Lost Exists Thanks To A Tom Hanks Blockbuster And A Reality TV Show

There is perhaps no simpler path to getting your television show greenlit by the network than reducing it down to a simple “It’s like X meets Y” in your pitch. “Lost” is the quintessential example of why it can be incredibly helpful in boiling a complex story down into an easily digestible package. It all started in Hawaii, where ABC Chairman Lloyd Braun was on vacation with his family. Ever the company man, Braun turned his hotel TV to ABC and caught an airing of the Tom Hanks film “Cast Away.” Afterward, he went down to the beach with his family, still thinking about the film and wondering if there was a way to translate the story of “one actor and one volleyball” into a TV series.

“And then the notion of ‘Survivor’ popped into my head,” Braun recounted in an interview with Grantland. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t shake this “Survivor” meets “Cast Away” idea, so he started picking away at how it could work.

“What if there was a plane that crashed and a dozen people survived, and nobody knew each other?” he asked himself. “Your past was almost irrelevant. You could reinvent who you were. You had to figure out — how do you survive? What do you use for shelter, for water? Is it like ‘Lord of the Flies’? How do we get off the island, how do you get home? And I start to get very excited about the idea, and I start thinking about the title ‘Lost.'”

As he fleshed out the basic formula of “Cast Away” meets “Survivor,” Braun knew that “Lost” had the potential to be something special, but when he pitched the high-concept idea at an ABC corporate retreat, it was met with dead silence. The only friendly face was Thom Sherman, the head of ABC’s drama development, who sidled up to Braun to admit he saw the vision of the show. The two plugged away at the concept while the rest of the company was still skeptical of the series’ prospects.

The first iteration of the pilot (written by Jeffrey Lieber) didn’t live up to Braun’s expectations, and the clock was ticking to get the pilot to air. So Braun turned to J.J. Abrams and tasked him with the impossible job of writing a pilot in a matter of months. Abrams, like everyone else, was initially skeptical of the idea but reluctantly agreed to do it. Damon Lindelof was brought on board to co-write with him, and the two used the high concept pitch as a jumping-off point for a series that would blend episodic and serialized stories like no one had seen before.

The result was “Lost,” one of the most ambitious and expensive pilots ever filmed. Unfortunately for Braun, his tenure at ABC didn’t last long enough for him to reap the benefits of the show’s premiere in 2004, which became the cream of the crop of an extremely strong year of TV. Six years and one controversial finale later, the series managed to remain true to that “Cast Away” meets “Survivor” pitch while still managing to carve out an identity all its own.