The Story of “Lost”

“The creation of Lost defies nearly everything we know about how successful television shows — or great ones — are made. The idea for Lost came not from a writer, but a network executive. The first writer on the project got fired. The replacement creative team had a fraction of the usual time to write, cast, and produce a pilot episode. The executive who had championed the show was himself fired before it ever aired. One of the two creators all but quit the moment the pilot was finished. Nearly every creative decision at the start of the show was made under the assumption that it would never succeed. Everyone believed it was too weird, too dense, too unusual to work. And it may have been. But it worked, anyway.”
 — Grantland has a Lost making-of extravaganza that should hold your interest even if you quit after the second season and picked up the hazy idea the island was purgatory, or something, from the general culture. (It wrapped like twenty years ago, spoiler alerts do not apply.)