WHAT WENT WRONG - LOST (Part 1)

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

No script? No problem! This week Chris & Lizzie crash into the insane gambit that became LOST. Learn how J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof and their incredible production team turned around the most expensive pilot ever made… in 90 days… and how the man who greenlit the project paid the price. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome back to what went wrong. We are so very excited to be back. I'm Lizzie Bassett. As always, I'm here with my co-host who is really taken on a daunting task for these next two weeks. Chris, how you doing? I'm doing well. Adrift. But well.

Marooned. Bad pun. Maroon 5 over here. Lost? We are very excited to be talking about Lost. one of the most influential television shows of the last 25 years. Also the first time we've covered a television show on this podcast, although I would argue the pilot is effectively a movie in and of itself.

But before we get to that, we've got to tell you guys what we've been up to during our hiatus. Mostly Chris and David. I actually did take a lot of naps. Lizzie had some good naps in there. Lizzie, would you like to tell them about our new website? Boy would I ever. We have a...

It's not even a new website. It's our only website because we didn't have one before now. It's pretty awesome. Go check it out. It is www. What Went WrongPod.com. It's very cool. There's lots of things on there, including little bits about us, a way to reach out to us directly, information

about our Patreon, information about what episodes are coming up next. And that is also where you can find special announcements about other things that may or may not be coming soon. Chris, speaking of our Patreon, I think we have some changes. is there. You want to hit us with it? I do. So based on user consumption data that I have perused, we are going to consolidate our tiers into three tiers. We're going to keep our $1 tier, and that will give you voting privileges. So all of you cult classics, that will give you voting privileges for all of our polls. We're going to be doing one poll every six weeks. So every third episode is going to be a poll. We are then going to be a poll. We are then going to

to move our ad-free feed to the $5 tier. And that is going to be our main offering at the $5 tier. It is an ad-free feed. We are limiting our interviews and rip from the Headflines episodes going forward. They may occasionally show up, but they're not going to be an offering because we want to put as much time as possible into the actual podcast because that seems to be what you guys are most interested in. And candidly, we don't have the time to do polls, right? now. And then we are going to keep our full stop tier that is $50. You get a shout out, but we're actually bolstering that tier. We are adding a bunch of merch options that will ship to you once per quarter that you are subscribed to the full stop tier. So that is going to include

a hoodie and many other fun things, including a tote bag, mug, et cetera. So if you guys would like to see those designs, you can check out the full stop level on our Patreon. but we are also going to be selling merch options on our website. So don't worry if you are interested in merch, you can check out our website, www. www. what went wrongpod.com. Head on over to merch. You can get a hoodie. You can get some pins.

You can get a mug. You can get a tote bag. You can get a t-shirt. That is the update on our Patreon. And just heads up, these changes as they go into effect, a number of you will be kicked off the current tier that you're on. Use that as an opportunity to take stock, decide whether or not you want to continue in this relationship.

no hard feelings if you don't. And then you can sign up for the tier that you prefer. And again, everybody that's at our free tier level, that will continue to exist. But if you want to vote, you need to join the $1 tier. We appreciate all of your guys' support. And I want to make sure we're able to fulfill everything that you're paying for with these tiers. Yeah, and this is America. Voting isn't free.

So go ahead and pay $1. Then you can decide every third episode. But this episode, Chris, This is a much requested episode that I am very, very excited about. I was a huge fan of this show. I have begun a rewatch. I am about 14 or 15 episodes into season one. I don't remember a ton that happens later except for the finale, which I'm sure we'll get to at some point.

But I cannot wait to hear about this because it had to be a mess. Yeah, it's a really interesting show. Before we begin, here's how we're going to break down the coverage. Obviously, the show went for six seasons. We could fill multiple seasons of a podcast covering everything that happened across the span of this show. So the way that I've approached it is in the first episode of coverage, we're going to cover the conception, development, scripting, production, and release of the pilot and kind of how the show was birthed. And then in the second episode, we're going to cover the arc of the show, the finale,

the legacy of the show, what happened to everybody involved coming off of it, and then in the second episode. and how I believe it changed television in both good ways and bad and the controversies surrounding the type of storytelling that the show engaged in. But obviously, before we get there, we have to figure out how the heck this show even made it to the screen. Yes. We say that every movie's a miracle. This TV show is just miracle after miracle after miracle.

I mean, it's a weird pitch. Well, let's get to what the pitch really was and then how it pivoted. Okay. So while the story of Lost is that of a collective effort, truly, I mean, remarkable ensemble cast, an incredible number of creatives behind the camera, the entire production team, it's really remarkable what they pulled off. More than anything, it's the result of one individual willing to take a Hail Mary on a very strange idea that would change the landscape of network television. And that individual is a is a man named Lloyd Braun. And in a weird way, this is kind of the story of how Lloyd Braun saved ABC, which in the early 2000s was very much a TV network adrift. So let's go back, Lizzie, to when we were in middle school.

The internet bubble had burst. The September 11th attacks had changed American foreign policy forever, and television network ABC is really struggling. They are in fourth place behind the other three major. networks. I don't even know it was on ABC at that point. It was basically who wants to be a millionaire. So they had restructured their entire primetime schedule around that show, and it kind of sucked the life out of all of their scripted dramas. And so they had a real slump. So a little history, we're going to talk a little bit about the history of TV and a little bit about how pilots are

made as well in this episode. I think it's very interesting. Great. ABC, founded in 1948, seven years after NBC and CBS. It was one of the more popular networks through the 90s. It had Roseanne, Home Improvement, Coach, and Monday Night Football. But of course, at the end of the 20th century, here comes NBC with the big swingers of ER, Friends, Frazier, Law & Order, The West Wing, and Will & Grace. Wow. And then CBS had Everybody Loves Raymond, CSI, Survivor, CSI, Miami. Yeah.

And then Fox comes in, and Fox was the new kid on the block. It had been founded in 1986, technically out of the remnants of an older network, the Dumont network. I did not know that. Yeah. So the Dumont network was a kind of red-headed stepchild of the networks that was also formed back in the 40s. And then it was defunct, and Fox was formed out of it in the 1980s.

So American Idol was Fox's big hit in the late 90s. there was stiff competition for ABC. So in early 2003, Lloyd Braun, who had been an entertainment attorney earlier in his career and had turned into becoming a media executive, he had also famously encouraged David Chase to pursue the project that would eventually become the Sopranos. Oh, wow. So he had a lot of influence at the time. And he was a couple years into his tenure as chairman of ABC Entertainment.

And it wasn't going well, obviously, because. they were in fourth place, and he was vacationing in Hawaii. And so, according to Entertainment Weekly, he was struck out of the blue with an idea that would prove to be life-changing, although it wasn't exactly what lost would be yet. He thought, okay, Tom Hanks castaway, huge box office hit, $430 million against a $90 million budget, meets Survivor, which had been crushing it on CBS for three years. I'm saying, but sure, I get it. It's castaway, but if there were more Wilson's and they were people, yes, I got it. That's literally what it was, because when he first came up with the pitch, you thought, it can't just be a guy in the soccer ball.

No, it's a volleyball. And that's right. A bunch of guys and zero volleyball. Exactly. So, Ron goes to a corporate retreat with fellow ABC executives the next month. There are about 50 people there. and I guess he actually had a primary idea that he was supposed to pitch, but he couldn't get the lost idea out of his head. So he pivoted at the last minute. He pitches lost. And apparently the response is less than enthusiastic.

As he later put it, quote, I felt like the only Jewish guy at a Clu Klux Klan rally, which was a hardcore quote. He did, however, win over one important supporter with his pitch. Then head of drama at ABC, Tom Sherman. Sherman had recently overseen the development of Alias, the JJ Abrams Jennifer Garner thriller, which even though it was a critical hit, it was not a top 10 Nielsen rating hit. It actually hadn't even cracked the top 50, I believe, in television ratings yet.

Again, a lot more people watch TV then. It had eight-figure viewership numbers. It just wasn't at the top of the pile. I know, exactly. Now people would kill for that many viewers. A quick side note to the Nielsen rating is a calculation of the percentage of their panel that watch each program. So like a 10 is not 10 million people. It means they're assuming 10% of the viewing population has watched a show.

I didn't know that. So I just wanted to clarify. I didn't know that either. So Tom Sherman loves Survivor Hanks. We're going to call it right now. And so Braun says, develop it quietly. He's on thin ice with his superiors at Disney. and he doesn't want, you know, any missteps at this point.

So Sherman reaches out to Ted Gold. He's an executive at Spelling Productions, Aaron Spelling, producer and father of Torrey Spelling. Excuse me. Excuse me. Yes. Sorry. Excuse me. So spelling productions actually had gotten its start with ABC.

And in the mid-80s, they actually held one-third of ABC's primetime schedule, which was why. That's how big this company was. They actually went public in 1987, which is. wild. And then in the 90s, they'd had a bunch of successes with Fox, Beverly Hills 90210, Melrose Place, and then they did Seventh Heaven for the WB. But by the end of the 90s, they were in decline. So similarly, spelling needed a hit as well. So it's like ABC needs a hit, Lloyd Brown needs a hit, spelling production needs a hit. So Ted Gold takes the idea and he runs with it. We're going to do Castaway the series. Great. So Ted Gold had recently signed

screenwriter Jeffrey Lieber who'd penned 2002's Tuck Everlasting. Was he not sure if you saw that one? The movie or the book? Because the movies... The movie. It's not good.

Oh, okay. Cool. I haven't seen it. It's not that bad. It's just, I don't know. Whatever. We can cut that out. The book is so good.

It's like a seminal book. I think a lot of people are age read. The movie wasn't amazing. It's like young coming of age. Yeah. People Living Forever thing. Yeah.

Like borderline Y.A. Fantasy. Right. It's Twilight without vampires and Mormonism. So he had been signed to a blind pilot deal. This is an agreement that locks him into delivering a then-unspecified pilot. So Ted says, great. This is going to be that pilot.

Lieber comes on to write the script, and he calls it nowhere. That is the working title, not lost. All right. So Lieber spent a week or so creating an outline for the show. You can find this outline online. The bones of the series will be familiar to any lost fan. the show would follow a society putting itself back together after a catastrophe, specifically featuring a doctor, a con man, a fugitive, a pregnant woman, a drug addict,

a military officer, and a spoiled rich girl. Of course, the key decision that Lieber made was hewing to the direction that the show be realistic because that's castaway. So he'd intentionally written it in the vein of Lord of the Flies. There was no mysticism. There were no monsters. So he was brought into ABC in September of 2003, so this is roughly six or seven months, after the idea had first germinated with Lloyd Braun,

and he pitches the story to Tom Sherman, head of drama. Ted Gold later said, quote, it was one of the more well-thought-out pitches I've been in. Tom called me and he told me, quote, unquote, the best project of the year, he greenlights it enthusiastically, meaning he greenlights paying him to write the script, not the show.

So Lieber dives further into the outline. Spelling Productions brings on consultants from National Geographic to ground the reality of the island. That's how realistic it's going to be. And the only note that they added that they gave him following his next presentation was to cut a shark attack scene that he'd written in. The studio felt it was, quote, too unrealistic. So Lieber turns in a pilot just after Thanksgiving 2003.

Studios got minor notes. They tell him, if you don't hand in blank pages on the rewrite, we are shooting this thing. This is, like, insanely good news and also insanely rare. So let's travel back in time. The odds of getting a pitch made into a pilot were exceptionally low. So each season, the studios would consider thousands of pitches. Of these pitches, each studio would purchase around 100 pilots.

So in 2003, ABC purchased 80. Of those 80, 15 to 20 would actually be produced, meaning the pilot would be shot. And of those 15, only seven or so would actually make it on the air. And of those seven, between one and three, would last longer than a season. So you're talking a one in multiple thousand chance of actually going to series. And they were telling him, this thing's amazing. We are definitely shooting this pilot. Also, I just want to call out, and correct you if I'm wrong, but like this was,

even as you're describing it now, this is a large, scale, very expensive pilot. Like, this is not a, I mean, it's contained to a certain degree, but we're not talking about like Will and Grace in terms of something that they're testing. And that was somewhat unusual at this point, wasn't it? Like, this is like movie quality action they're talking about for a TV show, a network TV show. Yes, absolutely.

I do think that the way that it was being pitched, it's likely that they felt that after the first couple of episodes, they would be able to build a set, basically, like a Gilligan's Island kind of vibe. Oh, no. Not in tone, but in production. I say that based on the later response the studio had to the actual filmed pilot. I don't know that for a fact here, but it seems to be their assumption. Okay, a couple of other numbers, just to show how much network television has declined in

terms of the pilot process. In 2013, 98 pilots were filmed across the five broadcasters. That's ABC, CBS, Fox. NBC and the CW. And that number had fallen to 35 in 2022. So it's declined drastically. COVID. It was a big part of that.

Now, obviously, a lot more shows are purchased and sent straight to series than had been before with the advent of streaming. Okay. So December holidays roll around. They send Lloyd Braun, Jeffrey Lieber's script. So he has not read the script until this point. It has been Tom Sherman and Ted Gold giving Lieber notes. And basically the plan is we send it to Lloyd Brown in December.

He greenlights it. We go to casting in January with his notes. Like that's the schedule because they need to film in February and March so they can deliver in April and May. That's pilot season. And we're in 2003 heading into 2004. And this comes out in 2004, right? Oh, yeah. Okay.

All right. Here we go. All right. Here we go. Lloyd Braun takes Lieber's script to the La Quinta Resort in Palm Springs. He reads it and he really, really, really doesn't like it. Oh. Unclear why exactly he doesn't like it. He wanted more smoke monsters.

I don't think he knew that necessarily, but yes, he did. And I think he'd be the first to admit he didn't know what he wanted exactly. Lever was kept on to do another rewrite, but he was operating. without a whole lot of top-down direction. So he turned in a new script a week later. I believe this was January 5th, 2004. You can read that script online. I'll get to why I think and why one of the producers

ultimately thinks it didn't work. And it's a really interesting point, and it's not dissimilar to our Galaxy Quest conversation. So late that afternoon, after he turns it in, he gets a call from Jonathan Levin, the head of spelling, saying, it's over, you're done. From all accounts, Lieber had delivered exactly what Lloyd Braun had asked for,

which was ironically the problem. He had centered his pilot on one simple idea. Can these people reinvent society on this island? There was no larger mystery at play. Specifically, the island was not a character. It starts in the air before the plane crash. It follows kind of exactly the structure that a lot of people, I think, would pitch. And it's very well written.

It kind of follows all the expected beats of, you know, we're going to get there. and everything's really difficult, and we need to figure out a way to get off of this island, you know, without going at each other's throats. But again, there's no mystery. There's not, there is some mystery about folks' backstories, but not to the extent that it was taken in the finished product.

Okay. Tom Sherman goes to Lloyd Braun and says, Lloyd, we gave it a good swing. Why don't we develop it for next year's pilot season? Lloyd Braun turns to him and says, Tom, there's no next year for us. At that point, it was clear to me that I didn't think any of us were going to be surviving. This was the time to take a shot at a show like this, end quote. So Lloyd Braun knew that if he didn't do this now, he was going to get fired anyway for the performance of ABC.

And so he'd never get the opportunity to Greenlight Lost ever again. The project would die. And they are six months behind where they need to be in delivering this project. So he calls J.J. Abrams, creator of alias, and asks him if he'll take a look at the project. J.J. Lens flare, Abrams. Put him in. He's ready. So a brief, brief history on J.J. Abrams. He is the son of television producers Gerald W. Abrams and Carol Ann Abrams.

He had first broken into the business at 16 when he wrote the music for Don Doller's 1982 sci-fi horror B movie, Night Beast. It's a trauma film. If you're interested, you can find it online. In the late 80s, he collaborated with fellow Nepo Baby, Jill Mazurski. She's the daughter of writer-director, Paul Mazurski, to write Taking Care of Business, which was made, and it starred Charles Groden and Jim Belushi. I have not seen it. He then penned 1991s regarding Henry, which I have seen, and I enjoyed.

I saw it when I was younger. And that's Mike Nichols directed Harrison Ford film. It's a little schmaltzy, but it's fun. He then worked on the development. team, The Propeller Heads, which was a group of Sarah Lawrence Alums, tasked with developing computer animation for Shrek. They're actually hired by Jeffrey Katzenberg. I mean, the guy's remarkably talented, and he's doing this all in his 20s.

He wrote the Danny Glover Joe Pesci film Gone Fission, and he actually did a credited rewrite on Armageddon, and he has a shared credit on that movie, which I had... That makes sense. I didn't know. I think it's great. So it was in television, though, that Abrams really carved out. Elaine for himself. And so Lizzie's nodding, I'm sure you know. By 2003, still a few years shy of 40, he was batting two for two on the small screen, his first show, Felicity, which he co-created

with Matt Reeves, had just finished its four-year run. Carrie Russell had won a Golden Globe for her work on the show, and Ailius was wrapping up its second season. It was performing even better, and again, Jennifer Garner won a Golden Globe for her performance on that show. Great shows, really fun, seminal shows of the early 90s, early 2000. thousands. Fun fact, Abrams composed the opening theme music for both of those shows. Really? I had no idea. Yeah, he's a talented musician. His daughter is a very talented musician. I'm not sure if you've ever listened to Gracie Abrams. I believe she opened for Taylor Swift during a bit of her tour. Wow. Yeah. But did he cut Carrie Russell's hair? Because there's something

to answer for it. I don't know. That's beyond my domain. All right, so Ron calls, and of course, it's J.J. Abrams. He's in the middle of prepping another pilot for ABC because he's one of their star producer directors. It's called The Catch. But Braun says, look, take a look at this pilot. If anyone can crack it, it's you. Apparently, he really almost begged him. He told Abrams, quote, I know it's an impossible drill, but I believe in every bone in my body that in your hands, this is a huge hit show. So, January 8th, 2004, again, the nowhere draft that had been sent to Braun was January 5th, so we're moving very quickly.

Yeah. Producer Brian Burke, who had worked on alias with Abrams, meets up with Abrams at Kate Mantellini, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, presumably for drinks, at 11 p.m. He finds him working on the script for the catch, and Abrams goes, I need you to read this script nowhere. And Burke's like, why is it good?

And Abrams is like, no, because I don't have time to read it. And Lord Braun asked me too. As Burke later said, quote, to this day, JJ has never read the original script. Wow. So, Burke reads the script, and I'll let his criticism speak for me. I read it as well.

And his criticism is that it lacks mystery. And I think that's fair. Again, not Jeffrey Lieber's fault. His direction was to be more realistic. No, he did exactly what he was asked to do. Exactly. By the end of the first act, you knew all the characters,

their fears and desires. and it was simply a story of survival. So the conversation between Burke and Abrams shifts to an idea that Burke had long wanted to pursue, a show that combined various sci-fi elements, and Abrams said, quote, what if we did that on a deserted island? So Abrams calls Braun the next day and says, quote, look, I have a version of this, but you are not going to like it. It's more Michael Crichton than it is castaway.

There would be a hatch on this island, and you would start to learn truths about these people that aren't immediately obvious. It's a weirder version than you want to do. Really quick, it's unclear who came up with the hatch and when it was developed, because I read that it was Abrams after that first conversation. I also read that it wasn't until Damon Lindelof came into the picture. So I don't want to erroneously... My money's on an old Damon, but...

Yeah, I don't want to erroneously assign credit on the hatch. I could not figure out exactly where it came from. Okay, so Braun replies, quote, no, I love that version. I want an outline of that version by the end of next week. Oh my God. So there was one request. For the love of God, JJ, please keep everything in the realm of scientific fact and have an explanation for everything. Well, JJ threw that right out the plain window.

He says, of course. Yeah, no problem. So he's chest deep in the catch. He can't take a flyer and just like drop it for this weird, whatever it was going to be show. Ron says, no problem. I'm going to send you a writing partner. Yes. So on Monday, a 30-year-old Damon Lindelof walks into Abrams' office wearing a Star Wars Bantha-Trax t-shirt.

According to Lindelof, quote, JJ accused me of wearing it for the purposes of impressing him, knowing he was a Star Wars nerd, which was absolutely correct. Aw. So Damon Lindelof now, of course, is a Titan, but at the time was kind of a small fish, especially compared to J.J. Abrams. He had developed an unproduced pilot for ABC, and he was currently working on Crossing Jordan. an NBC crime drama series. And he had been a semifinalist for the Nickel Fellowship. And then I think his day job at this point was working on Nash Bridges. Oh, wow. But again, he'd never been a showrunner. He'd not had one of his shows produced yet. So again, relative to Abrams, he was inexperienced. But it's just so obvious that people could see his talent immediately.

Yeah. I mean, he's an amazing writer. He is. And Abrams is the first to say it. He said after that first meeting, it was obvious that Lindelof was the guy for the job. He sat down and he pitched in the first meeting the cold open of the pilot. Open up on Jack's eye opening. He's wearing an Armani suit. He's disoriented. He pulls the vodka bottle from his pocket. He doesn't know what the hell happened, wanders down the beach.

Holy shit, there's a plane. So Abrams and Lindelof spend the day breaking story. So this I think would be like Monday, January 11th, following Braun sending Abrams the script. So as Lindelof put it, quote, we left feeling completely jazzed. In addition to the hatch, the flashbacks, Jack waking up in the jungle, we had the ending of the pilot would be that there was already a transmission going out that had been repeating on a loop for so long that the castaways knew they were host. That all happened on the very first day.

The working title that Lindelof put on that first outline, which you can also read online and is really cool. Lizzie, any guesses? The hatch, the others? I don't know. The island. Oh, that was my third guess. Yeah, very good guess.

One other thing they decided, Jack would die midway through the first episode. Ooh, keep that note. Harsh. Sorry. It's my least favorite character in the whole thing. No shade to Matthew Fox. I think he's a great actor. That is just one of the most annoying characters on TV to me. I just never liked him.

Well, you and Seth Rogen in Knocked Up. So throughout the rest of the week, Lindelof would come in to break story with alias producers Jesse Alexander and Jeff Pinker, along with Brian Burke, while JJ was finishing his script for The Catch. So Jay J.J. is splitting his time between the two shows at this point. Abrams would then meet with Lindelof in the evening. They'd do a brainstorming session. On Thursday, January 15th, Abrams turns in his revised pilot for The Catch. On Friday, January 16th, Abrams and Lindelof send a 21-page outline of the island to the studio. On Friday, that afternoon, Abrams gets a cross.

call from the studio. They love the rewrite of the catch. They're definitely going to shoot it. On Saturday morning, January 18th, 10 days after sending the nowhere pilot to Abrams, Lloyd Braun, Green Lights Lost Without a Script. Oh my God. So what had sealed the deal? Two things. First of all, Lindelof had the brilliant idea of populating the island with people who didn't really want to be rescued. So this is where I say that it ties back to Galaxy Quest. If you guys remember in our episode, and if you haven't listened, give it a listen. In the initial draft, Tim Allen's character didn't want to continue to play the captain.

And the guy that was brought in to do the rewrite, said, no, he should want desperately to be the captain. And that shift in perspective gave them the spite of the movie. And Lindelof wanted to diffuse the audience's desire that the characters escaped the island by giving them all reasons to want to stay. That's so smart. Super smart. They then gave it a flashback structure

that allowed them to leave the island to show the characters and how they got there. And then apparently, Braun was so excited by this idea that he read the script, I guess, on his way to an agent's house, and he got there and said, quote, they've done it.

It's ER. They've done it. He has that outline framed in his office to this day. That's awesome. So by interweaving so many subplots, Braun could feel confident that the show wouldn't be too reliant

on one source of tension. The excitement ended with Braun. Above him, Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, deemed the $12 million pilot, which was going to be the most expensive in studio history, quote, a crazy project that's never going to work, and his number two, current CEO, Disney CEO, Bob Eiger,

called it, quote, a waste of time. In a later interview with, IGN, Damon Lindeloff referred to Braun's decision to Greenlight the pilot as, quote, a final you, end quote, from Braun to his superiors, knowing that he would likely be fired for ABC's performance over the prior three years anyway. Nice. Nice. All right. They got the greenlight, Lizzie. What could go wrong now? I'm going to go with everything. Well, this is an enormously complicated pilot and they don't have very much time. They do not have very much time. They have less than 12 weeks to write, cast, shoot, edit, VFX, score, and turn in a two-hour pilot that would take over a

month to film and cost more than anything ABC had ever spent before. That's insane. The solution? Get creative. All right. What does that mean? Well, you're about to hear it. It's amazing.

The people on the show deserve the keys to the city. In order to get casting underway, Abrams, Lindeloff, and the pretty. started writing placeholder audition scenes before the actual pilot so the actors would have something to read, sides, as they're called, in the industry. Abrams quickly realized he wouldn't be able to shoot both the catch and lost, duh, realizing the potential that this crazy, deserted island idea had. He opted to push the catch to the following pilot season. Spoiler alert, good call. The catch was shot a year later but was not picked up. Lost was his baby now. So, Spelling Productions was kicked off the project when Jeffrey Lieber's script was ditched.

So Spelling Productions was out, and in its Touchstone Television, which is Disney's TV production arm, and obviously Bad Robot, J.G. Abrams' production company. So J.G. Abrams immediately hires Sarah Kaplan. She's a veteran producer. She had produced Alias, and she's going to produce the pilot. They have a start shoot date of March 11, 2004, which is giving her just, I think, exactly six weeks to prep a show that doesn't have a script. And you can tell that she's cool as a cucumber because her quote about it was, the lack of time was an interesting factor. And that's the kind of producer you want. Okay.

So the biggest question she needs to answer Lizzie as a producer. What do you think? Location? Location. That's exactly right. Where are we going to shoot this? There was no time to build elaborate soundstage sets, so they'd need to shoot virtually the entire pilot on location.

They needed an untouched beach that was deserted in both directions, a jungle close enough to keep the production unit intact, and a jumbo jet that they could crash on that location. So Touchstone came up with an answer that I think at first blush seems like a great answer, which is Australia. Australia has jungles and they have beaches. Sure. Kaplan books a trip to begin scouting there,

even though the best beach location was a plane ride away from the nearest jungle. Plus, if the show were picked up, the actors would have to relocate to Australia, something that might scare off talent during the casting process. So, Kaplan, knowing in her gut that Australia was not the answer, canceled her flight the day of and told the production to book her a trip to Hawaii. Not to flee, but to scout. So she carries this 21-pillar.

outline to Honolulu meets with the film office and says, look, in five weeks, I need to cross a plane on the cleanest beach that you have for a show that doesn't have a script yet. And the Honolulu Film Office said, no problem. And they showed her Mokulea Beach Park in Oahu. It's actually a public beach that is big, beautiful, and has road access. And it was right next to the jungle. Only downside is apparently there were a lot of squatters on the beach. And there was a legal issue that basically meant they could not kick them off the beach. So they just kind of coexisted with them. And they became the others.

No, I'm just kidding. They actually... I was like free extras or thing in there? Maybe. But apparently it didn't cause any serious problems, or at least was not written about. Okay. So the production gears off and Damon Lindelof dives into the script while J.J. Abrams assembles the rest of his team.

A couple I'd like to note, Mark Worthington, production designer. He had previously mostly been an art director on feature films, although after Lost, he would go on to be the production designer on American Horror Story, Watchmen, Mythic Quest, a ton of other amazing shows. Commercial and music video director, excuse me, cinematographer, Larry Fong was brought on to be the DP. Apparently ABC was not stoked about this choice

because he hadn't done really anything in the narrative space, but J.J. Abrams was insistent. This needs to look like a movie, And this is the guy to do it. And he was right. I mean, the movie. And look at Larry Fong's credits. He shot an incredible number of films now.

So aside from a few days shooting plain interiors on a soundstage in L.A., so less than one week of shooting, the entire thing was going to be on location in Oahu. So from a production perspective, Lizzie, any guesses what the next big question to figure out is? Casting. Well, that is, but production-wise. Where are you going to get a 747 that you can tear apart and scatter across the beach? There we go. Yeah, the plane.

Your first guest. Well, as some of our audience members may be aware, there is actually an airplane graveyard in the Mojave Desert roughly 90 miles north of Los Angeles. So the Mojave Air and Spaceport is actually an active research center for aerospace companies, but a portion of its 3,300 acre site is dedicated to storing over 100 defunct aircraft. And you can go see it. I've not been, but my in-laws have driven through it and say it's remarkable. So they go and they don't find a 747, but they do find an L-1011, which I guess is a Lockheed Martin wide-body airliner that had been produced until the mid-1980s and then had been retired.

Lockheed Martin is like weapons, right? Yeah, so they're in aerospace, arms, defense, information security, tech corporation, and they've, formed in the 90s when Lockheed Corporation merged with the Martin Marietta Corporation, but they made commercial aircraft. They actually still do make some commercial aircraft. I don't believe they make any passenger jets, but they still make freighter aircraft, heavy liftoff helicopters, et cetera, but they did make commercial passenger jets all the way through the 80s. Regardless, it's not Boeing, so the door was still on. The price tag for the defunct plane was a cool $1 million, which is actually very low considering how much planes cost.

I was going to say, that's a whole ass plane that they just crashed on this beach. Well, that was a problem. Getting a whole ass plane that doesn't fly anymore to Hawaii is really hard. And all of the barges out of Long Beach were actually booked up until after their start date. So they had to use a giant cutting machine to cut the plane up into smaller sections. And then they put these on the backs of trucks, drove them to the Bay Area, and then barge them across the ocean. The timeline worked out so that they would get to Hawaii literally just in time for the shoot. And the studio suggested using CGI to make the plane look bigger.

And it was Abrams that said, no, all these pieces need to be real, with the exception of the interior of the spinning turbine that sucks the gentleman into it. So that wing, that's hanging over everybody, that's a real 70-foot wing that's being held up with a 100-plus-foot crane over the set with everybody running around underneath it. Wow. Yeah. So a couple of other important production team members. Thomas Fisher handled these special effects, meaning physical effects. He's a veteran of the trade, and he obviously did Titanic, listen to our episode, True Lies, Terminator. or two Total Recall, Last Action Hero, listen to our episode, Rambo, and many, many, many more films.

Okay, Lizzie, you've mentioned casting a couple of times. Yeah, because I'm excited. I want to get to this part. We're here. It's time to talk about casting. Great. And Lost is, I think you would agree, a triumph of casting. Yes, 100%. Yes, it is like the show is so fun because of the mystery, but it's made by the cast and learning more about them.

And I think for me, I don't know if you feel this way, felt this way at the time, it felt like these amazing actors that I'd never seen before. 100%. I mean, I was young, but again, like, this is the first show that I remember being like appointment television. And I didn't know who any of these people were. And there are a few reasons for that that worked in the production's favor. So starting your story with a downed international passenger jet means you need to fill it out with an international group of actors. That's one thing. Which is also cool and was not necessarily a given for a lot of shows at that time. It's a very diverse show for the time.

And further, when you're casting off of an unfinished pilot script, you have the flexibility to cast the best actors you can find and adapt the various roles to them. The other unexpected advantage they had, they were so far behind the rest of the pilots that all of the established actors had booked roles on the other pilots. That's no discredit to the wonderful actors they got for this show. It reminds me of that moneyball quote, Jonah Hill is Peter Brand. I think it's a good thing that you got Damon off your payroll. I think it opens up all kinds of interesting possibilities. And it's the same sort of thing.

It opens up the field to look at people that have been overlooked for some reason or another that actually might be diamonds in the rough. So, as I mentioned before, Lindelof is writing sides, scenes for actors to use in their editions in tandem with the pilot itself. As actors were brought in, characters were completely reconceived on the fly by both Abrams and Lindelof. Lindelof then could adapt his script in real time to fit these actors. So it became like a really fluid process.

As Lindelof later told Entertainment Weekly, quote, we did not want a lily white cast. So we said, bring in people of every color and every ethnicity for every, role, and in some cases, both genders, which led to a lot of roles changing ethnicity or gender at the last second, and we'll get into that now. It's not 100% clear which roles were written when casting began, but we can look to Damon Lindelof's initial outline from January 12th, 2004 for some hints. So here are the characters that are in that initial document. Jack, sorry, Lizzie, written as the alpha male, described as our guy, the lead, quote,

the first thing we see in the show, cool, intelligent, handsome, self-deprecating, a natural-born leader, and his name is Jack so he can't possibly die except for the part where he does, end quote. They were really adamant about him dying. So Kate was actually written as the show's actual hero. Following Jack's death, midway through the pilot, she would become the group's leader. The storyline that she was supposed to have or might have was that she was married and her husband, had gone missing. Given her motivation to explore the island to find him, she'd then fall for another survivor during the season, only to then find her husband at the end of the first season,

drama. That storyline obviously was, is it Rose and Bernard who got that storyline, more or less, the older couple? Yeah, a little bit, just that he's missing for most of that season, yeah. Right. So they kept that in there. So then you had Charlie. He was described as James Dean, Han Solo, Bruce Wayne. He bristles under Kate's direction, despite character. wearing a torch for her. Okay, this actually became Sawyer. Yes. You know what I mean?

Like, that's more Soyer. Clearly. Okay. They had a character named Teddy who was described as Jamie Kennedy and Scream, kind of like the, you know,

pop culture. It kind of feels like the Damon Lindelah character in the story. I think they collapsed parts of him into Hurley in the final version.

Maybe into Charlie as well. A little bit. Yeah, maybe. They aged Charlie down specifically for Dominic Moynihan. We'll get there. So then Mike and Walt were in there, more or less as is. Dr. Donji, this is like a man who's very, he's an engineer, very into technology.

This role really morphed into Saeed. They collapsed like a different military role. And this one had Saeed. Sawyer was initially written as the convict, more straight villain posing as an air marshal first. So that storyline obviously got shifted to Kate. You had Feeley, a master manipulator who wasn't actually on the plane. here, Ethan. So that's, yeah, and then, like, the others in general kind of conceived here.

Shannon was apparently more of like a femme fatale, less Paris Hilton. Listen, if I have one bone to pick with the first season of this show, it is Shannon's hair. What are they, who are they hitting? Go back and watch. She has perfectly flat-ironed, blow-dried hair that has like a early-aughts 2000s flip. at the end. They're all looking good. No.

No beards are ever grown. Listen. Some of them look like TV rough. She looks ridiculous. She looks like I had, I got my first flat iron in eighth grade and I was Shannon. Like, it makes me so mad every time she's on screen. Feels consistent with her character to me. They also had this guy named Curtis, who was the muscle.

I think he just kind of got shoved aside. I would also just like to read a note that Lindelof put in the document. basically he was just like, what are we going to do with the red shirts? Which is like they needed people to die, but he didn't know what to do with them. So he wrote, quote, is it just me or is it kind of weird that 30 idiots are just hanging out with our core group and they never talk? And I thought that was a funny observation because it kind of becomes an issue in the series later on. Yeah, there are people just showing up and you're like, I've never seen you before. I've never seen you before, yeah.

Okay. So the team needed to find 14 series regulars in three weeks. Yeah, it's a ton. That's three and a half a week. So, where to start? Casting director, April Webster, kudos to you. Ms. Webster, wonderful work. Very prolific casting director.

Yeah, they decided to begin with Kate, the lead of the show at that point, and one of the first actresses to come in and read for her was actually South Korean actress, Yunjin Kim. I'm going to come back to her in a second. The first person actually cast, I believe, was Hurley, the lovable lottery winner, originally written as a 50-year-old redneck,

according to producer Brian Burke, that was until they caught sight of Jorge Garcia stealing scenes as a pot dealer in an episode of Larry Davis' curb your enthusiasm. They loved his humor so much that they created Hurley for him, combining the lottery winner with Teddy, I think, more or less. A year and a half prior,

he had been working in the music department at Borders Books. By spring of 2004, he was playing the unexpected moral center of a revolutionary new show. Wow. Fun fact. They actually brought him in to read for Sawyer, and you can see a little bit of that in the behind the scenes DVD from the first season of Lost. And his audition is, you can, he could have kind of worked. It'd be like a different Sawyer, but he's a really good actor. And you can see how he uses his humor to play the role and be a little intimidating and manipulative. Interesting. And it's just interesting. It's really fun to watch these auditions because it's how you can tell these actors are so good. They feel mal. Even though in the final pilot, even though in the final pilot, they feel perfect. When they audition for other roles, you can actually see that version working.

And Yunjin Kim as Kate is a great example of that. Her audition for Kate is wonderful. So on the opposite end of the spectrum of Jorge Garcia was Dominique Moynihan, who's obviously hot off of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings. That trilogy had just wrapped up with the December 2003 release of The Return of the King, listen to our episodes covering those magnificent films. He was obviously an established performer. He was apparently the only actor brought in for Charlie, Although originally that character was written as an aging rocker, more of a Mick Jagger type. So they aged him down. And I like Charlie a lot in this show.

Oh, I love him. One of my favorite parts of the entire show. Yeah, funnier than I remember too in the first episode. So British actor, Naveen Andrews, who said at the time he felt the premise was, quote, limited at best and dreadful at worst, booked the role of Saeed, a former Iraqi Republican Guard that was originally written as female and not Iraqi. And it was actually Andrews who pushed to give his character a romantic angle, resulting in the love story between him and Shannon, played by Maggie Grace.

And he really thought that it would be iconic if the show did an interracial relationship, especially between a Muslim character and a white character. And if you think about that, it's pretty crazy. We were three years post-9-11 at that point. So it was very revolutionary. So according to Abrams, the foreign couple in the script was written, as German. Oh. That was until Yunjin Kim came in to read for Kate. She reads for Kate

and Damon Lindelof and J.J. Abrams look at her resume and they're like, oh, you're from Korea. Do you speak Korean? She goes, yeah, I was born there. I was raised in the U.S. and then I went back there. I'm actually like kind of a big movie star in Korea. So it turns out in 1999, her first big film role in was in a movie called Switty, and it's actually it's shitty internationally, S-H-I-R-I, but I guess in Korea, it's S-W-I-R-I. And she played the film's villain. She was a North Korean assassin slash spy, and at the time it was the biggest budget South Korean film in history.

Wow. $8.5 million budget. The movie, which also starred Old Boys Shui Min-Sik, and I apologize if I looked up the pronunciation, it's difficult for me. Parasites Song Kang-ho, who is the father, who's one of my favorite actors of all time. So it was a huge success, critically and commercially. 6.9 million people in South Korea saw it during its theatrical run. That's just over 15% of the population. So that puts it kind of somewhere in the range of like Avengers in terms of how many people

saw that movie. It also opened at number one in Japan and Hong Kong. So she read for Kate, and her agent calls. called her and said, look, they don't have a role for you right now, but JJ Abrams is going to write one for you. Three days later, she gets new sides for Sun and Jin. So he basically was like, I want to have a character on the island who can't speak English, and then another character who's revealed can speak English. And I think it's one of the most interesting parts of the show. And I love, actually, when they show Jin's point of view and they turn the English into

gibberish. I don't know if you remember that scene. I love both of them. They both really stand out as like some of the best people in the cast. And their storyline is so interesting too. Yes, it's a great storyline. So, Yen Jin Kim is cast his son and now they need a gin. And that goes to my vote for hottest guy on the show. Yeah.

Daniel Day Kim. Pop two for sure. Just like, oh my God, the bone structure of a god. Like his face, it's ridiculous. So what's really interesting is, ironically, he would have to act entirely in Korean and he had not spoken Korean consistently since high school with his parents. Oh, wow.

So he had like six weeks to brush up on all of his Korean because he only speaks Korean, you know, for pretty much the whole show. Okay, alias veteran Terry O'Quinn was tapped specifically for the role of John Locke. Great, yes. By Abrams. According to O'Quinn, Abrams told him, quote, there's not going to be a lot in the pilot, but we're hoping to develop the role, end quote.

I'll say. Which they did, because Locke's backstory in a wheelchair, not part of the show while filming the pilot. Is that, wait, I can't remember. Is that in the pilot? It's not. Or it is? It's not. Oh, wow.

No. Okay. So they didn't figure that out until they broke the first season, which is really interesting because it feels like it was worked out when he spends much of the pilot seated, like he's sitting there under the first season. the rain, and then he's playing backgammon, and he teaches Walt the game. And he seems to be embracing, you know what I mean, this new life in a way that nobody else is. So it's really interesting that they didn't know what that secret was going to be yet when they were filming the pilot.

Wow. Okay, so Jack initially supposed to be stunt cast because he'd be killed midway through the pilot. So they basically thought, maybe we can get a movie star to play this character. Any Any guesses? George Clooney. That's a great guess because they played the same character. No, Michael Keaton. Oh. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. He was apparently a top choice for the studio, but the studio didn't want Jack to die. And I would argue this is an instance. You don't like the Jack character. Listen, I'm fine that he stays alive. He's necessary for the narrative. He's just annoying.

I think that Stephen McPherson, who was the president of Touching, Stone at the time, I think put it really well when he finally convinced Abrams and Lindeloff to let Jack live, because they wanted to do psycho. They wanted gently to die and everyone thinks, oh my God, this is crazy. And he said, quote, there's a difference between a movie and a television show. If you can get the audience to love this guy over the first hour, killing him will make them feel like they cannot attach themselves to anybody else because they can be plucked away at any time. And I think he's exactly right. And I think it was a really smart note. And I think ultimately,

obviously they did too because they expanded the pilot to continue to include Jack. However, I think you can tell that originally he died at the midpoint because if you notice, after the midpoint, he is out of the picture for the most part. He's just caring for the air marshal. Yeah. Interesting. They leave him behind and everybody, they all, you know, Sawyer and Kate and Said and Charlie and Shannon all go on the hike and then they hear the French woman's signal. So anyway, it's just an interesting what if. But Matthew Fox was not to be denied. He was known at the time

for Fox's party of five, which co-starred Nev Campbell, and he came in to read for Sawyer initially. That makes sense. Yeah, he was then brought back in to read for Jack. He came into the room, sweaty and out of breath, literally playing the scene as if he'd just been in a playing crash. Lindelof and company were sold on the spot they had their... Jack, and he's great. I think he's very well cast. Josh Holloway's journey to the show is probably my favorite because of his honesty about it. He'd started his career as a runway and print model in the early 90s. He transitioned to acting in 1999 and basically just nabbed like bit parts as the good

looking guy, you know, here and there, but it was not working out. When Lost was being cast, he was ready to leave the profession entirely, as he told Entertainment Weekly, quote, I was done. I was saying, acting had kicked me in the teeth so hard. I had just received my real estate license in the mail four days before. I was going to build my real estate empire. The chance to audition for this came along. And I was like, ah, fuck it.

One last hurrah. He goes into audition. And Brian Burke says, quote, you could hate this guy, but also want him to be your best friend. End quote, they had their Sawyer. And I agree. I love Sawyer. I love him. I think Josh Holloway is great in this show.

I do too. And he's just really endearing and he's so funny and so offensive. And his nicknames for everyone are awful but great. And he really sells it. I really like him. Yeah, I do too. I love him. All right.

Now, as we said, casting director April Webster had begun this process searching for their Kate. At the time, she was the show's true lead. And I would argue she remained its female lead after it was decided to let Jack live. So they look high and low. They look at hundreds of actresses. They're pressing up against their start days for shooting. They're getting desperate.

Enter two audition tapes that had been mailed from Canada. Both actresses were flown to L.A. to read in person. And the less experienced of the two had done a few commercials in Canada, worked as an extra in Canada, and played a corpse twice. That was everything on her resume. Wow. And her name was Evangelion. Lee, according to producer Brian Burke, and this feels a bit apocryphal, but it was in the book I read, so I'll tell it. Her audition was fine, but her hair was obscuring her face. So Abrams

tells her to pull her hair back and show us your real performance, and everyone was struck by both her beauty and talent. And I know it's like she's all that taking the glasses off. Yeah. You can't tell that Angelian Lily is gorgeous. I know. Regardless, she won the role, but that added an unexpected complication. She's Canadian, which means she needs a work visa yesterday. The producers suddenly need to explain to the government why an actress with a, quote, blank resume is indispensable to their $12 million pilot. The woman whose last credit is a must have. So, they're one week out from shooting, and the permit still hasn't.

arrived. If you remember, the first week is on the soundstages in L.A. Evangeline Lilly obviously has one scene as Kate in the flashback with the U.S. Air Marshal. The week begins. Still no permit. They push her start date to the following Monday. Meanwhile, April Webster, Brian Burke and Tom Sherman start looking at backup actresses because they don't know if they're going to be able to keep Evangeline. At the same time, she's in L.A. She's there for two weeks, just in. in a hotel room waiting to find out if this work visa will come in time to literally change her life. Oh, my God. I cannot imagine how stressful that was.

Yeah. Fate was in her favor. The call came in on a Friday. The visa had been approved. Her first real role in Hollywood was the female lead of the most expensive television pilot in history. As she later put it, quote, I'm the opposite story of Josh Holloway. He hates it.

Harold Perrinow, Malcolm David Kelly, Ian Summerhalder, and Emily DeRaven rounded out the cast. It seems like they were just great fits for their roles. Sorry. You got one wrong there, Chris. I think you actually meant, my baby. Oh, sorry, that's right. Emily DeRiven. My bye, right. I got to tell you, that gets old. If someone with kids, you would be very concerned about your bi-bait if you heard. in a plane crash.

Production begins on March 11th, 2004. As I mentioned, they shot the plane interior scenes first. The flashbacks to the plane crash, then relocated to Hawaii to get to work. The production was kept under wraps until the local government got so many calls about concerns over the plane crash on the beach that they had to reveal that they were shooting a TV series about a crashed plane. The first shot on location was Jack, Kate, and Charlie going to. going into the jungle to find the plane's cockpit and pilot and then fleeing from the island monster.

Speaking of island monsters, the studio was like, do we need an island monster? To which Lindelof and Abrams said, yes, we do. A question many would ask for years. They didn't know what it was. Not even the cast knew what it was as Harold Perrinos. Maybe. Later said, they spent a ton of time trying to find. figure it out between takes. They would ask them to ask each other, is it a dinosaur? Is this

land at the lost? We couldn't figure out. Maggie Grace said, quote, we didn't know if we were doing Godzilla or Lord of the Flies. Now, did the monster stem from a place of logic? Not really. Nor did a lot in the pilot because they were flying by the seat of their pants. As Lindelof later told Grantland of about how much of the mythology they had mapped out, quote, during the pilot, none of it, to be honest with you. Makes sense. They had a matter of weeks to write this entire thing, And it's awesome. Yeah, it's amazing what they did. Originally, the episode was supposed to feature a wild boar, charging Sawyer,

only for Abrams to lament that it wasn't strange enough. Producer Sarah Kaplan jokingly said, what about a polar bear? Which Abrams immediately said, yes. Oh, no. And they put it in the show. I like that scene a lot. This is like that key and feel sketch about gremlins, too. Be careful what you're throwing out because it's all making it in.

Yep. The mysteries extended to the characters themselves, Sayers' letter, they hadn't worked out what was in it yet. As Abrams said, Josh was like, well, what is it? And I was like, it's just insanely important to you, and it's very painful. That's all. It was more important that we allude to the character's pain than to wait until we'd figured it out.

I agree. They also didn't know what John Locke's secret was in the first episode. Sure. But they figured that out later. As much as the monster and polar bear are the obvious, ooh, what's that mysteries? As Abrams said, the far more important hooks that we were hoping the audience would bite on where things like, what's that pain he has, what does that letter mean? And I think he's exactly right.

Those are the more interesting mysteries in the pilot. Totally. So the shoot was a trial by fire for everybody involved. Remember, a lot of first-time dramatic actors here, a lot of first-time actors at this budget. But apparently, I mean, look, Abrams has manned huge movies now. And this pilot's amazing. And you can tell he's just dialed in the entire time. A couple of small mishaps worth mentioning.

Evangeline Lilly got some sort of spore in her eye, which caused it to swell to you twice its normal size. Don't say spore. That's like one of my worst nightmares. Spore. The crane wire holding up that 70-foot wing did snap under the heat of one of the fires on set. So that wing actually fell down unplanned. And I think it actually only, so they had only that one shot of it coming down. That was the only take that they got because it.

broke. No one was hurt. There was a great deal of skepticism that the polar bear would work. Apparently, they rigged a pillow on a hydraulic cannon to fire it at Josh Holloway. So he had something to shoot at. And the pillow went like two feet and everybody was like, this is never going to work. And J.J. Everyone was like, it's going to work. Don't worry. It's going to be fine. The pilot also featured over 200 VFX shots. And if you remember, Jurassic Park had under 100. Yeah. Now, midway through production, there was one crucial casualty, not actual death. I mean, a firing.

In April of 2004, Lloyd Braun, head of ABC, who had greenlit the show, was fired and replaced with Stephen McPherson head of Touchstone Television. So in the Grantland Retrospective Entertainment Weekly, a number of other sources, Lloyd Braun was fired in April. I read in another choice that he had resigned at a later date, but I was able to find the Disney announcement that Stephen McPherson was taking over as the head of ABC in April, so I do believe he was fired in April, which would have been midway through production on Lost. We'll get to Lloyd Braun getting the last laugh on this in a couple of ways.

Don't worry. The studio, though, was now terrified that they'd just spent at least $12 million. I've read reports upwards of 15 on something that would never last as a TV show. So they send a last-minute request to Abrams and Lindelof. Quote, can you shoot a closer-providing ending in case the pilot becomes a TV movie instead of a series? They had just thrown as many mysteries into the pilot as possible

to encourage people to watch the next episode, and now they needed to write a five-minute scene that answered all of them. As Lindelof put it, quote, it's like telling somebody to design the fastest car in the world, and they do that in five minutes before, they start up the assembly line, they say, can it also be a boat? So Abrams and Lidloff obviously knew it was an impossible ask. Abrams goes to the studio and politely says, no. Well, I think he handled it exactly right. He said, look, tell me what to shoot and I will absolutely shoot it, but I don't know

what that ending could be. Yeah. And the studio, to their credit, quickly realized they had no idea what it could be. So they finished the shoot with the scripted ending, which is what you see in the final pilot. They try to send out an SOS. They discover the French woman's 16-year-old S-OS, and Shannon translates it with perfect hair. So they... Raging hair. They wrapped the pilot on time. Lloyd Braun claims under budget, who knows, however, its fate was in a precarious place. Stephen McPherson had reasonable, I would say, reservations about the show during the development process. However, when he saw the pilot and they tested it, he realized they might have something special on their hands.

Still, the studio wanted assurances that this wasn't some serialized myth-building mystery box show. So they brought in a bunch of writers that Lindelof led and they spent, I believe, two months, creating a document, again, that you can read online. It was never intended to be released to the public. It leaked in 2013. But this document was basically intended to assuage any concerns that the studio had about the show.

To be clear, this was not intended to be like a show Bible or canon for the show. It was just to be like, please get off our backs. But it is funny to read a few things that the document promised. The document had a brief Q&A anticipating the most obvious questions. One might be asking coming out of the pilot. It had a detailed character list. The character list is very consistent with, you know, kind of the end. end result. It had 30 self-contained stories. They could tell on the island. One of those stories was

Tabula Rasa, basically, the first Kate episode. But after that, you know, it quickly veers off, and it's clearly they broke the show in a different direction. Here are the other promises. The show will be self-contained and will not have a serialized structure, we promise. Each episode will have a beginning, middle, and end, and anybody can drop in at any time and understand what's going on. The show is not constrained by genre, but is more an adventure. show than a sci-fi show. The show will have no ultimate mystery. The monster will be explained in the next few episodes. The eventual home of the show and the survivors would be something that could be built on a soundstage. The show will have guest stars. And the other survivors,

the non-main cast, would slowly die and disappear. There are also many elements in here that did make it into the show. There are hints at the Dharma Initiative, which was initially called Medusa Corp. Cool. I prefer the Dharma Initiative. an ancient mythology was to be built into the island. The monster was going to be the island slash Dharma security system. They referenced the others. Each episode would feature a different regular of the show, which is very much, like, you know, this is the Kate episode,

the Locke episode. And some of the episodes, as I mentioned, had rough outlines here, Tabula Rasa being one of them. Now, after the pilot, J.G. Abrams basically had to step away from the show to direct Mission Impossible 3. So the way that this works, they shoot the pilot, ABC then decides, okay, we're going to pick it up. They then bring Lindelof in to showrun the writer's room, and he has to produce the next episodes himself without J.G. Abrams. And Damon Lindeloff had never show run a show before, so he found himself, quote, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, after show running the next few episodes on his own.

So he asked his old Nash Bridges boss, Carlton Q's, to come. Co-show run the show with him. Kews loves the strips and says, I want to do this and actually tells his agent to get him out of a big development deal with a rival studio so he can take on the show. And his agent was like, what are you doing? This show's not going anywhere.

But he was adamant. So Ques joins Lindelof, helps him finish out the first 12 episodes of the first season. As he later told Grantland, quote, everyone left us alone because they were convinced the show was 12 episodes and out, basically half a season. And it gave us the liberation to make the best version of the show we could, the one we wanted to watch.

