Lost: Back to the Island: The Complete Critical Companion to the Classic TV Series

A comprehensive critical companion to the blockbuster TV show LOST, revisiting its core themes, lore, and impact on culture

For fans of one of the most successful and highly discussed shows in recent memory, LOST: Back to the Island is both a delightful time capsule and a rousing work of entertainment criticism.

Before it premiered in the fall of 2004, LOST looked doomed to be an expensive, disastrous plane crash of a TV show. Instead, LOST was a massive hit, debuting with the biggest audience for a new drama on ABC in over a decade, reaching heights of over 23 million viewers at its peak, and holding on to a hefty fan-base for its entire six-season run.

The elements that made the series seem like a boondoggle proved, instead, to be a big part of its appeal. Audiences loved the exotic island setting, became invested in the morally compromised characters, and feverishly tried to unravel the show’s many mysteries.

In LOST: Back to the Island, TV critics and veteran LOST recappers Emily St. James and Noel Murray revisit what made the show such a success and an object of enduring cultural obsession, twenty years later.

Through essays, episode summaries, and cultural analysis, they take us back to the island and examine LOST’s lasting impact—and its complicated, sometimes controversial legacy—with a clear-eyed and lively investigation.

Emily St. James is a writer and cultural critic, currently writing on the TV series Yellowjackets. During her journalism career, she served as the critic-at-large for Vox and the first TV editor of the A.V. Club. Her work has also appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Vulture. She is the co-author of Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files. Her debut novel, Woodworking, arrives in early 2025. She lives in Los Angeles. Noel Murray has been a freelance pop culture critic and reporter for over thirty years and was a key contributor to the influential websites The A.V. Club and The Dissolve. His writing about TV, movies, music, comics, and more has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone. He lives in central Arkansas.