Shows Like Lost

Every few months someone on r/lost finishes the finale and asks what to watch next, and hundreds of people answer. These are the names that come up again and again: shows made by the people who made Lost, and shows that scratch the same itch for mysteries, big casts and stories told out of order.

No spoilers here, for Lost or for any of these. Each one is described by its opening premise only. Still watching? Pick up where you left off on the home page.

The Leftovers
HBO · 2014 to 2017
Damon Lindelof’s next show after Lost, made with novelist Tom Perrotta. Two percent of the world vanishes in an instant, and the series cares far more about how the people left behind carry on than about explaining where anyone went. If the grief, the faith and the hours that hand a whole episode to one person were what you loved about Lost, start here.
- Damon Lindelof
- One-character episodes
- Faith and doubt
WatchHBO Max
From
Epix, now MGM+ · 2022 to now
Strangers are trapped in a small town that nobody can drive out of, and something comes out of the woods at night. Harold Perrineau leads the cast, Jack Bender, who directed the Lost finale and dozens of episodes before it, directs and produces, and showrunner Jeff Pinkner wrote for Lost. Survivors who do not trust each other, rules nobody explains and a mystery that keeps opening new doors: it is the most Lost thing on television right now.
- Harold Perrineau
- Jack Bender
- Jeff Pinkner
- Trapped strangers
WatchNetflix MGM+
Fringe
Fox · 2008 to 2013
Created by J.J. Abrams with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, and run for its first four seasons by Jeff Pinkner, who came over from the Lost writers’ room. An FBI agent, a brilliant scientist just out of an institution and his estranged son take on cases where science goes wrong. It starts as a case of the week and grows a mythology as deep as the Island’s, and sharp eyes will catch an Oceanic ticket or two.
- J.J. Abrams
- Jeff Pinkner
- Bad Robot
- Oceanic Airlines
WatchPrime Video Hulu
Yellowjackets
Showtime · 2021 to now
A high school girls’ soccer team survives a plane crash in the wilderness in 1996. The show cuts between those months in the woods and the survivors as adults 25 years later, so every scene in the past changes how you read the present. The crash, the camp politics and the sense that the place itself may want something will all feel familiar.
- Plane crash survivors
- Then and now
- A place with a will
WatchNetflix Paramount+
Manifest
NBC, then Netflix · 2018 to 2023
A passenger jet lands after a patch of turbulence, and everyone on board learns five and a half years have passed. A plane full of strangers, a mystery about why, and a big cast who each get their own stories. NBC cancelled it after three seasons and Netflix brought it back to finish, so the ending you get is the one the writers planned.
- A missing flight
- Big ensemble
- Finished on its own terms
WatchNetflix
Person of Interest
CBS · 2011 to 2016
Jonathan Nolan created it and Bad Robot made it, with J.J. Abrams producing. Michael Emerson plays a reclusive billionaire programmer who built a machine that watches everyone, and teams up with a former CIA operative to stop the crimes it sees coming. The first season looks like a procedural; then the larger story takes over. Emerson’s precise, unhurried delivery is reason enough to watch.
- Michael Emerson
- J.J. Abrams
- Bad Robot
WatchPrime Video Peacock
Dark
Netflix · 2017 to 2020
A child goes missing in a small German town, and the search pulls four families into a mystery that runs across generations. Created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, it was planned as three seasons and ended exactly where it meant to. Like Lost, it rewards anyone who keeps track of who is related to whom.
- Puzzle box
- Time and fate
- Family trees
WatchNetflix
Severance
Apple TV · 2022 to now
Office workers at a vast company have had a procedure that splits their memories between work and home, so the person at the desk has never seen the outside. Dan Erickson created it. Retro technology, cheerful orientation videos from a company with something to hide, and every answer arriving with two new questions: Lost fans will know the feeling.
- A secretive organization
- Retro technology
- Questions behind questions
WatchApple TV
Silo
Apple TV · 2023 to now
Ten thousand people live in a giant underground silo, told the world outside is deadly and that some questions are against the rules. Based on Hugh Howey’s Wool novels. A closed community, a history nobody remembers writing and buried technology that someone left behind on purpose.
- Underground secrets
- A closed community
- Who made the rules
WatchApple TV
Westworld
HBO · 2016 to 2022
A Wild West theme park run on lifelike android hosts, where guests can do anything they like. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy created it for HBO, with J.J. Abrams producing through Bad Robot. It plays with timelines and identity the way Lost played with flashbacks, and its fans ran theory threads as long as any Lost message board.
- J.J. Abrams
- Bad Robot
- Shifting timelines
- Theory threads
WatchRent or buy
Twin Peaks
ABC, then Showtime · 1990 to 1991, and 2017
David Lynch and Mark Frost’s mystery about the murder of a homecoming queen in a Washington logging town. Damon Lindelof has talked about watching it with his father and talking it over for hours afterwards, and Carlton Cuse has said it shaped how the two of them made Lost. It is where the network drama full of dreams, symbols and open questions began.
- Where it started
- Dreams and symbols
- ABC
WatchParamount+MUBI
Station Eleven
HBO Max · 2021 to 2022
A flu pandemic brings down civilization, and twenty years later a travelling troupe performs Shakespeare to the towns that are left. Patrick Somerville, a writer on The Leftovers, adapted the novel by Emily St. John Mandel. It moves between before and after the way Lost moves between the Island and the lives people left, and it is ten episodes with an ending.
- The Leftovers writers
- Before and after
- A finished story
WatchHBO Max
Alias
ABC · 2001 to 2006
The spy show J.J. Abrams was running when he co-created Lost. Jennifer Garner plays a graduate student who is secretly an agent, and an old prophecy slowly turns the missions into a mythology. Michael Giacchino scored it before he scored Lost, and plenty of faces turn up in both.
- J.J. Abrams
- Michael Giacchino
- Jeff Pinkner
- ABC
WatchDisney+
The 4400
USA Network · 2004 to 2007
Four thousand four hundred people who went missing over sixty years come back all at once in a ball of light, not a day older and with no memory of where they were. Created by Scott Peters and René Echevarria, it ran in the same years as Lost’s early seasons: a big ensemble, a question about who took them, and the slow discovery that some came back changed.
- Vanished and returned
- Big ensemble
- Same era
WatchRent or buy