Feature: Lost

Survivors of a plane crash on a desert island. Sounds familiar… or does it?

J Abrams, the creator of ABC’s Alias, has come up with another winner for that network, a drama called Lost, which follows a group 48 survivors of a catastrophic plane crash as they work together to find a way off of a seemingly deserted island, which holds many surprises, including a mysterious creature who is stalking them.

The producer was clever enough to recognize that he had to fill the plane (and therefore the series) with an ensemble of consummate actors, which he did with Matthew Fox, Dominic Monaghan, Harold Perrineau, Terry O’Quinn and newcomer Evangeline Lilly. “We needed to populate the island with a very large cast,” he admits, “because these are the people that we’re going to be with. So we asked ourselves, how do we stock the island with all the elements of potential conflict, potential romance, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and who floats in between?”

Some journalists have been critical that the producer added the Sci-Fi element of the strange creature, which Abrams is quick to answer, “This monster is what makes this island unique. You need to say to the people watching it, ‘This place isn’t normal.’ The reason that we put it in the pilot was not to make a statement that, ‘Okay, every week the monster is going to show up, and there’s going to be people running through the jungle.’ If we didn’t introduce it in the pilot and did in episode nine, I think people would feel like, ‘What? This show I’ve been watching for months has a frigging monster?’ I think we needed to do it from the beginning to make it part of the fabric of the show.”

by Judy Sloane

Get the full feature when you buy
TV Zone #181

Photo © ABC
Feature © Visual Imagination 2004. Not for reproduction

Taken from

TV Zone #181
October 2004
ships from Sep 16 2004
News-stand Price
UK £3.99 / US $6.99

Buy it now!

VI DIRECT
Stores Info

You can order any of
our magazines via this
secure service.
To buy this issue:

To SUBSCRIBE to
TV ZONE, use these
links to our stores: