5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

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J.J. Abrams’ Lost revolutionized the future of television after it premiered, but is it all that original? Did it take things from other shows?

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5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

Lost is one of the greatest TV dramas of the last twenty years – despite its rather questionable ending. It generated millions of fans the world over owing to its incredible mixture of mystery-based storytelling and character-driven drama. By its later seasons, Lost was so gonzo bizarre (like moving an entire island through space and time with a magic donkey wheel) that everyone had to see it through to the end, no matter how much they may have given up on receiving any satisfying answers.

Lost revolutionized many aspects of television, but it also borrowed many elements from the influential programs that came before it.

10 Revolutionized: TV Production Values

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

Lost still looks spectacular to this day, and that’s in large part thanks to the expensive production values on display. Before Lost, television was considered quite a cheap and visually uninteresting medium. Network shows were cheap, and even the prestigious dramas on cable like The Sopranos and The Wire didn’t exactly wow in the visuals department. Lost changed all that. In fact, Lost was the most expensive project in ABC’s history, with the pilot alone costing upwards of $14 million.

9 Took From Others: Antiheroes

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

Lost was filled with tantalizing antiheroes. Many of the male characters were antiheroes to some degree, and Kate Austen was perhaps the most morally gray character of all owing to her penchant for violence, selfishness, and acts of cold-blooded murder. Even the straight-laced heroes like Jack and Sayid contained some morally questionable personality traits. However, this was nothing new for TV. Antiheroes had been around for years, and when Lost premiered in 2004, both The Sopranos and The Wire were in the middle of their runs.

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8 Revolutionized: Mystery-Driven Storytelling

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

While some TV shows definitely employed the mystery-driven approach, it was Lost that revolutionized it and brought it into the wider mainstream. Even to this day, Lost is synonymous with mystery-driven shows, and many of them are still referred to as “Lost clones”. Unfortunately, this is both a blessing and a curse. While it’s respected for bringing a new style of storytelling to television, the disappointing amount of unanswered questions and harsh critical reaction serve as a stern warning for future mystery-driven writers.

7 Took From Others: Character Specific Episodes

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

Lost was an ensemble show, and while it found time for everyone, each episode was told through a different character’s perspective.

Most of the story was catered and written through their specific experiences, and the on-island story was usually shaped in some degree by the specific flashback story on display. Cool as that was, Lost wasn’t the first show to do it. Again, The Sopranos had been doing it for years by that point, as each episode of The Sopranos is typically focused on one or two specific characters.

6 Revolutionized: Network Serialization

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

Before Lost, network TV typically contained a lot of episodic shows. While most of them contained some degree of overarching storyline, each episode told their own unique story that could be enjoyed on their own merits – even without prior knowledge of the show. And if a fan missed an episode, it wasn’t really a big deal. However, this changed with Lost. Episodes couldn’t be enjoyed to their fullest extent without knowing the overarching story, and missing an episode resulted in fans losing an important chunk of the story owing to its serialization.

5 Took From Others: Desert Island Setting

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

The desert island setting of Lost was certainly unique, and it helped that the show was filmed on location in Hawaii. However, it definitely wasn’t the first show to take place on a desert island. Perhaps the most famous example is Gilligan’s Island, which ran forty years earlier from 1964 to 1967. And at the time, Survivor was enormously popular. In fact, Lloyd Braun originally pitched Lost as a combination of Survivor, Cast Away, and Gilligan’s Island.

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4 Revolutionized: Supernatural Elements

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

Much like its mystery-driven storytelling, Lost also helped revolutionize the concept of supernatural elements within an otherwise grounded story.

It was clear from the very beginning that something was “off” with the island, like the inclusion of Rousseau’s sixteen-year-long transmission, the polar bear, and the screaming monster in the woods (that would later be revealed as The Man in Black/Smoke Monster). Many of the “Lost clones” would also “borrow” these supernatural elements for their own stories.

3 Took From Others: Serialized Storytelling

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

While Lost revolutionized the concept of serialized storytelling on network television, it certainly wasn’t the first TV show to do it. Some network shows had done it before, but these were exceedingly rare and weren’t often popular (perhaps owing to the dedication that they required). But once again, cable TV was revolutionizing serialized programming by the time Lost had debuted, with shows like The Sopranos, Oz, and The Wire offering up some incredible long-form storytelling.

2 Revolutionized: Non-Linear Storytelling

5 Ways Lost Revolutionized Television (& 5 Things It Took From Other Shows)

As great and revolutionary as The Sopranos, Oz, and The Wire were, they offered traditional storytelling techniques. That is, a beginning, middle, and end with little in the way of experimentation (minus maybe The Sopranos’ dream sequences). Lost offered up a truly bizarre form of storytelling that was wonderfully complex at its best, convoluted and confusing at its worst. Time jumps, “time wobbles,” flashbacks, flashforwards, flash-sideways, non-liner concurrent storytelling – all were present, and it was either adored or detested.

1 Took From Others: Cliffhanger Endings

Lost often employed cliffhanger endings, and they were very, very good. While the show toyed with more traditional, non-cliffhanger endings throughout its first season (and its second, to a much lesser extent), it veered full-tilt towards the cliffhangers midway through season two and never looked back. Each episode ended on a delightful cliffhanger of some kind, and it guaranteed audience retention. However, Lost was far from the first show to employ cliffhangers, as they had been used for decades to ensure audience retention and continued viewership.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/lost-revolutionized-influenced-inspired-tv/

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