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FROM (2022)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
If what you miss most is the dread of the jungle at night, start here. FROM traps a growing crowd of strangers in a small American town that no road leads out of, and whatever comes out of the woods after dark is genuinely frightening. The Lost lineage is right on screen: Harold Perrineau, Lost's Michael, leads the cast, and Lost director Jack Bender directed the first four episodes.
The answers are still to come. MGM+ has renewed it for a fifth and final season, expected in 2027, so you can commit knowing an ending is planned rather than just hoped for.
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The Leftovers (2014)
8.3/10on IMDb
First aired
Damon Lindelof's next series after Lost, made with novelist Tom Perrotta, and the closest thing to an answer to what Lost was really about. It follows the people left behind after two per cent of the world's population vanishes, and its single-character episodes do what Lost's best flashbacks did, turning someone you had misjudged into the person you care about most. From the second season, a small Texas town where nobody disappeared becomes as much a character as the island ever was.
Know the deal before you start: it cares far more about how people live with not knowing than about explaining the vanishing. It runs three seasons on HBO and ends exactly as its makers intended.
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Yellowjackets (2021)
7.7/10on IMDb
First aired
The plane crash survival story Lost fans keep coming back to. A high school girls' football team goes down in remote northern wilderness in 1996, and the show cuts between their months in the woods and the damaged adults they became 25 years later. That two-timeline structure is Lost's flashbacks turned into the engine of the whole series: every grown-up scene makes you wonder what happened out there.
It is darker and more grisly than Lost, with a lot of black comedy. The fourth and final season premieres on Paramount+ on 20 November 2026, so the full answer is finally on its way.
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Paradise (2025)
7.9/10on IMDb
First aired
The newest show to borrow Lost's playbook, and the one that does it most openly. Dan Fogelman, who made This Is Us, builds Paradise around a murder in a picture-perfect gated community, with Sterling K. Brown as the agent who knows more than he says. Whole episodes step back into one character's past to change how you read the present, and the pilot's closing minutes land a reveal you should go in completely blind to.
Two seasons have aired on Hulu, the second in February and March 2026, and a third is on the way. Fogelman has described a three-season plan, so this looks like a mystery built with its ending in mind.
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Fringe (2008)
8.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams launched this with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci while Lost was still on air, and it scratches the mythology itch with far less waiting. Early episodes are weird-science cases for an FBI agent, a brilliant, unstable scientist and his son, but each one feeds a much bigger story about why these events are happening, and it is a story that gets explained.
Push through the case-of-the-week stretch of the first season; it turns into one of the most emotionally rich sci-fi series of its era. All five seasons, finished on Fox in 2013, reach a proper ending.
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Dark (2017)
8.7/10on IMDb
First aired
For the Lost fan whose favourite stretch was the time-jumping, Dark is the series that commits to it all the way. A missing child in the small German town of Winden pulls four families into a mystery spanning several generations, and keeping track of who is related to whom, and when, becomes the fun of the thing. Watch it in the original German with subtitles; the dub is distracting.
This is the strongest answer on the list to the fear of an unresolved puzzle. Its three seasons on Netflix were planned as one story, and it ties up nearly everything it sets in motion.
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Manifest (2018)
7.0/10on IMDb
First aired
Pick this if the part of Lost you loved was the passenger list: the idea that a single flight bound strangers together for a reason. Montego Air Flight 828 lands after a bumpy few hours to find more than five years have passed on the ground, and its returnees start hearing callings that push them into each other's lives. It is a broadcast-network show through and through, warmer and soapier than most on this list, with family drama carrying as much weight as the puzzle.
It nearly became a cancelled-mid-sentence casualty, but after NBC dropped it Netflix funded a 20-episode fourth season, and the finale explains why the plane vanished. Opinions on how satisfying that explanation is are split.
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Silo (2023)
8.1/10on IMDb
First aired
If the Swan hatch was your favourite Lost discovery, Silo is an entire series set inside one. Thousands of people live in a vast underground tower, forbidden to ask what lies outside, and Rebecca Ferguson's engineer starts pulling at the rules. The place itself is the mystery: every level, stairwell and banned relic hints at who built it and why.
