by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the show being covered here wouldn't exist.

In the midst of working on this project, Maureen Ryan’s Burn It Down came out, which shed more light on the abysmal treatment employees faced on LOST, both writers and actors. While there had been rumblings of shittiness behind the scenes—backed up by, in my opinion, the questionable writing for characters of color on the show—this was a hard confirmation that a show many loved, and some loved to hate, had been rotting at the core.

Over the course of #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, #PayUpHollywood, and the many other media-related reckonings that have started but not been allowed to fully form, there have been movements that tried, but most often did not succeed, to force those in power to account for the way that this industry, along with others, treats minorities. People of color, especially women of color, are most often the first to be taken advantage of, either by being given lower pay, facing unbearable working conditions, and/or hostile communication with those in power.

And while there have been attempts to reckon with how to process that a favorite show or movie was made or influenced by a less-than-stellar person (to say the least), there’s no one way to handle it. But, to make this very clear, no show is worth the vitriol that was directed toward people of color and women behind the scenes of LOST. And the fact that it happened behind the scenes of many, many other shows doesn’t make it any better or easier to swallow.

In the case of LOST, there are reports of racist comments and hazing from the showrunners. Ryan writes about it in a lot more detail in Burn It Down (and you can read the excerpt from Vanity Fair), but here are just a few instances she mentions: Lindelof claimed that Harold Perrineau “called me racist, so I fired his ass”; Cuse commented that he wanted Mr. Eko, one of the few Black characters in the show, to die using graphic descriptions that evoked lynching; and when a female writer carried the HR manual into the writer’s room, a man said, “Why don’t you take off your top and tell us about it.”

Writers faced abuse and hazing from their peers and bosses, making a hostile environment out of what should have been, and from the outside appeared to be, an amazing experience writing for an incredibly popular show. Per Monica Owusu-Breen, her writing partner was told, “The problem is, you don’t think racism is funny.” In an environment like that, it’s no wonder she was glad to be fired.

Before Burn It Down came out, Damon Lindelof did a podcast with Vulture to promote Mrs. Davis, the new show on Peacock that he’s co-showrunning. At this point, I have to assume he’d talked to Ryan for the book, but it hadn’t been released yet. In it, Lindelof responds to a question about how the responsibilities of showrunning have changed in recent years, saying,

If you were in the writers’ room on Lost—I can’t speak for all the writers in the room, but I know that for many of them, their mental health was not prioritized. There was toxic, misogynistic, even racist language in those rooms because I allowed it to happen. What I said or didn’t say is not really important. That was the culture, and just because it was happening 20 years ago is no excuse.

This conversation was in the context of Mrs. Davis, where he shares showrunning duties with Tara Hernandez, and they both agree that Hernandez has more power and final say in the show’s production. So far as I can tell, Lindelof’s putting his money where his mouth is. But we’ll see.

In Ryan’s book, Lindelof takes the pretty standard I-didn’t-know approach: “Would it shock you to learn or believe that… I was oblivious, largely oblivious to the adverse impacts that I was having on others in that writers’ room during the entire time the show was happening?” When Ryan pushed back, to tell him that he likely knew enough but chose not to do anything, he agreed. But talking to Ryan again, he made reference to that very common binary in our society: you can be talented, or you can be nice. There are nice people who are talented, but Lindelof certainly wasn’t one of those people at the time that LOST was made.

It’s very important, in my opinion, to also mention Carlton Cuse, who, through a written, PR-approved statement, denied just about everything that Ryan brought up to him. He calls some of the accusations outrageous lies, and he insists that no one ever complained to him—that ABC Studios never told him about any complaints. It’s your typical “I would never do that” response, and it’s so boring. He most likely mistreated his employees during his entire time with the show, and that’s all I need to know.

And because I’ve quoted from Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s LOST Will and Testament in previous pieces, I feel it’s important to point out that he’s written a Final Statement, which includes this particularly chilling sentence:

It's very easy, especially twenty years after the fact, to think 'well, it can't have been that bad or someone would have done something.' Let me say it loud and clear: it was that bad, and no one did anything because retribution was a constant and looming presence.

There’s no right way to process learning that a beloved property has been the source of pain for the people who helped make it. I probably won’t revisit LOST for a good long time after this project is done, for multiple reasons, but the knowledge of what went on behind the scenes weighs heavily on me.

For all that I think the storytelling of LOST shaped me as a person, it isn’t worth what those writers and employees went through making it. And to know that the creators of the show got to go on to bigger and better things after mistreating their employees for years? Well, that’s not something I’m thrilled about. While I’d intended to do a Where Are They Now for the actors/creators, I’m not particularly interested in seeing much of what Lindelof, Cuse, and the like have been up to since then.