After returning to Netflix, few seem to watch “Lost”

When Netflix picks up a licensed series, it often does really well, if not better than the original series on the particular channel or service it came from. As we speak, we’re seeing this with “Your Honor,” a little-watched series from Showtime that has mixed reviews.

But with all six seasons of Lost hitting Netflix less than a week ago, it… hasn’t done much to spark renewed interest in the series. Shortly after its release, it disappeared entirely from Netflix’s top 10 list, which is now populated by reality series, and, you guessed it, Your Honor is still there.

So…why? The Emmy-winning series is hailed as one of the best crime dramas of all time and was an absolute phenomenon when it first aired in 2009. I don’t think it has aged particularly badly and 15 years later, it seems to have been given new life by a rewatch or by being introduced to a generation that hasn’t seen it yet.

What’s going on? We don’t have a clear answer as to why things aren’t going better, but I have a few theories.

First of all, it’s not a show you watch casually. Not really. Suits, for example, is much easier to read and put down, but the twisted, complex mysteries of Lost require a lot of attention in the “watch stuff on your phone” era, and that’s perhaps a harder task. Especially given how much you have to take care.

Another aspect is that it is a series from the time of real television, when a one-hour series twenty-five episodes in the first season. Now that sounds crazy, and most are barely 6-8, or if we’re lucky, 10. Lost had 25, 24, and 23 episodes in the first three seasons, and the last three were between 14 and 17, with the drop I believe being due to a writers’ strike at the time. It can be daunting for people to even get started.

I also think that Lost loses something in the binge release model. That was The It was a show that people talked about week after week in its day, long before shows like Game of Thrones took over the conversation at the coffee machine. The mysteries, the theories spread like wildfire. But today? What people only figured out years later, talking it through with friends who were also watching, is now a week or two without any more theories or friends tuning in. It really was an important part of the experience that is now gone.

Lost isn’t the only “classic” show to land on Netflix with quite a bang. We saw that a few weeks ago with Dexter, probably the most famous show of all time on Showtime, but it consistently underperformed another Showtime series, Your Honor (again).

Sometimes licensing from Netflix results in a huge surge in interest. Sometimes it doesn’t, and that seems to be the case here.

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