“I was such a believer.”įor a number of Lost sources I talked to, the creative highs that counterbalanced the hard parts of the job evaporated fast. “It was a bigger try than I had ever seen on broadcast TV.” When he talked to the press in those early days, his enthusiasm was palpable: “I was shouting about it from the rooftops,” he said. “We were all really hopeful about it,” Perrineau remembered. But he was encouraged by what he was told and by the cast that was assembled. He’d been around long enough to know, as he put it, “where the lines were, and what the ceiling was” for Black actors. Part of the reason Perrineau took a chance on the ABC drama was because the creative team said they wanted to tell a story that “was really equitable” in terms of the time it spent on its array of characters. And I thought his work was some of the best on the show.”
“Harold had one of the biggest careers of all of us when Lost began,” noted Daniel Dae Kim, another member of the cast. Lost was not going to be as edgy as shows like Oz, but securing Perrineau was, as they say in the industry, a big get. He also played a key role in TV’s brave new golden age: He was part of the ensemble on HBO’s provocative prison saga Oz. Lost and Desperate Housewives, which also premiered that fall, turned around the fortunes of an entire network.Įarly on, when Abrams and others on the creative team gave Harold Perrineau the full-court press in hopes of convincing him to join the cast, he had been in two Matrix films and Romeo + Juliet. The show was allowed to continue down this wildly ambitious path because it was a giant hit. Through the flashbacks, which evolved into flash-forwards and even “sideways” flashes, the drama asked why these specific human beings arrived in such rough shape, personally or psychologically, and whether they could not just survive this strange island but also transcend the worst things that ever happened to them. But what helped Lost win awards, and what kept some folks watching even through slow patches and narrative misfires were Lost’s deeper levels. And everybody (especially me) wanted to know what was up with the trippy Dharma Initiative, an organization that left evidence of its weird research all over the island. We were freaked out by a mysterious metal hatch amid the jungle foliage, and by the shadowy doings of a faction known as the Others. Like the characters themselves, we wondered how a polar bear ended up on a tropical island.
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