Would it surprise anyone to know that Lost was a hotbed of racism?

I watched Lost during its original network TV run. While I still believe the premise of the show was great and some of the backstory episodes were beautifully done, the show went off a narrative cliff in Seasons 2 & 3 and never really recovered. Even back then, we knew that certain characters and actors were being consciously sidelined in favor of Evangeline Lilly, Josh Holloway and, of course, Matthew Fox’s Jack Shephard. The three white leads. Although I would put Terry O’Quinn in there too, there was a lot of focus on his character. It wasn’t even that Damon Lindelof didn’t know how to land the proverbial plane (ha), it’s that he bungled whole seasons and huge plots and storylines. Well, would it shock you to learn that the whole show was a hotbed of racist crap? There’s a new book called Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood, and the behind-the-scenes stuff on Lost was very bad:

In an excerpt of Maureen Ryan’s new book Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood published by Vanity Fair Tuesday, actors, writers and others behind the scenes claim racial pay disparities, stereotypes, offensive humor and demeaning actions on the set of the TV series. Lost showrunner Damon Lindelof acknowledged issues on set and partly blamed them on his inexperience and pervasive issues in the industry.

When plans to negotiate for equal pay as a cast fell apart, Harold Perrineau, who is Black, and an unnamed actor claimed the group was divided into different compensation tiers with the top level being held by White actors only.

“That affected relationships,” said the unnamed actor, who Ryan nicknamed Sloan. “A lot of us grew very close,” Sloan said. “The thing that kind of created a rift in the cast was money.”

Perrineau, who played Michael Dawson on the series before he was written off in 2008, also alleges that his White counterparts received more screen time during the show’s first season. “It became pretty clear that I was the Black guy. Daniel [Dae Kim] was the Asian guy. And then you had Jack and Kate and Sawyer [who received more screen time],” he recalled, according to the book excerpt.

A writer on the hit series, which ran from 2004 to 2010, claimed they were told Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly), and Sawyer (​​Josh Holloway) — who are all White — were the “hero characters.”

“It’s not that they didn’t write stories for Sayid [an Iraqi character] or Sun and Jin [Korean characters],” the insider told the author. The writer alleged they would receive feedback including, “Nobody cares about these other characters. Just give them a few scenes on another beach.”

Perrineau claimed that he brought up the issue to a producer and asked why the story was centered around the White character. According to the excerpt, he was told, “Well, this is just how audiences follow stories” because the characters were “relatable.” In one specific instance, Perrineau took issue with the original draft of the second episode of season two because his character showed little concern about finding his kidnapped son. He made the decision to speak up about worries he could be “another person who doesn’t care about missing Black boys, even in the context of fiction.”

He alleged his phone conversation with showrunners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse — on which he was told the episode was not about Michael — ultimately led to his character being written off the show. Multiple sources claimed that following Perrineau’s exit, Lindelof said the performer “called me racist, so I fired his ass.”

“Everyone laughed,” writer Monica Owusu-Breen said of the incident, according to the book. “There was so much s—, and so much racist s—, and then laughter. It was ugly. I was like, ‘I don’t know if they’re perceiving this as a joke or if they mean it.’ But it wasn’t funny. Saying that was horrible.”

[From People]

There’s much more at that People link, and even more here at Vanity Fair, which published the excerpt from the book. It’s so painful to think of what could have been, what kind of stories that show could have told but didn’t because they needed to endlessly film Evangeline Lilly running around in a dirty tank top. I absolutely believe Lindelof said racist sh-t and wrote from a perspective of “how can we center everything on the white characters.” This was not some old-school TV show from the 1970s either – Lost debuted in 2004 and ended in 2010. There are still people who host podcasts about the show and do big rewatches and talk about Lost as if it was an important cultural moment of the early 21st century.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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