Lost reshaped modern television as a serialized weekly event you didn’t dare miss, quickly becoming one of the best TV shows of all time—and today that still rings true. But the show wasn’t perfect, with many of Lost’s biggest unsolved mysteries collapsing under the weight of its own ambition.
Still, Lost didn’t fail in vain, and its experimental decisions, like Lost’s season 6’s flash-sideways, taught a generation of storytellers how to build structure around characters first, not the other way around. The shows that followed inherited elements of Lost’s daring characteristics but actually advanced those TV devices further.
Each of the series below refines one part of Lost’s DNA and they prove that the same themes of faith, time, memory, and survival can thrive without alienating audiences.
Station Eleven (2021–2022)
Perfects Shifting Timelines Without Losing Emotion
The best flashbacks in Lost’s first seasons remain some of its best storytelling, from Jack’s surgery, Sun and Jin’s separation, and Locke’s walkabout; each one deepened the modern island plot by grounding it in who these people were before everything changed. But as the series pressed on, especially through seasons 4 and 5, the structure frayed.
Flashbacks and flashforwards stopped reflecting emotional growth and started functioning as narrative devices. The easiest example to turn to is the infamous, perhaps worst Lost episode, season 3 episode 9, “Stranger In a Strange Land.” Designed entirely around explaining the origins of Jack’s tattoos, it was merely uninteresting filler.
Station Eleven repaired that disconnection as a tight and coherent miniseries. Its three eras—the night of the pandemic, the first years of survival, and the world decades later—don’t ever compete for attention; rather, they build on one another.
A scene of young Kirsten clinging to Jeevan during the world’s collapse echoes years later when she protects a child in the Traveling Symphony. The moment works because the mirrored imagery in both timelines evoke an emotional response, not through dialogue or exposition, but through cinematic storytelling.
That cohesion remains consistent through the story’s recurring art: Miranda’s Station Eleven comic and the troupe’s performance of Hamlet. Each reappears in a different time, linking people who never met. These motifs give the audience tangible objects to attach to a recurring meaning that exposition never could. Where Lost’s chronology eventually scattered its characters, Station Eleven threaded its fractured timeline into something whole.
The Leftovers (2014–2017)
Learns Restraint Over The Mystery Box
At its peak, Lost debated faith and reason into constant conflict through its characters and its themes. Episodes like “Man of Science, Man of Faith” or “Exodus” showed how belief could move through people as powerfully as any island miracl, and. Jack Shephard and John Locke had always served as the two sides of this debate.
But as the mythology grew heavier, especially in its later seasons, Lost began chasing questions faster than it could answer them. While faith vs. reason still lingered later on, this thematic resonance was shoved aside in service of worldbuilding, where the mystery box transformed into a Russian doll—there were far too many questions.
But The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s follow-up, keeps the same existential ache yet might as well be Lost’s antithesis. The Sudden Departure mirrors the plane crash in shock and awe, yet the show resists the instinct to solve it. Nora’s vanished family, Kevin’s visions, or Matt’s desperate faith—none of them seek proof.
Where Lost kept falsely promising reasons to its own posed questions, The Leftovers rejected reasoning entirely. The answer to the Departure was never the point; it was about how characters endure grief in the aftermath.
The Leftover ending’s ambiguous monologue, of Nora recounting her journey to the other world to Kevin, was arguably more tender than Lost’s finale, which reached for the same closure but complicated it with lore. Looking back, The Leftovers was a poignant reaction to Lindelof’s experience writing Lost, and his own wrestling with what it means to find meaning in an unforgiving world.
12 Monkeys (2015–2018)
Finally Makes Time Travel Make Sense
Lost didn’t invent television time travel, but it sure did add its own interesting twist. “The Constant” remains one of the best sci-fi TV show episodes ever aired as a story where love anchors a man slipping through time. Desmond’s call to Penny in that episode captured everything the series did well: a bold sci-fi concept with a satisfying, deeply human conclusion.
12 Monkeys took that same romantic fatalism and rebuilt the architecture around it. From its pilot, the show toys with cause and effect by questioning fate vs. free will. Cole can’t rewrite history; he can only complete it, and each paradox connects through a closed loop that honors its own constraints.
When Cassie resets her life and Cole erase himself from the 12 Monkeys timeline, both outcomes are the inevitable completion of every choice they’ve made. The show’s timeline folds exactly as foretold and their sacrifice closes the loop instead of rewriting it. That inevitability makes the ending feel tragic but absolutely earned, because it had always been planned from the start; not written as the show went along.
Time in 12 Monkeys acts as a living force that shapes who these people become. The loop confines them, but it also gives their love meaning. Where Lost often confused its own time travel mechanics, 12 Monkeys rejected the mechanics entirely, instead framing time travel as an unforgiving but honest thematic device.
