Failures of Imagination: Lost and Non-White Characters
Inverse presents an excerpt from LOST: Back to the Island: The Complete Critical Companion to The Classic TV Series, written by Emily St. James and Noel Murray. Available on September 17.
In May 2008, after Michael Dawson had been written off of Lost for the second time, Harold Perrineau opened up about his frustrations with the show’s handling of his character. Speaking to TV Guide’s Shawna Malcom, the actor underscored how badly he thought the show had served the relationship between Michael and Walt. Perrineau argued that the show’s treatment of the character perpetuated a pernicious stereotype about absentee Black fathers.
“I wanted Michael and Walt to have a happy ending. I was hoping Michael would get it together and actually want to be a father to his kid and try to figure out a way to get back [home],” Perrineau told Malcom. “This is [the producers’] story. If I were writing it, I would write it differently.”
The 2008 interview with Perrineau has become a sort of Rosetta stone for understanding the betrayal many Lost fans of color feel around how the show came to tell stories about non-white characters. Since Lost ended, several people of color involved in making the series have spoken openly about both the show’s lackluster storytelling around non-white characters and the often racist experiences they had behind the scenes of the show, most notably in Maureen Ryan’s 2023 book Burn It Down. While Lost was on the air, however, Perrineau’s TV Guide interview was essentially one of the few times an actor involved in such a huge hit show criticized it even mildly.*
While the issues behind the scenes on Lost have now been well-documented, I was interested in the question of how those storytelling choices filtered out to the show’s fandom. For the most part, when the show aired, discussion was centered around white voices. When you look at contemporaneous discussion of Perrineau’s comments, you see a fanbase that seems irritated by the idea of someone questioning a storytelling decision the series made. The few fansites and blogs that dominated discussion of the show in May 2008 and that still exist—including some from major critics — largely wrote off Perrineau’s frustration with the series as sour grapes at being killed off.
“When you have one Black writer or one Asian-American writer, there’s no way you’re going to get that depth.”
Now, however, as we† are more aware of racially insensitive and even racist storytelling on TV, the conversation around shows like Lost, which were seen as diverse at the time of their airing, has shifted. I talked to over a dozen non-white fans of the series for this essay, and the majority expressed some version of the same narrative. When the show debuted with one of the most diverse ensemble casts broadcast TV had seen to that point, these fans had at least mild hopes that it would tell stories about characters of color with more nuance than they’d seen at the time, a very low bar to clear in 2004. And then, the longer the show ran, the more the series’ potential was squandered in this regard, the non-white characters largely being sidelined in favor of a series of heroic white guys and occasionally Kate.‡
Michael’s death in Season Four’s “There’s No Place Like Home, Part 3,” then, was a major moment that crystallized the split between the series’ initial potential and its eventual execution. But it was a culmination of a trend that had been building for a while, not a sudden, out-of-nowhere betrayal. Similarly, a lot of these fans cited the events of Season Six’s “The Candidate” — in which three characters of color (Sayid, Jin, and Sun) die to save the lives of the white characters, with just a handful of episodes remaining until the show’s finale — as a moment of supreme irritation with the show’s treatment of its non-white characters.
The Sun and Jin love story is one of the best stories in Lost. It’s also a story that leaves both characters largely out of the spotlight for long stretches of the show’s run and often separates them entirely.
Melody Simpson is the co-editor of the anthology Writing in Color. She came into Lost deeply skeptical of its ability to tell stories about Black characters, given the majority-white creative team. Still, she liked the show’s storytelling style and loved many of the characters, and she found lots of friends in the incipient fandom. Yet all her cynicism about how the show might treat non-white characters proved to be well-founded.
“From the jump, I knew what was going to go down. I knew we were going to be pushed to the side, and boy, were we,” Simpson said. “The problem is there was no depth in these characters and their layers. When you have one Black writer or one Asian-American writer, there’s no way you’re going to get that depth.”
Andrea Zevallos watched the series live from its earliest episodes, and at the time, she felt glad to have any people of color on TV at all. When she revisited the series during the Covid-19 lockdowns, after studying media studies and screenwriting, she found her feelings around the series shifting.
“A lot of stories in their flashbacks were stereotypical and rarely turned the stereotype on its head. It was, like, ‘Here’s a stereotype,’ and that was it,” Zevallos said. “I think expecting perfect representation is not the best way to approach [any TV show], but I was disappointed to revisit it and see how one-dimensional a lot of those stories felt compared to the white characters, who had multiple flashbacks and depths and were able to grow and change.”
“A lot of stories in their flashbacks were stereotypical and rarely turned the stereotype on its head. It was, like, ‘Here’s a stereotype,’ and that was it.”
