Pilot (Part 1)

This is where it all starts. Pilot (Part 1) aired on ABC on September 22, 2004, the first of 121 episodes. J.J. Abrams directed it from a script by Jeffrey Lieber, Abrams and Damon Lindelof. It was Lieber’s only writing credit on the show, while Lindelof would go on to write more episodes than anyone.

You need no homework. The setup is simple: a plane goes down, and the people who walk away from it are stranded somewhere they do not know. The two-part pilot cost around $13 million, a huge sum for network television at the time, and most of it is up on the screen.

The production dressed a stretch of Oʻahu’s North Shore with a real airliner fuselage, at Mokulēʻia Beach near Dillingham Airfield. Interiors were built at the Hawaiʻi Film Studio on the slope of Diamond Head, which stayed the show’s base for six seasons. Watch it with the lights low.