Just before I stopped acting, I was in a short film with Harold Perrineau, the actor who played Michael on Lost. I couldn’t sleep for days leading up to the shoot. I was sure he’d be able to smell the Lostie on me, that he’d notice my particular brand of “star-struck” had a more desperate bent than everyday fans. The day I got the call that I had been cast, I had a flashback (not unlike those featured on the show) to Lost’s heyday, my drama school years—a time in my life when I was seeking answers with the same frenzy as the passengers of Ocean Flight 815.
The year was 2009, and every Sunday night at seven, we sat in Jake’s pigsty of a dorm room with cracked plastic bowls of popcorn between our knees. His laptop (which had the largest screen out of all of ours) was perched on an IKEA table that was so flimsy it swayed dangerously whenever one of us accidentally brushed our arm against it. When it overheated, the laptop made a whirring sound that picked up volume as it got hotter, so that toward the end of every episode we streamed, the laptop sounded like it was groaning. We didn’t mind as long as we could still hear the dialogue. Nor did we mind the crime-scene streaks of dried Coca-Cola on Jake’s walls, the questionable crumbs that lined every nook and cranny of his couch, or the brown hairs looping on the shower tiles in the bathroom. It was Sunday night, and we were ready to go to the island.
2024 marks the 20th anniversary of Lost’s premier episode, in which Oceanic Flight 815 crash-lands onto a deserted island, bringing with it the complex, jaw-dropping backstories of its passengers. Each week, we learned a bit more about the characters’ histories, which also informed the events on the island (itself a compelling character). The show revolutionized TV with its “massive ensemble cast, flashback-infused storytelling, and mystery box appeal,” and it remains one of the most popular TV shows of all time: an average 13.5 million viewers tuned in for each episode in its six-season run. The show had everything: cults, numerology, philosophy, supernatural smoke, time travel, and hot people—and we couldn’t get enough.
Once a week, a group of die-hard Lostie sophomores from NYU’s Stella Adler School of Acting temporarily abandoned the highbrow artistic sensibilities we were so carefully cultivating and gathered for some good, mass-market fun. We knew the island held great mystery, but we didn’t yet know the nature of that mystery, and we lapped up every clue J.J. Abrams gave us like the freezer-burned ice cream we spooned into our unwashed bowls. Was it aliens? Purgatory? Demons? Was this entire world a figment of Hurley’s imagination? No one knew. How could we possibly know? When would we finally know? We didn’t know. We kept watching. We watched six seasons of twists and turns that mirrored the labyrinthine actor’s studio to which we all reported each Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8 o’clock, Shakespeare and Ibsen and Molière in hand, and tried to stop thinking about The Hatch.
Lost grapples with big concepts like good versus evil, destiny versus free will, and faith versus science. It asks questions like: What determines the quality of a person’s character? How much control do we really have? What are we even doing here? Is there a greater plan, or is it all just total chaos? For us, the show mimicked life’s promise that the big answers would come, that it would all make sense in the end, that it was just a matter of time before someone or something was coming for us.
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Acting is often thought of as a way to escape, but my experience of drama school felt like the opposite. My theater education was rigorous, with early classes, hours of scene preparation, and intensive script analysis. Every movement we made onstage was fair game for dissection and critique. The acting fundamentals we were taught (identifying character objectives, building the setting in our minds, establishing the norms of the time period in which the play was originally written or performed, experimenting with physically inhabiting the body of the character) were meant to help us build a foundation for our performances so that we could let go more completely onstage. I used the tools, but when the time came to perform, I was unable to let go of all the work I’d done. I was always nervous, scared my hours of preparation wouldn’t be apparent to the audience, convinced I needed to prove how much effort I’d put in. My performances never fully landed because I always had one foot in the real world. I was constantly watching myself. I was all science, no faith.
What acting lacked in escapism for me, Lost provided. Part of what made it so compelling was the subtle genre-switch that occurs in the first episode, making our minds ripe for the blowing. Most of the pilot is dedicated to the physical realities of a plane crash: someone is trapped under a large piece of the plane; a pregnant woman starts having contractions; the cockpit must be reached to find the transceiver; a shirtless, bleeding Jack must be stitched up with a sewing needle. But what at first seems like a run-of-the-mill survivor story turns into something much more mysterious. At night, the jungle seethes and clicks with a disturbing, monstrous sound. Trees appear to be gobbled up by an invisible beast that hunts the survivors whenever they enter the jungle. A scouting party encounters a polar bear in the jungle––a sinister reversal of natural order. Meanwhile, John Locke drops hints that he knows something about island that the others don’t. In the first two episodes, he unsettles Kate by smiling at her with an orange in his mouth, sits in the rain when everyone else takes shelter, and asks Walt, the island’s only child, “Want to hear a secret?” just before we cut to commercial. In that scene, Locke teaches Walt to play backgammon, holding up a black stone and a white stone. “Two players,” he says, “two sides. One is light. One is dark.” His tone implies that he’s giving Walt more than a backgammon tutorial; he’s hinting at the secrets of the island. Here, his tone implies, we will be dealing with more than just survival. We are asking the big questions. On the island, everything matters.
