Podcasters are obsessed with it, as are gamers, and Reddit won’t stop digging into it. So what is it about Lost that people still can’t get enough of?

Eight years after one of the most divisive finales in television history, it feels like Lost is on the rise again. Listen hard enough and you’ll hear the sound of it being rediscovered.

It’s bubbling up all over the place. New blogs and podcasts and Reddit discussions concerning themselves with various aspects of Lost have started to appear without warning. Gamers, too, seem to have suddenly rediscovered the series. This week alone, for instance, a Fortnite user found a hatch in the woods, prompting speculation of a Lost crossover, and a Far Cry 5 user recreated the Lost island in its entirety using the game’s map editor.

Meanwhile, in entertainment, you can feel Lost’s influence everywhere. It’s in the knotty time structure of This Is Us. It’s in the spectacularly high concept of The Good Place, to the point that Mike Schur literally consulted Lost’s Damon Lindelof when he started to write it. It’s in the marketing push for Amazon’s The Crossing – billed as being “from the network that brought you Lost” – even though it is certainly no Lost. And if rumours are to be believed, Avengers 4 (a film all but guaranteed to be the most successful ever) is going to be heavily inspired by Lost’s fourth series.

But why now? Why have I, an ardent Lost apologist since the word go, had to wait eight long and lonely years before the rest of the world caught up with me?

“I took a long time to come around,” says Jack Shepherd, who co-hosts The Lost Boys podcast. The podcast’s gimmick is that Jack watches Lost for the first time, along with his die-hard fan Jacob, before discussing it. Jack dodged Lost for so long partly thanks to its weird reputation. “My older brother watched the first few seasons and gave up because he thought it quickly became awful. Most friends never made it through season five. The length of the show – 100 episodes plus – is also daunting, especially when I’ve been told there’s a lot of filler”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Loche and found. Photograph: Mario Perez/ABC via Getty Images

He has a point. Lost was never really interested in hanging around for viewers. If you missed a couple of episodes, the whole thing had a habit of making no sense whatsoever. Once, during the original run, I was discussing an episode with a friend – this was in the show’s loosey-goosey endgame, with various dimensions and donkey wheels and pendulums at play – and we had to stop because strangers were looking at us as if we were concussed.

Jack’s co-host, Jacob Stolworthy, who has watched each episode seven times, argues that this lateral complexity is exactly why Lost has managed to maintain its cachet. “Those who liked Lost absolutely loved it and pored over its every detail,” he says. “They still go on about it as fondly today.” “People fucking love this show,” adds Jack. “We get emails from long-time fans telling us that Lostpedia [the Lost wiki] is wrong, sending us scripts from the initial pilot to correct a minute point in our podcast. It’s crazy”.

It’s also worth mentioning The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof’s Lost follow-up. Although not as highly watched as Lost – it was too bleak and weird for mainstream appeal – The Leftovers managed to win over an army of frothing devotees. It felt like a Lost concentrate, a similarly high-concept programme that didn’t feel the need to pander to a network television audience with 22-episode runs or episodes about tattoo origins.

When good TV goes bad: how Lost got lost - and then found its way again Read more

Better yet, it stuck the landing. The finale of The Leftovers is a genuinely breathtaking, emotionally satisfying piece of work that fed back into the original premise in a way that Lost couldn’t. After watching The Leftovers go out on such a soaring high point, and after just 28 episodes, of course you’d go back and give Lost a second chance. It doesn’t seem coincidental that this new rush of Lost interest has only surged now that The Leftovers is over.

Both Jack and Jacob agree that we’ll never see the likes of Lost again. But that’s fine. We can live with Lost because it is everywhere now. Whenever we see Redditors sweat out elaborate Westworld theories, it’s because of Lost. Whenever we see deep-dive online recaps, it’s because of Lost. Shorter, more compressed series? That’s because of Lost. Whenever there’s a flashback, or a flashforward, or a terrible Britpop band named after a mechanical component, it’s because of Lost. Lost will never die. Finally, the believers have been vindicated.