The Lost Before Lost
I have successfully avoided Lost for two and a half years, until the winter-hibernation doldrums forced my non-cable-having-self to the public library for some books and A.V. material to keep me entertained. So I picked up Lost and have been watching it from the beginning. At first, it seemed really familiar to a TV pilot on NBC that I liked. There was the rogueish dude with the Southern accent (Sawyer), a guy and his son (Mike and Walt), etc. etc. I figured it was just a coincidence, and kept watching the show. But now I'm in the midst of season two, and there's no doubt in my mind that Lost was attempted before, and on NBC in the early '90s. It was the hatch that tipped me off. I distinctly remember watching the second episode of the pilot and having my pubescent mind blown when the characters found evidence of "Others" on the island. There was even a mysterious transmission! My fiancée looks down her nose at me and says that this isn't the case, that Lost has never been on TV before, and that I am obviously and categorically wrong. I followed the usual protocol: IMDB-ing the producers and writers to see if any of them contributed to the show I'm thinking of, Google-ing every possible incantation of "lost+pilot+90s," and so on and so forth. I need someone else to agree with me on this.
Dustin Anderson
Lostie Noel Murray tries to help:
It's unlikely that a Lost precursor could've vanished entirely from the pop-culture landscape, especially with so many people obsessing over every clue the show's creators deign to drop in our paths. But you may not be completely crazy either.
The most widely known Lost predecessor is the short-lived 1969 ABC series The New People, about a group of college students who crash on an island and have to build a new society. But it's unlikely that you're remembering that one. I also doubt that you're thinking of Flight 29 Down, a kids' show about even younger castaway teens that aired in 2005 and 2006 on NBC and Discovery Kids.
No, my guess is that you may have seen some of the Canadian TV version of Mysterious Island, based on the Jules Verne novel that's often cited as the most significant forerunner of Lost's scenario. It's got refugees from the Civil War (hence the Southern accents), a sailor and his protégé (who have a relationship just like father and son), and Captain Nemo watching everyone's actions from a technologically advanced bunker (à la "the hatch"). And yes, the landing party receives a strange distress call. Or at least, that's what happens in the novel. I imagine the Canadian series—which ran for 22 episodes in 1995—follows much the same arc.
Were you in Canada, or near the border, in the mid-'90s, Dustin? Or did your local NBC affiliate have some adventurous programmers with a stack of unusual syndication catalogs? And when you experienced this bout of déjà vu, did you buy your fiancée the diamond ring or not? (Sorry, that's a season-three reference.)
The Munich Before Munich