If the genre switch was what got me hooked, it was Lost’s wish-fulfillment element that kept me coming back for more. In Lost, extraordinarily attractive people who required almost no grooming, and who almost never got injured past a fetching scar on their upper right cheek, performed heroic, selfless tasks—daily. They weren’t concerned with superficial, egoic indignities like being snubbed for a lead role, having an acting professor forget their first name, or being rejected by the senior who played Hamlet in the mainstage production. In fact, the passengers weren’t concerned with themselves at all. They were concerned with uncovering the mysteries of the island. They were concerned with taking care of each other. Their drives were above reproach, their day-to-day lives uniformly noble and full of adventure. As a college student who didn’t truly know what it meant to have to fight for survival, I envied them their adventures, their spotless characters, their dewy, unruffled gorgeousness, their obvious purpose. A part of me felt that that, despite their bad luck, the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815 were better off than I was.
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Lost’s finale was famously disappointing, with dozens (literally dozens—someone counted) of burning questions left unanswered. A generation of fans was crestfallen, our dreams dashed at the anticlimactic finale. Part of what made the ending so disappointing was that the philosophical questions the show had raised ended up being simply an interesting through line rather than a driving force behind the plot. Sure, the central conflict turned out to be the battle between Jacob and his unnamed brother, between good and evil, but did that really tell us anything about humanity? Did it involve the philosophical questions in any significant way? No, except in the ways that human affairs always provoke philosophical questions. And sure, as the characters kept pointing out, “the island had its reasons,” its own mysterious logic, but the island’s reasons were predictable, almost human in the way they disappointed us. We wanted answers that changed us like the artistic awakening we were all working so hard to achieve in acting school. We wanted a plot twist that shook us to our core, that made sense of everything we’d gone through with the passengers. But that twist never came.
Perhaps I’m just bitter. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been satisfied by any conclusion. Perhaps there was no final plot twist that could ever live up to the feeling Lost gave me every week, of being dropped into the middle of something important. Perhaps, like everything, it was the journey that mattered. Or, perhaps, the show was written to be disappointing, offering the same dazzling mystery and ultimate lack of explanation as life itself. Perhaps I just never wanted to leave the island.
Still, I don’t regret the time we spent watching it. The endless debating, geeking out, and scouring the internet for clues was regenerative, and on Monday mornings, our acting work was better for the space we gave it—suffused with fun and a sense of play. Lost had allowed us to blow off some steam, to be human beings instead of actors, to indulge in a world that had nothing to do with the lives we were trying to build. It had given us permission to believe that, just like Jake’s pigsty of a dorm room, it mattered more how we felt than how we looked.
***
That first day on set with Harold Perrineau, I was dying to ask him all sorts of questions. What had happened on that island? What had it all meant? What had I missed? On set, Perrineau was lovely: the picture of kindness, professionalism and talent. I never asked him about Lost. By then, I knew that no story could ever live up to what I needed from it. By then, I knew that what I needed from it was for it to make me nobler, less selfish, less small. By then, I knew that what I had always wanted from a story was what I had wanted from life: to make it mean something despite what seemed like utter chaos. Now, I knew that no story could do that. There was no script into which I could dive headfirst that would tell me what to do with my life. The answers weren’t coming to find me. I had to find them.
I found at least one answer when, a year later, I realized that I had never really wanted to be an actor. What I had really wanted was to be a character, a participant in the heightened worlds and stories I had fallen in love with. In the world of a play or a movie, every single sentence has meaning. It was never the performance I had wanted—it was the immersion, the disappearance into another world, the promise that it meant something. I quit acting about a year after the short film wrapped.
I still, however, understand Jack’s pull to go back to the island, despite the wreck, despite its problems. When I think of me and my friends watching Lost together each week, I see that dorm room as our own wreck site, own disaster zone, our own unlikely island. There is comfort in being stuck somewhere, in leaving the pressures of the world behind, in escaping. Our Sunday nights together were our holdout against a world that offered no easy answers. The mystery of the island, and our faith that it would all make sense, was a prayer that we might make meaning of our own lives. For some of us, our destiny was to become working actors. For others, it wasn’t. We moved out of our sticky, overheated dorm rooms, bought vacuum cleaners and better computers—and life seemed to make more and more sense. But perhaps it only looked that way. Perhaps it never made more sense than when we were all together, and we let that be enough.
Samantha Colicchio’s work has been published in Off Assignment, The Huffington Post, Faultline, and Ohio State’s The Journal. She was a finalist for The Sewanee Review‘s Nonfiction Contest judged by Stephanie Danler, and her book-in-progress was nominated for the Allegra Johnson Writing Prize. She has attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writer’s Workshop, studying under Melissa Faliveno. She graduated from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and she currently writes for behavioral health brands. You can find her at samanthacolicchio.com.