Hydra Island Weekend: Looking Back at THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST!

Happy Saturday! So, remember on LOST how the Others had that second smaller island that was behind the big central island? The one that was called Hydra Island, for some reason? Where a lot of that early Season Three stuff took place, and although you had this sinking feeling none of the action taking place there was going to be all that relevant or even interesting, you were ultimately just happy to get more of the show you loved?

Yeah, think of this weekend bonus article as my LOST Hydra Island series. They’re going to feature little tangential LOST-related topics that I couldn’t fit into the main series, but felt I could squeeze a short-form article out of. This weekend, we’re starting off with a banger. Enjoy!

We live in a time of people being spread thin, of too few resources being split among too many individuals.  Supply chains are still recovering from a prolonged (and arguably still unresolved) pandemic.  Prices have gone up while wages have stagnated.  People are getting increasingly sick with dwindling access to healing medicines.  Even in the civilized world, we lack quite a bit.  It’s bleak.

However, if there’s one thing we are in absolute excess of in 2024, it’s podcasts. Way too many goddamn podcasts.  Everyone has a podcast.  Chris Kattan now has one.  Unfortunately, I have one.  By the time you wake up tomorrow, you will probably have one.  It’s just the lay of the land now, seemingly the number one way we currently communicate.

But it wasn’t always this way!  Not even twenty years ago, there were hardly any podcasts at all.  Oh, sure, there were a handful of early adopters here and there; Leo Laporte had already launched “This Week in Tech”, Jesse Thorn’s college radio program “The Sound of Young America” had launched as a downloadable podcast, and President George W. Bush had begun delivering his weekly address in the form of a podcast (yes, really).  But in 2005, it was still an up-and-coming media format.  There just wasn’t that much going on.  There certainly weren’t any podcasts hosted by a pair of writers and producers that took you behind the scenes of one of the biggest shows currently on TV.

Oh, wait, fuck, there was.  As of November 8, 2005, there definitely was.  It was called THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST and it was hosted by LOST showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse.  I totally forgot.

For today’s bonus LOST article, let’s talk a little OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST!

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

In terms of structure, THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST was a fairly straightforward endeavor.  Presented by ABC producer Kris White and launched a few weeks into LOST’s second season, the podcast typically began with an interview with one of the eight thousand cast members of the show.  After a few minutes, it would transition over to the Big Guys themselves, Lindelof and Cuse, the show-running uber-gods that oversaw the Great LOST Storyline.  They would “rehash” the episode that had aired the week before “pre-hashing” the episode to come.  They’d wrap it all up with a round of fan questions!  Seemingly nothing to it.

What made it special is the unique, giggly chemistry between Lindelof and Cuse, as well as their acuity for what kind of podcast they wanted to present to the world.  Nowadays, there are many, many, many television shows with “companion podcasts” available for download the day after broadcast (if not the night of).  Shows as diverse as THE GOOD PLACE, BREAKING BAD, THE CROWN, LATE NIGHT WITH SETH MEYERS, and any HBO show you can think of (including forgotten documentaries such as MCMILLIONS) have official tie-in podcasts where showrunners, actors, or fans could drop in at any time.  But there’s an undeniable “official” feel to many of them, perhaps even a little corporate.  The insight feels reviewed, the banter controlled and guard-railed.

Not THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.  The show was invariably loose and extremely goofy, to the point where you could often lose sight of the fact that it was officially sanctioned and produced by ABC, the network the show aired on.  Lindelof and Cuse would spend just as much time bitching about the phone ringing in the office they were recording out of, or commenting on the famous trailers driving by their window (they once seemed particularly excited about Nic Cage’s) as they would giving insight into the creation of their television sensation.

To some degree, this ethos of “screwing around” rather than “pulling the curtain back” makes sense.  After all, considering the “mystery box” nature of LOST, and the fact that part of its art is dragging its viewers along to some degree, how much insight into the show could the showrunners really provide?  It’s not that Lindelof and Cuse never revealed their hands on the podcast; they actually did it quite a bit, even if in cheeky fashion.  There’s a late Season Three episode where, by the end, it truly seems like John Locke’s goose is cooked; he’s laying in a pit of human skeletons, a bullet in his gut.  The next week’s podcast episode had Cuse musing, “If I was a betting man, I would not bet on John Locke being dead” (Lindelof proceeded to bet five dollars that he would be, which should give you a good idea as to how the podcast generally conducted itself).