Severance (2022–Present)
For Fans Of Single-Location Mysteries
Lost’s island remains one of sci-fi TV’s great settings; it’s a living riddle that could hold any genre inside it. In its best stretches, like the early hatch episodes “Orientation” and “Lockdown,” the show used that space to mirror human conflict: survival against the environment, and faith against science.
But as the world expanded with every Dharma station in Lost and sideways timelines, the mystery’s edges softened. The island stopped feeling like one story and started feeling like several searching for a center.
Severance inherits that same tension between place and identity but confines it to a single building. Lumon’s sterile corridors become a psychological maze where every answer births a sharper question. When Helly rides the elevator that divides her consciousness, or when Mark glimpses what his “outie” life hides, each revelation satisfies before it unsettles.
Unlike Lost, the mysteries evolve like gears in motion. They’re clean, logical, self-contained; and where Lost often piled new riddles atop old ones; Severance season 2 resolved just enough questions to keep curiosity alive without collapsing our trust, like even Severance’s Cobel family mystery.
It’s still early—two seasons in, we don’t yet know whether Severance will conclude with the same control it began, but what’s already clear is its confidence. By shrinking its unknown setting into white hallways and corporate rituals, it turns that confinement into worldbuilding that’s just as rich as the Lost island.
The Expanse (2015–2022)
Builds A Universe That Actually Obeys Its Rules
At its best, Lost made the unknown feel boundless. The hatch reveal in “Man of Science, Man of Faith” remains a masterclass in wonder—the moment the island seemed to contain infinite worlds below its surface. That curiosity fueled the show’s identity in its early seasons, but as its mythology widened, logic began to bend under the pressure, becoming more fantastical than hard sci-fi.
Electromagnetic pockets, ancient wheels, and a teleporting Light in the Heart of the Island— it’s all vivid, but no longer grounded in reality the way season 1 promised, and the show’s mythology kept expanding even as its internal physics thinned.
The Expanse thrives on the opposite principle, of awe born from rules and order. Its solar system operates on propulsion math, political tension, and moral consequences. When Miller tracks Julie Mao through Ceres and Eros, the mystery unspools through evidence like any of the great noir movie with unbelievably dark endings, not through some profound revelation.
Nor is The Expanse’s protomolecule magic—it’s biology and technology interacting with human greed, an imagined future where humans continue to create new weapons to destroy each other with. Every new discovery feels like a consequence of what’s come before, and it all feels like a plausible future reality.
In season 2 episode 2, “IFF,” when the Rocinante endures violent acceleration during a rescue, shifting gravity pins Prax to his seat and crushes his breathing. Moments later, the ship’s motion forces a wall compartment open, scattering tools until one slices through his oxygen tube. It’s a terrifying sequence built entirely from hard science, just the world’s laws turning lethal.
Across six seasons of The Expanse, it grows into the kind of coherent sprawl Lost once promised. Characters move between Belter stations and Martian warships where physics like gravity, scarcity, and exhaustion govern every choice. The result is still epic, still strange, but grounded in laws that never shift.
From (2022–Present)
Channels Lost’s Claustrophobia Into Genuine Dread
Lost proved that isolation on an island could power an entire mythology and its crash survivors formed one of TV’s most compelling ensembles because the island forced them inward. Episodes like “White Rabbit” or “The Moth” forced characters to confront themselves as much as the jungle around them.
But as the show expanded its geography and mythology, that early claustrophobia dissolved. The island grew larger; the fear grew smaller. From restored that containment and turned it against its characters.
A group of travelers trapped in a mysterious rural town face rules that never change: they can’t leave, night brings monsters, and every road loops back to the same intersection. It’s a classic horror TV show premise with shiny new wheels that’s also written by some of the Lost writers. But where Lost’s boundaries expand every season, From’s close in around the characters.
From’s terror isn’t what lurks beyond sight but rather, what routine does to the mind. It inherits Lost’s fascination with community under impossible rules but removes the comfort of any possible revelation. Three seasons in and each new clue deepens despair rather than clarifies it.
Dark (2017–2020)
Completes The Loop Lost Could Only Begin
Lost made destiny feel cinematic long before the best prestige TV dramas learned how. At its best, the show understood that science and faith weren’t opposites, that they were ways of explaining love, loss, and control. But its later seasons let that balance slip. Again, the rules of time travel grew confusing and the island’s mythology thickened until it curdled.
Dark takes the same cosmic questions, of how choice survives fate, how love resists chronology, and commits to solving them in four seasons. Nearly every family in Winden connects across generations, and every paradox is accounted for until the loop closes on itself.
Jonas and Martha’s journey echoes Desmond and Penny’s devotion in “The Constant,” but where Lost used paradox to evoke an emotional moment (and it succeeds), Dark uses that same feeling but actually resolves its own paradox.
In the Dark ending, when the two finally erase themselves to restore the origin world, their disappearance is both mathematically and emotionally inevitable. The show spends three seasons proving that the loop persists because its people can’t let go of their own grief, so the moment Jonas and Martha accept erasure, time finally heals by ending.