10 Sci-Fi Shows That Almost Became The Next Lost

Over the past couple of months, we’ve seen Hollywood snatching up every viral horror short on YouTube, because Backrooms was a blockbuster success at the box office. Time and time again, we’ve seen studio executives make the same mistake. Audiences respond to something new and exciting, then the studios just copy and paste that same thing over and over, hoping to capitalize on that fandom and attract that same audience. Twilight was followed by a dozen Y.A. adaptations about a supernatural love story; Game of Thrones was followed by a succession of big-budget fantasy epics (including its own spinoffs); and The Walking Dead brought back zombies.

Whenever a TV show like Lost hits, every television producer and network executive starts trying to come up with “the next Lost.” They usually fail miserably — you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice — but some of these attempts to replace Lost came damn close. From From to La Brea to Terra Nova, these sci-fi shows all tried to be the next Lost.

Heroes

Heroes is basically a superhero version of Lost. Where Lost revolves around a group of random, ordinary people who find themselves stranded on a very special island, Heroes revolves around a group of random, ordinary people who suddenly find themselves with extraordinary superhuman abilities. It takes the tropes of American superhero comics and applies the “mystery box” storytelling of Lost.

Heroes had a stellar first season; it’s one of the most acclaimed debut seasons in television history. But, much like Westworld and True Detective, it struggled to follow up its incredible first season with a satisfying season 2.

FlashForward

Based on the book by Robert J. Sawyer, FlashForward follows an FBI task force’s efforts to uncover the truth when everyone in the world mysteriously blacks out for a little over two minutes. During the blackout, everyone seems to see a glimpse of their own future — or a “flashforward” — as they see where they’ll end up in six months.

This was ABC’s first real attempt to replicate the success of Lost — another mystery-driven show hoping to tap into the same audience — and it had a really interesting hook at first. But FlashForward ultimately failed to catch on, and it was cancelled after one season.

La Brea

La Brea is one of the most ambitious shows in the history of network television. It begins with a sinkhole opening up in Los Angeles, dragging hundreds of people into a dangerous, prehistoric world. There, the separated Harris family fight tooth and nail to be reunited.

Much like Lost, La Brea started off as a typical survival story before bringing in loftier sci-fi and supernatural elements. The plot eventually blew up to incorporate time travel, the “Lazarus Project,” and a mission by people from 2076 to control these bizarre rifts.

Invasion

Invasion had a lot of potential, but it couldn’t have arrived at a worse time. The series is a modernized reimagining of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which water-based creatures start taking over people’s bodies.

The show started airing after Lost in 2005, hoping to capture the same demographic, but it wasn’t meant to be. Invasion was set in the aftermath of a hurricane — that’s how these water-based creatures managed to get into town — and America was still recovering from Katrina, so it was just really bad timing. Unsurprisingly, Invasion was canned after just one season.

Manifest

The inciting incident of Manifest’s thrilling pilot episode feels like an overt reference to Lost. Much like Lost, Manifest is a chilling supernatural thriller that begins with a fateful flight. A plane full of passengers goes missing, then reappears five years later. Manifest is more overtly supernatural from the outset than Lost was, but, crucially, despite those supernatural elements, it’s really all about the characters and their interpersonal drama.

Manifest had the potential to be the next Lost, but the series bounced from network to network, and it never really found the core audience it needed to become a Lost-sized hit. Maybe, at some point in the future, Manifest will be rediscovered and reappraised (that’s the beauty of streaming).

Terra Nova

Terra Nova was pitched as Lost meets Jurassic Park (it was even produced by Steven Spielberg). The series borrows Lost’s conceit of a ragtag band of misfits stranded in the wilderness, coming together to help each other survive, but this version has dinosaurs.

The high-concept premise sees a group of impoverished humans volunteering to leave a dystopian future behind to live in prehistoric times. The setup is very complicated, which might have turned off a lot of viewers (leading to the show’s early cancellation), but this was a really fun show, with a cool, unique twist on the Lost formula and a lot of unfulfilled potential.

Under The Dome

Under the Dome has a very different premise than Lost, taken from the Stephen King novel of the same name. It’s all about a town that gets encased in a giant glass dome, similar to Springfield in The Simpsons Movie. But, despite having a wildly different premise, Under the Dome has a very similar format to Lost.

Much like in Lost, we spend every episode jumping around a sprawling ensemble of characters, all trapped together under extreme circumstances. Rather than isolating its characters on a remote island, Under the Dome isolates their town from the rest of the world.

From

From leans more into the horror than Lost, but it borrows everything else from the Lost playbook. It takes place in a strange, inescapable little town in middle America. Once you enter this town, you can never leave, and residents are terrorized by nocturnal monsters. Harold Perrineau — a.k.a. Michael from Lost — plays the sheriff trying to maintain order and uncover the town’s dark origins.

While it’s a lot scarier than Lost, From similarly follows a huge cast of characters as they’re forced to contend with the unknown. It’s like Lost with a dash of Stephen King.

Fringe

J.J. Abrams didn’t stick around for long during Lost’s run — he was promptly recruited to direct Mission: Impossible III, and jumped at the opportunity — but he was there from the very beginning, at the conception stage, and his signature “mystery box” storytelling style went on to define the series. Abrams directed Lost’s now-iconic pilot episode, so his DNA is all over the show, and with Fringe, he tried to do it again.

Fringe ultimately ended up being too complicated and convoluted to appeal to the mainstream audience that made Lost a smash hit. But sci-fi fans were enraptured by its multiversal storytelling (which has been done to death now, but was way ahead of its time in Fringe), and it’s now remembered as one of the genre’s finest entries.

The Leftovers

Damon Lindelof himself, one of the masterminds behind Lost, tried his hand at creating a Lost replacement in 2014, and it ended up being arguably an even better show. Based on Tom Perrotta’s novel of the same name, The Leftovers takes place in a dystopian world where 2% of the Earth’s population has inexplicably vanished, and the other 98% are left wondering what the heck happened to them.

The Leftovers always struggled in the ratings — it was always teetering on the brink of cancellation, and the renewal of each new season was a miracle — so it never matched Lost’s commercial success. But it did outshine Lost’s critical success (and had a much more satisfying ending).

Lost

9/10

Release Date: 2004 – 2010-00-00
Showrunner: Damon Lindelof, Carlton Cuse
Directors: Jack Bender, Paul A. Edwards, Tucker Gates, Eric Laneuville, Bobby Roth, Greg Yaitanes, Daniel Attias, J.J. Abrams, Karen Gaviola, Kevin Hooks, Rod Holcomb, Stephen Semel, Adam Davidson, Alan Taylor, David Grossman, Deran Sarafian, Fred Toye, Mario Van Peebles, Marita Grabiak, Mark Goldman, Matt Earl Beesley, Michael Zinberg, Paris Barclay, Robert Mandel