But, generally speaking, the way for Lindelof and Cuse to get through an OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST episode alive was to say less while seeming like they said a lot.  So, Lindelof and Cuse leaned more into the shenanigans than any official podcast nowadays would.  One week, the two genuinely seemed more excited to choose a piece of stock music for the podcast theme song than they did to talk about the episodic fiction they had dedicated the last two years of their lives creating.  There were unbelievably candid moments where they actively questioned their own network’s marketing of the show, mocking on the air the extreme over-promising of certain episode promos.

In the spirit of the “silly over substance” philosophy, when it came to fan questions, Lindelof and Cuse seemed to zero in on some of the least-ready-to-be-presented fan questions imaginable.  Insane screen names read out verbatim, typo-riddled text that went uncorrected…anything that would generally be filtered out of a more “professional” show hilariously got featured front and center.  Sure, they could have pulled questions from the undoubtedly-enormous stack that came with some intelligence or understanding regarding the show (or even how television production works); then again, what’s the fun in that?  Only THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST dared to pull inquiries from people with usernames like “harryfeatdb1” or “DePlaneBossDePlane".  I’ll never forget the moment in a special video episode where, after a particularly long and rambling fan question, the two pretended to fall asleep before leaving the question unanswered.  Cruel?  Yes.  Vaguely unprofessional?  Arguably.  Funny?  You bet.

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Sometimes, bullshit generated from the podcast would even seep its way into the official canon of the show.  For the ultimate example, I point you towards Ezra James Sharkington.  You all know that character, of course, as the Dharma-branded shark that attacked Michael and Sawyer in the Season Two episode “Adrift”.  This beloved be-finned character was unnamed in the episode, but got officially christened in response to a question asked by “Ice Cold Dharma” on the May 11, 2007 episode of the podcast.  After being asked what this shark’s name was*, Lindelof stated that it was Jim.  Carlton responded that he thought it was Ezra, Jim became the middle name “James” and Lindelof capped it off with the last name “Sharkington”.  The episode quickly derailed from there; Cuse declared “ABC is gonna pull us”.  A quick moment of delirious improv was all it took for a legend to be born.  Ezra doesn’t have a Lostpedia entry or anything, but if you ask certain LOST fans what that damn shark’s name is, you bet they’d be able to tell you.

*”What was the name of the shark in Season 2, Episode 2?” stands as perhaps the net average fan question asked on THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.

Now, all of this was well and good in the mid-to-late-aughts, but it’s impossible to separate the fun-loving, goofy personas Lindelof and Cuse presented on the mic from the unfortunate behind-the-scenes realities that have leaked over the past couple of years, where the combination of Cuse’s vengeful iron fist and Lindelof’s complete inexperience with the personnel-focused responsibilities of a show-runner led to many cast and crew members with bitter tastes in their mouths.  It’s a topic I’m going to defer from talking about too much, but it undeniably alters a modern relisten to THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST.  Intellectually, it’s understandable that people contain multitudes; it’s perfectly conceivable that people can present as one way when hopping in front of a microphone and goofing around with a creative partner, and another way when under the gun or facing intense creative pressure with multiple stakeholders all wanting completely different things from a vision you have to put your name on*.  But, emotionally (at least for me), I wanted to believe that Lindelof and Cuse were fun, complimentary, and equitable bosses all throughout their tenures on LOST.  Reality just didn’t bear that out.  Alas.

*It’s worth clarifying that no amount of creative pressure excuses any leader making any teammate feel lesser, even under the guise of “joking”.

Regardless, for a certain type of fan (i.e. me and my friends), THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST was an essential part of the viewing experience.  After all, what other shows out there had supplementary behind-the-scenes content quite like this?  It was a show whose quality was susceptible to how much energy the two hosts had in them; some episodes towards the middle of a season would be missing either Lindelof or Cuse; on rare occasions, their segment would be skipped altogether.  Later seasons of the podcast leaned heavily on quick video episodes that would amount to DVD-extra-style interviews.

But the magic never fully left, all the way through to the show’s finale.  I’m thrilled that every episode has been archived by fans and is easily accessible via many YouTube playlists.  If you’ve never watched the show, I highly recommend pairing THE OFFICIAL LOST PODCAST  up with your initial LOST journey.  If you’re digging into a rewatch, why not revisit the audible shenanigans once more?

Just make sure if you submit a question, you don’t put the hosts to sleep.