Think of it this way: Lost started with fourteen characters, and of those fourteen characters, the series’ endgame largely boiled down to Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer, and Hurley. Of those five characters, only Hurley was a character of color. He and Sayid were among the few characters of color to ever be drawn into the main Island narrative, and even then, they would find themselves in the series’ main plot only sporadically, when their roles of “happy-go-lucky nerd” and “tortured former torturer” specifically intersected with that main narrative. Other characters of color found themselves cordoned off into their own storylines, which rarely had any bearing on the larger storylines.
“Since the mystery box almost never involved people of color, the stories of those people were never as important to the fandom.”
For instance, several fans I talked to pointed to the love story of Sun and Jin as being well-done and breaking new ground for American television showing anything with subtitles. Yet they also pointed out how that love story was such that both characters mostly existed in a narrative cul-de-sac, where they might pop up to play a supporting role in one of the larger storylines but rarely drove that storyline forward on their own. Contrast this with, say, the Jack/Kate/Sawyer love triangle, which existed in tandem with the Island’s mysteries and occasionally even drove the investigation of those mysteries forward, as in the infamous early Season Three episodes when the Others lock them all up in cages. Or perhaps even more significantly, contrast it with the Desmond and Penny romance, which connected with essentially every major story beat through the show’s third, fourth, and fifth seasons.
Again, the Sun and Jin love story is one of the best stories in Lost. It’s also a story that leaves both characters largely out of the spotlight for long stretches of the show’s run and often separates them entirely, giving them even less story weight as individuals. That Lost could tell a whole bunch of different kinds of stories within its larger framework is part of what makes it such a good TV series, but it is worth noticing just how frequently those smaller stories were used to focus on the non-white characters.
Hurley (Jorge Garcia) is the only non-white character who played a critical role in Lost’s endgame.
Travis Bruggeman started watching the show with a lot of hope for the stories it might tell, and as a biracial person, he was excited to see Rose and Bernard, whom he describes as incredibly similar to his parents. Yet he also found himself wondering why the show seemed so uninterested in a character like Rose, one of the very first people to have a line of dialogue in the entire show, to the degree that she would disappear for long periods of time. By the end of the show’s run, Bruggeman had essentially stopped being a fan, finding the show’s sidelining of his favorite characters — especially Sun, Jin, and Sayid — driven less by organic story-telling choices and more by how the show’s fandom reacted to characters who weren’t core to the show’s mystery box stories.
“There would be weekly recaps and analysis of everything, and if a particular character’s story wasn’t building out the main mystery box, then this cottage industry of reviewers and recappers were a little hostile to the situation,” Bruggeman said. “Since the mystery box almost never involved people of color, the stories of those people were never as important to the fandom.”
Not every Lost fan I talked to has entirely turned on the show, and some even highlighted the show’s ultimate treatment of Hurley as a bright spot within an otherwise lousy record. But even as I write these sentences, I feel myself indulging in a frequent tendency among white critics, to nod toward a show’s most problematic aspects, then pluck out a few small highlights and say, “See? It wasn’t all bad.”
“I was hoping Michael would get it together and actually want to be a father to his kid and try to figure out a way to get back [home].”
But to say “It wasn’t all bad” is to let the show off the hook. It is possible to love Lost and accept that when it came to telling stories that would allow nuance to its non-white characters, it almost always fumbled the ball. White fans can, I promise, hold these nuances in our minds when revisiting the show or even thinking of it fondly. Lost, like all American television, was made in a country built atop long histories of systemic racism, misogyny, and queerphobia. And like all American television, it reflects those values all too often. To pretend otherwise is to turn a blind eye to far too many terrible things.
To pretend Lost’s failures were an inevitable offshoot of the time in which it was made is a blinkered perspective as well. Simpson points to one of Lost’s contemporaries to show how even TV at the time was telling these stories with more nuance. When Grey’s Anatomy debuted in 2005, yes, its main characters were almost all white, but it had a large, diverse ensemble, and because the series was created by Shonda Rhimes, a Black woman, the stories of those characters were treated with more nuance than television usually afforded them at the time—and still affords them with now.
“It’s one thing to have diverse characters on your show,” Simpson says. “It’s another thing to actually care about them and give them stories that aren’t the same five stories we’ve all seen before.”
* Perrineau is even more forthright in his criticisms in Burn It Down, including documenting his frustrations throughout the show’s second season, as he attempted to get the producers to give more story to Michael in the wake of Walt’s disappearance.
† By which I mean, let’s face it, “white people.” The issues discussed in this essay and elsewhere in this book were talked about during the show’s run, but the voices rais- ing those issues were rarely centered. To pretend these conversations are a recent invention is to flatter the present and ignore the ways in which TV discussion has traditionally been—and largely still is—driven by white voices, including mine.
‡ The show’s treatment of women? Also troubling.