There was no fear of failure because in this particular circumstance, failure was not an unattractive option. Like, we could fail and then we're done. Meanwhile, original scribe Jeffrey Lieber had gotten his hands on the pilot script, which didn't include his name anywhere on it. So he pursued a shared credit through the WGA, which led to a contentious arbitration process. And that actually resulted in the WGA awarding him with. 60% of the created screenplay by and created by credit, apparently this left a lot of people on the lost production side and the studio side

feeling like he was benefiting financially from work he hadn't really done. He later spoke to this, and it seems like, to his credit, he didn't understand that tonally they were going so far in a different direction. Like he just saw a lot of the characters overlapping when he read that first script. And he just read the pilot, right? That's right. Yeah. I can see how that would not be as clear from.

that episode. Yeah, exactly. So according to Grant Land's 2012 retrospective on the series, which is really worth reading, ABC's marketing team gave the show an unexpected boost. Rather than spread resources

across all of their new pilots, desperate for a hit, they decided to focus their attention on just three shows. Lost, and Lizzie, any idea what the other two were? No clue. Desperate Housewives.

Okay. And wife swap. So the buzz began to build over the summer, including, I guess they showed the episode to people at Comic-Con or footage from it, and it just got rave reviews. So, last premiered on September 22nd, 2004 to 18.6 million viewers. This was ABC's best drama series debut in nine years.

That number would be beat by Desperate Housewives in 11 days. Desperate Housewives did 21 million viewers. Wow. These two shows, along with the spring 2005, so mid-season premiere of Shonda Rhymes' Grey's Anatomy, geez. Changed ABC's fate. All had been developed and greenlit by Lloyd Braun.

Wow. Who had been fired, specifically for, in part, green lighting, lost. Of course, Braun did slip one by the studio. After he was dismissed, he got a call from J.J. Abrams. He met up with Abrams and sat in front of a microphone and recorded one fateful line. Previously on Lost. Oh my God. That is Lloyd Braun's voice, and nobody knew for years until Howard Stern, who's a friend

of Lloyd Bronze, actually put it together because they never credited Lloyd Braun. And he asked him, is that your voice? And it is indeed. That's amazing. I think they pitched it down a hair to hide it. Now, not everyone was happy about the release and success of loss. I mean, the cast gets to live in Hawaii, make a lot of money. Jeff Lieber, the original screenwriter, later told Chicago Magazine

that when he saw the pilot and realized how different the show really was from the one that he wrote, he felt like a fraud. And that when people would congratulate him about the successive loss for many years after, it kind of left him with a hollow feeling inside. So I think, you know, he quickly understood this is very different than what I was going to do with the show. And I think the only hard feelings he has is like, if they'd wanted supernatural, I could have written supernatural. But, you know, another instance of you don't know what you want until you see it. Now, Lizzie, perhaps no one was more depressed than Damon Lindelof.

As Carlton Cues told Grant Land, Lindelof comes to him after they get the ratings from the pilot and says, quote, does this mean we have to keep doing this? You bet it does, buddy. for so many more seasons. On that note, we will end tonight's coverage of Lost and save it for two weeks from now when we dive into Lost

and the monster that Damon Lindelof spent the next six years attempting to feed and how he finally brought it to an end. That was great. The only thing I kind of understood about Lost is that it seemed like, obviously, it had an amazing start, and then it does kind of fall apart

the farther in you get because it feels like it was not contained or sort of planned from the beginning and now kind of understanding how it came about. That totally makes sense. And interesting to see Damon Lindelof do things later in his career that are so extremely contained and just incredible. Like Watchmen, you can tell he learned a lot from this. That goes great. I can't wait to hear what happens next. Yeah, I think it's such an exceptionally well-made show. And the thing, the way that that I like to think about it is that in this pilot episode, momentum was so much their friend. Yeah. Right. They had to make decisions quickly. They did. And as a result, it feels propulsive.

It's mysterious. It's sexy. It's dynamic. It's tense. Yeah, I think early on the fact that they didn't have to answer all of the questions worked in their favor. It obviously doesn't necessarily towards the end, but it does for a long time. Yeah. And it's really great. And I think it's, like you said, it's a double-edged sword when you get to play fast and loose like that. But I still, I'm a huge fan of the series. I'm excited to talk about the ending in two weeks. And I think it's also an example of a, it is a business of taking risks the successful stories are.

And kudos to Lloyd Braun. Yeah. It was an incredible risk to take this show and greenlighted off of nothing. It also, you know, Jeffrey Lieber gave him his idea. And Braun, to his credit, realized. that's not enough, it needs more. You know, I think there are some people who could have thought, well, yeah, that is my idea. Let's just go and make it.

But he realized, you know, it needed a meteor hook and assembled the right people to pull it off. So that brings me to my what went right for this week. Lloyd Braun having the idea and then being smart enough to let somebody else take that idea and run with it in a completely unexpected direction. Yeah, 100%. And it's interesting that they kept bringing up Lord of the Flies because as sort of like the realistic thing it was grounded in, because correct me if I'm wrong,

but there is kind of an almost mystical, somewhat magical quality to that that starts to arrive because of sort of what they're experiencing on the island. So even in that example, I think there's something that this taps into. Yeah, and I think Yellow Jackets is the closest that we've come to a Lord of the Flies. The Wilds is actually another really good show that does a little bit of that as well. But I think in this instance,

Abrams described it as Crichton Island at one point, like Michael Crichton Island. And I think that's a good explanation for it as well. My What Went Right has to be the casting. I love the fact that they were flexible about this. And I think that's potentially one of the biggest advantages this had was their ability to shift these characters and just find the best people possible

and also not rely on big names. I love watching stuff where I have never seen the people that are in it before. It's such a treat because you don't know their tricks. And I wish that people would do that more. I wish people would take chances more often. Yeah, it's great. The Touchstone Television had, and then ABC head, Stephen McPherson, had a great quote where he said, you know,

typically you go into a pilot and the script's been locked for months, or the characters have and the script's been rewritten and rewritten. So you know the characters so intimately that a great actor could come in. If they're not right for one of those five roles, there's nothing you can do. Right. And you just lose that great actor. But with this project, a great actor could come in and they could just fold them in on the fly. And that's a really, really unique opportunity. All right. Well, guys, that concludes the first half of our coverage of Lost. Check back in in two weeks. To be clear, we do not expect you to watch the entire series between now and then, although you should.

but I would say check out the finale, at least. That's my plan. I'm trying to get through the first season, and then I may skip around a bit to some of my favorite episodes, and I'm going to get to the finale. Yeah, we will talk about the cultural impact of the show, its legacy, bringing it to an end, its impact on other shows that have followed, et cetera,

as well as some fun production stuff across the series itself. Lizzie, anything else we need to get to? No, I think we just have to thank our full-stop supporters, right? You know, we did pause the Patreon. I'm just kidding. Of course we can. All right. A special, super special, special, special, special, super special thanks to Lachlan

Morrow, Scott Gurwin, Sadie, just Sadie, Chris Leal, Matthew Pelton, Tom Kristen, Hannah Tripp, Salman Chianani, and Michael McGrath. We deeply, deeply appreciate your support. Thank you so much for your deep support. Guys, if you would like a shout out, and merch, consider joining our full stop level on our Patreon. Check out our website, www. What Went WrongPod.com.

There you can find links to our merch. A nice contact us page. Listen, you're always welcome to DM us on IG, but email's great too. And also, just want you all to know, we do read the reviews that you leave on Apple. Oh, yes, we do. Sometimes they haunt our dreams. Sometimes they make us feel better about the choices that we've made. So if you would like to leave us a rating and review, please go ahead and do that.

We did get a very nice one about a gentleman who's a painter and apparently made a lot of money because he was listening to our podcast without headphones on, got into a good conversation with his client, and they were also a movie buff, and now he's got a bunch more work. The lesson is, when you are anywhere, put us on blast. That's right. Out in nature, on hikes. People love that. They love it. Put that beats. spill on your back and blast what went wrong as loud as you can. Are you at a funeral? Are you at church? Are you at the grocery store? Yes. Yes. Full volume. All gas, no brakes. That is what we want.

Thanks so much, guys. We really appreciate it. We'll talk to you in two weeks. Bye. Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and gain access to bonus episodes, video content, and more. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast. by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Uthana Youos.