly successful at it.
That, my children, was the age of “Lost.”
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the show’s six season, 121-episode run on ABC. Since then, it’s been available on DVDs and various platforms. It’s currently on Disney+ and Hulu, and on July 1 it returns to Netflix, too.
I was a bit of a latecomer to “Lost,” initially put off by a remark in a preview that was something like, “So, the entire UCLA volleyball team crashes on an island, and? …” I eventually caught up — maybe during summer reruns (yes, that was a thing too, children) and was hooked.
You’d be hooked, too, if you watched the first episode: without a question one of the finest pilots ever made, beginning with a single eye-opening, the gradual consciousness of screaming in the background, the heartbreaking and terrifying aftermath of a plane crash, a collection of intriguingly distinctive survivors and ending, somehow, with a monster in the jungle. I mean, what was this?
