Back To The Island: Lost Opinion Pieces
Diversity and Lost Part 1: Why Lost Was So Radical in the 2000s And The Context For the Arguments By About Its Attitude Towards Characters of Color
I don’t deny that television in the first phase of the New Golden Age featured some of the greatest programs in the history of the medium. However looking back on the first decade of the 21st century one has to acknowledge much of divided on racial lines in a way TV hadn’t even in the 1990s.
In a different series I argued that during the first decade of the 21st century while so much of this groundbreaking drama was going on one could easily have put up the hashtag (if they had existed back then) #EmmysSoWhite and not feared contradiction. It’s considered that the decision of the Emmys to ignore The Wire was one of their greatest oversights as an institution but when you add to the fact they also chose to ignore such racially diverse series as OZ, gave the majority of the acting nominations for Six Feet Under to the white actors and basically shutout The Shield — one of the more racially diverse series of the first decade — an uglier picture begins to unfold. When you through in the fact that the series that won and the most nominations during the decade were The Sopranos and Mad Men — both of which were almost exclusively white casts — and it’s impossible to deny the racist overtones both by the Emmys, and by extension much of Peak TV.
And it’s worth noting the series that did have diverse casts far too often put them in the most offensive positions: as brilliant as 24 was by the time it was half over the show’s producers were being accused of stereotyping Islam in the worst possible of ways. And this trend was true of so many of the ‘lesser’ series that received nominations for Best Drama during the period: Dexter, Damages and Boston Legal were all great shows but by and large the white characters were the most interesting and got the most recognition. The sole exception was Dexter and its worth noting they killed of their one African-American regular at the end of Season 2.
In recent years we’ve heard discussion about the racist attitude of the writers and producers behind the scenes of Lost and obviously that can’t be ignored. But that doesn’t change the fact that when the series debuted in September 2004, the cast did not look like what most casts — on either broadcast or cable TV dramas — looked like 2004 and indeed pretty much until the end of the decade. (Grey’s Anatomy was the biggest exception but the real effect of Shondaland didn’t start being felt until the 2010s.)
This was something that, even within the scope of HBO, just wasn’t happening; indeed an argument could be made that much of HBO’s success in great dramas involved what could be considered a kind of ‘separate but equal’. No one will pretend that The Wire wasn’t as brilliant as The Sopranos but the fact remains David Simon’s masterpiece was predominantly African-American and David Chase’s predominantly white. This pattern continued throughout the decade, there was Rome and Treme near the end; Game of Thrones and True Blood during much of the 2010s; The Newsroom and The Deuce near the end of the decade. Series which had predominantly mixed racial casts when it came to drama were few and far between on HBO — and to an extent on much of cable. (Streaming’s another story, of course, but that didn’t exist during the 2000s so I won’t mention it here.)
This may very well have been a matter of necessity based on how late the show was picked up to a series order. But for all their flaws Cuse, Lindelof and all of the other writers never backed away from this particular challenge and from the start to the very end Lost was probably the one unquestioned masterpiece of Peak TV where you could never argue that any of the minority cast members were ‘tokens’. And perhaps the most daring way Lost changed the conversation was by using something that the ABC producers complained about from the start: the use of subtitles.
When Lost ended Yunjun Kim would complain that so much of her character’s story was part of a narrative cul-de-sac. And there’s a certain truth to that; Sun and Jin’s story may be one of the most moving parts of the series but it doesn’t change the fact that the longer the series was on the air, the less connected their characters were to the overarching sweep of the story. That doesn’t change several critical facts, not the least of which was the decision of the writers to have as much of their story (when it unfolded in flashbacks) spoken in Korean while it was subtitled in English. This actually proved a bit of a burden to Daniel Dae Kim; he was not fluent in Korean the way that Yunjun Kim was. (Yunjun Kim was a Korean born actress; Dae Kim was an American born one.)
