There's a better version of Lost's legacy 15 years after the show's finale is a hard one to wrap your hands around. The series has gone through several reappraisals, and even while it was airing, fans and critics couldn't seem to articulate their feelings on it exactly. At around the season 4 mark of Lost, the show went from a must-watch water cooler series to one that only dedicated fans were willing to tune into week in and week out.

That's not because the quality of the show dipped, but as mysteries piled up, the series became unwieldy, threatening to collapse under its own weight. By the end of a show like Lost that sticks the landing. So far, the best person to turn to for that is one of the Lost co-creators, Damon Lindelof, whose oeuvre has strengthened over time. His first series post-Lost feels like the solution to the questions harrying him while he made Lost, and fans will feel the same.

Lost Spent More Time Setting Up Mystery Boxes Than Answering Them

The Series Collapsed Under The Weight Of Its Questions

It's nearly impossible to go over every single mystery that Lost came up with between 2004 and 2010, but just to give you a few... There are polar bears in a jungle, a sentient smoke monster, a mysterious crashed flight, a hatch buried in the ground, a group of unseen people known as "The Others" who live on the island, a shipwrecked woman with mysterious origins, and a man who miraculously finds the ability to walk despite being a parapalegic before the crash. By the way, those are only the mysteries introduced in season 1.

Each episode and season presented something new for fans to chew on, and for awhile, it felt like a smorgasbord of puzzles and threads to pull on and discuss. However, answers rarely seemed to come and the few times they did, they opened up more mysteries. Lost started to feel like the hydra from Hercules. For every head-like mystery that was chopped off, two more sprouted to replace it. By the end of season 6, the story was completely obfuscated by all the mysteries and even retrospective reviews of the show can't agree on what the ending meant.

The Leftovers' Shorter Run Helped It Avoid Lost's Problems

The Leftovers Always Knew What Story It Needed To Tell

When Damon Lindelof came back to television with The Leftovers in 2014 with The Leftovers, he brought with him a lot of the lessons he learned on Lost. One of the big ones was not letting the show run too long. The Leftovers is only three seasons, with 28 episodes in total. Compare that to Lost's 121 episodes. Though, as Lost was a network show vs The Leftovers being an HBO show, it's not exactly surprising that Lost had many more episodes. Still, keeping the series to a tight three seasons avoids some of Lost's major problems.

With The Leftovers, Lindelof always had his destination in site.

With its shorter run, Lindelof had less of a runway to tell his story and, time and time again, it's been shown that when a series goes too long, it starts losing its plot. The three seasons forced Lindelof to make sure he was not introducing too many puzzle boxes or mysteries to the show that would threaten to suffocate the plot and the themes. With Lost, he was flying a plane thousands of miles to his destination, and for most of it, he wasn't sure of his heading. With The Leftovers, Lindelof always had his destination in site.

I'm Glad The Leftovers Didn't Have As Many Seasons As Lost

The Story Took Center Stage In The Leftovers, Not The Mystery

While I love The Leftovers, it's one of my favorite shows, I'm so grateful it did not have as many seasons as lost. For one thing, from a purely rewatchability standpoint, it's easier to go back through 28 episodes of one show than it is 121 episodes, even if those 28 episodes are occasionally longer. More seriously, The Leftovers feels like a perfectly told story, and if it had kept going, it could have come totally unspooled. If you're going into The Leftovers for the first time, it may be a good idea to understand that the main point of the show isn't to answer why everyone disappeared.

Because The Leftovers is a tightly written story, that answer is somewhat answered by the end, but the real mysteries and puzzles come from how characters interact with one another and react to this impossible event that's changed their lives. The disappearance of 2% of the population is the table setting for the real story. If The Leftovers had gone on for six seasons like Lost did, that mystery may have threatened to take over the show, and we would have lost so many characters, themes, and story, to an ultimately unimportant question about lore.