20 Years Later, A New Generation is Discovering Lost on YouTube and TikTok
“A lot of people watching my videos haven’t seen the show.”
Close-up shot of an eye opening as its pupil shrinks against a bright light. The camera zooms out to reveal a man, stranded and alone in a jungle with no idea where he is or how he got there. For fans of Lost, this is how the entire saga begins, introducing audiences to protagonist Jack Shephard and the mysterious island he’s about to call home. But if you’re in a distinct corner of YouTube, this striking visual marks the start of one YouTuber’s magnum opus. “Yeah, this is Billiam,” he says to the camera. “I’ve been gone for a while. I got a little lost in my work.”
So begins a multi-hour series exploring the creation of Lost, which Billy Thies (aka Billiam) launched in 2021 with a three-hour video titled “LOST Was Weird: A Show No One Wanted To Make.” In the years since, he’s released three additional videos about ABC’s hit sci-fi series. (The most recent one is more than six hours long and focuses on the show’s time-travel elements.) He recently teased a final entry focused on Lost’s divisive sixth season.
Watching six-hour documentaries on YouTube might seem like the kind of thing only diehard fans would subject themselves to, but Thies tells Inverse that a large chunk of his audience is coming to Lost for the first time.
“A lot of people watching my videos haven’t seen the show,” he says.
Billiam’s videos cover both the show itself and how it was received, putting the entire experience into context.
Thies and his videos, which cover everything from “Gossip Girl to Pokémon,” represent a larger trend across YouTube and other platforms like TikTok and Instagram. From lengthy explainers to short comedy skits to those weird split-screen videos that combine a clip from The Office with footage of a mobile game like Subway Surfers, people are choosing to watch user-generated content about popular movies and shows instead of those shows and movies themselves.
To find out why (and whether it means the end of Hollywood as we know it), Inverse spoke to some of the biggest Lost content creators around to understand how they’re riding a wave of nostalgia to pull in millions of viewers while (hopefully) teaching a new generation to love this complicated sci-fi classic. Or, at the very least, watch it for themselves.
Going Down the YouTube Rabbit Hole
Michael Messineo, aka Mike’s Mic, summarizes each episode into a diagram showing the relevant characters and flashbacks.
Michael Messineo (aka Mike’s Mic) is a revolutionary figure in the world of the long-form TV recap. Taking his cues from Jenny Nicholson’s foundational “THE Vampire Diaries Video” (13 million views on YouTube), Messineo gained a YouTube following with his definitive breakdowns of Pretty Little Liars, retelling the teen mystery drama in a series of three two-hour videos. Like Nicholson, his videos feature a detailed conspiracy board covered in photos of the cast connected by thumbtacks and red string. Now, he’s conquering Lost in a similar format, with two videos so far recapping the first two seasons.
Each video covers a single season of Lost, with each episode of the show getting its own smaller evidence board connecting all the characters and plotlines, both on the island and in Lost’s recurring flashbacks.
“In Lost, everything is on a timeline that has to be in that order,” Messineo says, teasing that all those boards will come together to reveal… something by the end of the series.
“This video is what finally pushed me to watch this show.”
Thies’ Lost series is much looser in structure. One video focuses on how the 2007-2008 writers strike affected the show. Another digs into its time-travel plotlines.
“I’m taking a lot of time to cover the cultural influences that are deeply ingrained in the show,” he says. “They name-drop people all the time, from Western philosophers like John Locke to people who revolutionized psychedelics in America: Richard Alpert, who became Ram Dass in America.”
Between Thies, Messineo, and countless others, there’s no shortage of Lost content to watch online. But who’s watching it? And why? The answer reveals a surprisingly positive space in one of the darkest corners of the internet: YouTube comments.
Don’t Read the Comments
Lost’s famously complex plot is color-coordinated and simplified in Messineo's recaps.
In August 2007, Hillary Clinton went on Late Show With David Letterman and delivered 10 tongue-in-cheek campaign promises. Some of them have aged poorly (see No. 5: “Turn Gitmo into a Dairy Queen as soon as possible”). Others still hold up today, like No. 2: “I will appoint a committee to find out what the heck is happening on Lost.”
At the time, Lost had just aired its Season 3 finale, breaking its flashback format to reveal that some of the characters would eventually make it off the island. The show was at the height of its popularity, but even then, it faced plenty of criticism for being overly confusing. Fast-forward to 2024 and Lost is mostly known as that show with the weird finale.
For a lot of people discovering Lost today, that weird finale has become an unfortunate starting point.
“It’s a religious belief in itself.”
“They’ve heard about it and say ‘The ending is so bad, I’m not going to watch it because it’s a bad ending,’” Messineo says. (For the record, he also defends the ending and argues that it makes sense if you catch all the details leading up to it.) “If people are watching it now and saying that it’s too complicated and confusing, even if they’re bingeing it, I’m like, ‘Get off your phone and pay attention.’ It’s user error. It’s not that hard.”
“It’s a religious belief in itself,” Thies adds to describe the ubiquitous criticism around Lost’s series finale.
Some of the most successful Lost content leans directly into its messy reputation. Drew Gooden’s 2021 video “The best show that no one talks about anymore” (4.29 million views) explains how he started watching the show as a joke but grew to love it. Reading the comments — which we normally wouldn’t recommend — reveals how Gooden’s video convinced others to finally give Lost a shot.
Drew Gooden positioned his video on Lost as if it were a hidden gem, despite the show’s massive popularity.
“This video is what finally pushed me to watch this show,” one viewer writes.
Read through the comments under Messineo’s and Thies’ Lost videos (which have a combined 10.1 million views) and you’ll find a mix of nostalgia and discovery.
“This inspired me to watch Lost for the first time ever,” a comment on Thies’ first Lost video reads. “It was huge when I was a kid but I always disregarded it in thinking it was overrated. I was wrong. Just finished Season 2 and, man, thank you for this video.”
Welcome to LostTok
YouTube isn’t the only place where Lost fans are congregating. TikToks about Lost garner tens of millions of views, from explainers to comedic skits to fan edits. One 19-second clip of the show’s opening scene set to Coldplay’s “Clocks” has 1.2 million views and more than a thousand comments full of zoomers curious about the show or sharing updates about their first watches.
A closer look at LostTok reveals that it’s almost all positive — especially about the finale. “The thing that made the finale bad was just everyone hugging in slow motion for seven minutes,” TikToker @emhahee says in a video with 40,000 views. “The ending made sense!”
Many of these TikToks were made after the series was added to Netflix in the United States in July 2024, making Lost more accessible (even if it was previously on Hulu) and prompting countless people to watch or re-watch the show — or turn to social media to learn more about it first.
“It’s just a fun time to be talking about Lost.”
Generation Z may have a reputation for short attention spans, but these recaps aren’t a shortcut to get around the actual show. They’re proving why the shows are worth putting the phone down in the age of TikTok. Sure, these videos can be watched on their own, but that’s only part of the experience. They’re not replicating the feeling of watching Lost; they’re replicating the feeling of talking with a friend about what you both saw earlier.
Then again, maybe the rise of Lost content on YouTube and TikTok is even easier to explain than that.
“It’s just a fun time to be talking about Lost,” Thies says. “Now that other people are waking up to it.”