It’s an old joke that American viewers hate to read their televisions and the easy thing to do would have been to do what the show would occasionally do with some of its characters who were born in other countries: start the scenes in Arabic (as they did with Sayid) and then switch to English. But Lost never did things the easy way. Much of the decision to have Sun and Jin only speak in Korean was to isolate them from the rest of the English speaking survivors. And for the first three seasons, outside of their conversations with the remaining survivors whenever Jin spoke to anyway, the writers didn’t give him subtitles. They wanted the viewer to experience the isolation Jin did. It was a daring move and I don’t know any other series that would have been willing to risk it.
And Lost did much to subvert our expectations of both Jin and Sun from the beginning. We were led to think in terms of the cliché that the husband was the strong, domineering figure and the wife was subservient to him. The series kept us thinking this until the brilliant …In Translation in which we finally were let in on Jin’s backstory and learned how much he truly loved Sun and that he did horrible things in order to protect her from her father. Then as the series kept going we learned not only was Sun not the innocent we thought she was about anything but that in many ways she might very well have been responsible for so much that happened to Jin and by extension her marriage.
I certainly won’t pretend that I believe the series did both characters a disservice in the final two seasons. Indeed for a very long time I held the same kind of grudge that many fans did about their deaths just a few episodes before the series ended. It had nothing to do with the idea that the series was killing off two of its minority characters; it was that Lost was killing off two characters that I had been committed to for the entire run of the series. I’ll be honest their deaths did much to enrage my perceptions of both the final season and the series finale for a very long time; it took me over a decade to get to a point when I could forgive the writers for what they did. And every time I’ve rewatched ‘The Candidate’ it still guts me painfully as a viewer.
But that was the thing about Lost: this was a series that had to deal with love in almost every form. This was not going to be a series that gave any of its characters a happy ending, something the viewer knew long before the final season.
And perhaps that’s the main reason I have so much trouble with one of the chapters in Back to the Island where St. James talks about Lost’s relationship with race under the heading ‘Failures of Imagination’. In it she discusses so much of the controversy about Lost’s horrible relationship with non-white actors. This chapter is as close to a deconstructionist take down as the book gets and it makes arguments that are painfully familiar. Some are based in reality: the complaints that Harold Perrineau made both at the time of the series and years afterwards are valid ones. But when she discusses the problems fans who were ‘people of color’ have with the show and then now, she is treading on what can only be considered the political. She is fair when she says it fumbled the ball with non-white characters but there’s a statement that will never track with me:
“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 far too often. To pretend otherwise is to turn a blind eye to far too many terrible things.”
This is getting on your soapbox pure and simple. First of all, every country in the world has long histories of racism, misogyny and queerphobia not just America and all of them do so in so much of their own television. It is the kind of blaming society for not having the values of today, which those of you who read so much of my other writing on politics, is not only offensive but kind of beneath a writer of St. James abilities.
She also makes ‘straw men’ arguments pointing out that Grey’s Anatomy did a better job with non-white characters then Lost. Again this is comparing apples to oranges, and it omits that Grey’s Anatomy was run by Shonda Rhimes, an African-American woman who by definition was more inclined to know of this realities than the white men of Lost.
And she goes out her way to have a fan have the last word:
“It’s one thing to have diverse characters on your show. It’s another thing to actually care about them and give them stories that aren’t the same five stories over and over.”
The writer is the author of the anthology Writing In Color which should tell you what you need to know right there: it’s another argument the only people qualified to tell stories of people of color are people of color. Shonda Rhimes is the premiere showrunner of that type and if she’s your baseline then that means letting people of color, women and LGBTQ+ people basically do all the horrible things that were the sole province of white men during the first decade of the 21st century. In my opinion that’s just another version of the ‘separate but equal’ series HBO was doing for most of the last twenty years. I fail to see how that’s an improvement.
I have always believed that if you want television to represent America, it has to be as much a melting pot as it has series that are focused on various members of that society. Lost did this in so many ways during the 2000s better than any drama I saw during the decade and probably didn’t see again until series like Orange is the New Black and American Crime debuted in the mid-2010s. And it is still maddeningly rare to see any drama in the world of Peak TV be willing to have so many different kinds of races and diversities apparent the way it was in Lost.
