‘Lost’ Secrets Revealed, Sort Of, At 10-Year Reunion Of Landmark ABC Show

Lost was a groundbreaking TV show in the way it told a long-form story on network TV, weaving mysterious plot twists together with detailed character development to create a world that, against in the generally stale, unchallenging landscape of network television, seemed fresh and exciting at the time the show debuted in 2004.

Sunday night, a decade after the premiere of Lost on ABC and four years since the 121st and final episode aired, leaving fans as puzzled as they’d been throughout most of the series, the two producers who served as the chief creative forces behind Lost got together with a few former cast members at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood for a reunion where they revealed some of the show’s secrets.

Well, sort of, anyway.

Here’s a sampling of the revelations from Sunday’s Lost reunion, featuring executive producers Carleton Cuse and Damon Lindelhof.

The characters were not dead and stuck in purgatory.

“No, they were not dead the entire time,” Cuse said at the reunion, definitively putting to rest a longtime favorite fan theory. The dreamlike nature of the Lost storyline and the bizarre way that it seemed impossible to get off the “island” where they were stranded — not to mention the high improbability of surviving the catastrophic plane crash that brought the cast to the “island” — led many fans to speculate that the whole show was taking place in some kind of afterlife.

“One of the ongoing conversations with the audience and there was a very early perception, was that the island was purgatory,” added Lindelhof. “We were always out there saying, ‘It’s not purgatory, this is real, we’re not going to Sixth Sense you.'”

A fan offered Josh Holloway sex if he would reveal plot secrets of the show.

“I had one fan I saw a few too many times,” said Holloway,who played the wayward con artist “Sawyer,” on Lost. Holloway, who currently stars in the CBS drama Intelligence, said the fan offered him sex, but couched the offer in the euphemism of a “chicken dinner.”

The character “Jack,” played by Matthew Fox, had his life saved by ABC executives.

The closest thing to a lead character on Lost, Jack was never supposed to survive past the first episode. Cuse and Lindelhof were infatuated with the idea of promoting a character prominently in the lead-up to the premiere only to kill him off right away.

But when ABC network executives got wind of the two producers’ idea, they became concerned. They told Cuse and Lindelhof that Lost fans would lost trust with the show if a character they cared about was eliminated right away.

As a result, Jack survived to the end of Lost.