New book reveals racist, toxic culture behind the hit show Lost

Lost is one of the foundational series of our current wave of heavily serialized fantasy and science fiction TV shows. It’s the story of a group of airplane crash survivors stranded on a mysterious island where they’re forced to confront their own pasts and personal demons as they gradually unravel the island’s secrets. Lost ran for six seasons from 2004 to 2010, and to this day remains one of the most successful and influential shows in ABC’s history.

Years later, we are finally getting a candid look at some of what went on behind the scenes, and it’s…pretty bad. This week, Vanity Fair published a chapter from long-time entertainment journalist Maureen Ryan’s new book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, which details some of the abuse, racism, sexism, and toxic managerial behavior that many endured on the production.

Among the many reasons that Lost was notable was also that it was one of the first shows which solidified the idea of “celebrity” showrunners; that is, showrunners who became public figures in their own right and gained an almost cult-like “genius” status among fans. For Lost, those showrunners were Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, often referred to as “Darlton” by fans. For her book, Ryan talked to more than a dozen writers, actors, and other people attached to the production, and they paint a pretty damning picture of the sorts of petty and career-ending retribution that was meted out by Lost’s showrunners, as well as the abusive culture that was fostered in the show’s writers room and beyond.

The culture behind the scenes on Lost was often abusive, racist and sexist

While Ryan notes that everyone she spoke to for the book remained proud of the work they did on the show, there were a lot of issues on set. Writer Monica Owusu-Breen, who worked on the third season, recalled how degrading remarks were encouraged by the higher-ups in the writers room.

“I can only describe it as hazing,” Owusu-Breen recalled. “It was very much middle school and relentlessly cruel. And I’ve never heard that much racist commentary in one room in my career.”

Here’s a sampling of some of the things that Owusu-Breen and others heard during their time on Lost, some of which was corroborated by multiple people Ryan interviewed:

"When someone on staff was adopting an Asian child, one person said to another writer that “no grandparent wants a slanty-eyed grandchild.”When actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s [Eko] picture was on the writers room table, someone was told to remove their nearby wallet “before he steals it.”When a woman entered the writers room carrying a binder, two sources said, a male writer asked her what it was. She said it was the HR manual for the studio, and he responded, “Why don’t you take off your top and tell us about it?”There was apparently some discomfort around the show’s cleaning staff using the bathroom in the Lost offices, and there were “jokes” about “putting up a Whites Only sign.”"

Owusu-Breen and her then-writing partner Alison Schapker were responsible for penning the script for the season 3 episode “The Cost of Living,” which is the episode where Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s character Mr. Eko was killed off. Cuse initially had some pretty horrific ideas for how he wanted Eko to die.

“Carlton said something to the effect of, ‘I want to hang him from the highest tree. God, if we could only cut his dick off and shove it down his throat.’ At which point I said, ‘You may want to temper the lynching imagery, lest you offend.’ And I was very clearly angry,” Owusu-Breen recalled. This was corroborated by another person who was in the room at the time.

“All I wanted to do was write some really cool episodes of a cool show. That was an impossibility on that staff,” said Owusu-Breen. “There was no way to navigate that situation. Part of it was they really didn’t like their characters of color. When you have to go home and cry for an hour before you can see your kids because you have to excise all the stress you’ve been holding in, you’re not going to write anything good after that.”

How Harold Perrineau was “fired” from Lost

Ryan also spoke to Harold Perrineau, who played Michael on the series. Perrineau was one of the bigger stars on the show going in, thanks to his appearances in movies like Romeo + Juliet and two of the Matrix films, as well as the HBO prison drama Oz. Apparently it was a huge deal for Lost that they were able to get Perrineau. Part of what convinced him to the join the show was that it was pitched to him as a series that “was really equitable” in terms of how it would split screen time among its diverse cast.

However, as time went on, Perrineau felt his character was being sidelined in favor of the show’s white cast members, who the writers were consistently told to remember were the “hero characters” of the series. Perrineau broached this concern with the producers but felt they dismissed it pretty quickly.

“I don’t have to be the first, I don’t have to have the most episodes—but I’d like to be in the mix. But it seems like this is now a story about Jack and Kate and Sawyer,” Perrineau explained. He said he was told, “Well, this is just how audiences follow stories.” Those characters were the ones people would think were “relatable.”

Perrineau also brought up concerns about how Michael’s son Walt was being essentially written out of the show. According to the actor, in the initial script for the second episode of season 2, Michael had only one line about his son following Walt’s abduction by the shadowy Others. Instead, the episode focused primarily on Sawyer. This, Perrineau said, was “too much” for him to stay silent.

“Michael’s asking Sawyer questions about his past, about how he feels, but he never again mentions Walt,” Perrineau remembered. “I don’t think I can do that. I can’t be another person who doesn’t care about missing Black boys, even in the context of fiction, right? This is just furthering the narrative that nobody cares about Black boys, even Black fathers.”

Again, Perrineau brought these concerns up. The episode was reworked to include more material for his character, and Perrineau was brought in to film flashbacks on a condensed schedule that included gruelingly long days. Nonetheless, Perrineau was determined to do right by the material. “It was 14-hour, 18-hour days. I was like, ‘If you think I’m gonna fuck this up, I’m not. I’m gonna be really good.’ But I felt like suddenly [showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse] were mad at me.”

A short while later, Cuse informed Perrineau that he was being written out of the show. “Well, you said you don’t have enough work here, so we’re letting you go,” Perrineau recalled being told. “It was all very much, ‘How dare you?’”

Multiple sources also told Ryan that Lindelof said that Perrineau “called me racist, so I fired his ass.”

There are only allowed to be so many “geniuses” in the room

And this stuff is only the tip of the iceberg. Ryan’s sources describe how the actors eventually clashed over pay; they had originally pushed to all be paid the same amount, until the studio started cutting separate deals. Unsurprisingly, all the actors in the highest pay tier were white. One actor who wished to remain anonymous described how Cuse berated another actor to the point of tears for being “ungrateful.” Other sources discuss how retribution was a constant and looming threat over the writers, with some writers being either banned from the writers room or having their script assignments (and therefore pay) reduced for things like disagreeing with the showrunners or even gaining recognition for their own work on the show.

According to multiple sources, Cuse repeatedly took credit for the work of other writers on the series, furthering the public image that he and Lindelof were the primary masterminds behind Lost. Writer Hsu Taylor and script coordinator Greggory Nations penned the well-received season 6 episode “Ab Aeterno,” which explored the backstory of the seemingly immortal island dweller Richard Alpert (Néstor Carbonell). Following the warm reception to the episode, Taylor heard Cuse on the phone with the actor claiming he “wrote most of that script.” Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer who worked on seasons 1 and 2, similarly claims that Cuse took credit for his and others’ work, including contributions to the iconic opening drone which series co-creator and executive producer J.J. Abrams created months before Cuse had even joined the production.

How will these damning revelations affect the legacy of Lost?

All of this paints a pretty awful picture, and we haven’t come close to covering everything that was unearthed. If you’re remotely interested in Lost or just TV in general, it is absolutely worth reading the full chapter excerpt from Maureen Ryan on Vanity Fair, as well as Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s statement expanding on his interview for the book.

Ryan also spoke to Lindelof and Cuse. Lindelof seems remorseful and shocked about the allegations while Cuse denied most of them through written statements provided by his PR rep. “Whether or not Lindelof and Cuse were present for every damaging incident, the workplace environment at Lost was created, rewarded, and reinforced by them,” Ryan wrote. Lindelof could only agree with her.

Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood releases on June 6 from Mariner Books.

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h/t The A.V. Club