This was done in many ways over the show’s run. I will always hold that Naveen Andrews’s portrayal of Sayid was one of the greatest characters in the show. Considering that by 2004 America had gotten very sick of the War on Terror, the decision to make one of your most important characters not only Iraqi but a member of the Republican Guard and a torturer was a move that 24 and Homeland never tried. And considering that America was engaged in an argument about ‘enhanced interrogation’ the fact that Sayid made it very clear he was a ‘torturer’ made it impossible for us to look away from the actions he committed the way we could when Jack Bauer did it on 24.
And let’s not kid ourselves: Sayid was no action hero. I’ll write about him in his own article but there’s an argument he was by far the most emotionally complex character on Lost. To simply write him off as ‘tortured former torturer” as St. James does, is a disgrace to one of the most brilliant portrayals in all of the 2000s. Indeed unlike Sun and Jin, his character got more fascinating in the second half of the series, something that Andrews’s acknowledged at the time.
There were also a rather large supply of LatinX actors as regulars. (There are two that fans want to forget and I’m actually going to give a separate article on that because it speaks to a different problem.) Indeed I’ve always been grateful for Lindelof and Cuse for being so fascinated by what was supposedly a one-off appearance that they turned Nestor Carbonell’s Richard into one of the most fascinating mysteries of the entire show. And as anyone who watched Ab Aeterno knows, this was a mystery that paid off in the final season.
When we learned the heartbreaking story of Richard in that episode, we saw a man who has spent an eternity believing he’s in hell, ready to despair. And who is the person who comes to his aid? Hurley, who happens to be the only character who can understand Isabella. The moment when Hurley delivers Isabella’s message to Richard is not only one of the most moving moments in all of Season 6 — but let’s not forget, it’s entirely in Spanish. The writers don’t cheapen it by having Isabella say in a language she never learned for the sake of the viewer’s convenience and its all the more moving for it.
And let’s remember that one of the fan favorites in the final half of the series was Miles Straume, played memorably by Ken Leung. We eventually learned that Miles’s history (among other things) was that of Chinese origin. This was rarely referred to but let’s not forget one of the great moments in Season 5.
Jin has just been reunited with the surviving castaways as the island bloops through time. At this point he still barely understands English and he then begins to speak in a rant in Korean. Then he shouts out: “Translate!” Sawyer, who is still not immensely enlightened, looks at Miles. Miles says with just a hint of more irritation than usual: “He’s from Korea. I’m from Encino.” (Jin is actually looking at Charlotte who he knows understands Korean.)
That is a subtle moment but it’s not an insignificant one when an ugly American thinks that all Asians are the same thing. Lost had a few of these moments over the years (most of them involving Sawyer, for the record) but this was among the more telling one. The fact that even in the midst of a situation where death may be coming quickly the writers point this out should give them some credit.
I will acknowledge that St. James and the people that she interviews about Lost’s difficulties with characters of color as well as female characters are correct as far as they go. The writers did drop the ball quite a bit and there is more than sufficient evidence that their was toxic behavior behind the scenes to acknowledge that it may have been intentional. But by making the reductive argument that even the most diverse series of the Peak TV dramas was still woefully inadequate by their standards speaks to the deconstructionist nature of so much academic writing about not just television but so many American institutions. By arguing that they are all fundamentally bigoted because of how they were developed and by who, it puts up the mirage of an idea that they could have done better but relieves them of arguing how. I never buy this with anything else; I certainly don’t when it comes to a show like Lost.
And to be clear in Back to the Island St. James highlights one particular controversial episode for attention which undercuts much of the arguments she makes about sexism and racism in Lost. And it’s there I’d like to make a separate argument.
In the next article I will deal with the two most hated characters in the history of Lost — and why I think their fates and fan’s reactions to it show hypocrisy in so many ways.