missinglost:

Not to be dramatic but I don’t know if you
guys realize that Lost broke all the rules when it premiered almost 14 years
ago. The kind of shows the networks were most interested in buying in 2004 all had 3 sets, 5 characters,
20min episodes and a simple plot that allowed the audience to watch one week
and skip the next. And then Lost came into the picture with a 2 hours pilot, 14
main characters, a heavily serialized super complex plot and spending an
average of $4,000,000 per episode.

The guy that green-lighted Lost was fired because the
ABC executives thought a show like this couldn’t be profitable. But Lost proved
that taking the risk was worth it. It became an international success and made
tons of money (30 seconds of advertisement in a Lost episode was paid at $900,000).
Lost opened the door for the high budget shows that we have nowadays like Sens8 or GOT.

And this is without mentioning how unusual the
multicultural cast was at the time. In season one we had an episode almost
entirely in Korean in prime-time American tv, that had never happened before. They
featured a sympathetic Iraqui soldier as a main character in a time when the Second
Gulf War had just started. One of the main heroes of the final season is an overweight latino.

Lost did THAT

Edit: I have several people commenting this whole post is wrong so I want to clarify that my intention was to highlight the BUDGET. That’s how lost was groundbraking. I’m perfectly aware that Lost didn’t invent serialization or large casts. The idea that I could think it did is stupid. I also talked about other things like, for example, the complex plot and the episode in (mostly) Korean because things like this made even more astonishing the money investment, shows with this characteristics were usually not seen as profitable for the network.

I also want to say that I wasn’t expecting this post to be seen by so many people (the active Lost fandom in tumblr is small) and it was intended to tie in with a previous post I did about Lost’s pilot being the most expensive pilot at the time of its making with a cost bewteen $12M and $14M.

Of course there were expensive shows before Lost, the last episode of Friends costed $10M. But that was for shows that were already hits and most of the cost was to pay the salary of the cast who had became famous stars.

TL;DR: Lost was groundbreaking because it convinced tv executives that investing a large amount of money in a new show could pay off.