This one is built to pay off. It adapts Hugh Howey's completed book trilogy, the third season aired from July to September 2026, and Apple TV has dated the fourth and final season for 9 July 2027.
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Severance (2022)
8.6/10on IMDb
First aired
The Dharma Initiative, reimagined as an office job. Workers at the Lumon corporation have had their memories surgically split, so their office selves know nothing of their lives outside and vice versa. The orientation videos, strange departments and company rituals are exactly the kind of clue-laden world-building that kept Lost fans pausing on frames, and the theories it generates between episodes are just as feverish.
Be ready for a long game. Two seasons, from 2022 and 2025, are out on Apple TV, and the third began filming in 2026 without a release date, so the big answers are still some way off.
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Person of Interest (2011)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
Come for Michael Emerson, stay for the best-kept secret on this list. Lost's Ben Linus plays Harold Finch, a reclusive billionaire whose surveillance machine predicts violent crimes, in a series created by Jonathan Nolan with J.J. Abrams producing. Flashbacks slowly reveal how Finch and his partner became who they are, and Emerson has said its reveals come faster than Lost's did.
It starts as a weekly crime procedural, which puts some Lost fans off. Stick with it: the larger story about the machine takes over, and the five CBS seasons build to a finished ending.
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Once Upon a Time (2011)
7.6/10on IMDb
First aired
Lost writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz created this ABC fantasy, and the family resemblance is obvious: almost every episode pairs the present in Storybrooke, Maine, where fairy-tale characters live cursed and unaware, with a flashback to their former lives. If the flashbacks were your favourite part of Lost, this is that structure applied to Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin, with Lost's Emilie de Ravin turning up as Belle.
It is lighter, sweeter and more family-friendly than anything else here. The early seasons are the strongest, and the seventh and final season is effectively a reboot with a largely new cast.
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Station Eleven (2021)
7.5/10on IMDb
First aired
The pick for viewers who loved the survivors more than the smoke monster. Adapted from Emily St. John Mandel's novel by Patrick Somerville, who wrote for The Leftovers, it moves between the night a devastating flu begins and a travelling theatre troupe touring the Great Lakes region two decades later. The way it leaps across years and reveals how strangers' lives connected will feel instantly familiar from Lost's flashbacks.
It is one complete story in ten episodes, with no cliffhanger and no unfinished mythology, and it is among the most hopeful series about the end of the world you will find.
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Watchmen (2019)
8.2/10on IMDb
First aired
Damon Lindelof's 2019 HBO series proves he can land a mystery box in one go. It picks up decades after the original comic, in an alternate-history Tulsa where police hide their faces behind masks, and Regina King's detective is drawn into a conspiracy reaching back a century. You can follow it without having read the comic, though knowing it adds layers.
The Lost connection is in the structure: patient set-up, then one character episode that rewrites everything you thought you understood. The sixth episode is the best flashback hour Lindelof has made. Nine episodes, one season, and its central mystery is fully answered.
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1899 (2022)
7.3/10on IMDb
First aired
The most Lost-like premise here: a ship full of strangers from across Europe, each hiding something, heading for New York in 1899 when they find a sister vessel that vanished months earlier. It comes from Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar, the creators of Dark, and the multilingual cast, with passengers who cannot understand each other, adds a layer Lost only toyed with.
The warning matters, though. Netflix cancelled it after one season, the creators had planned three, and the finale ends on a huge cliffhanger. Watch it for eight gorgeous, eerie episodes, knowing the answers will never arrive.
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Westworld (2016)
8.4/10on IMDb
First aired
Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy's HBO series, with J.J. Abrams producing, is a theme park of lifelike hosts with secrets their makers would rather keep buried. The first season is a feast for anyone who rewound Lost hunting for clues: timelines that may not be what they seem, a hidden maze and a park whose layout matters as much as its people.
Treat the first season as the main event. It stands up on its own, but the later seasons get more convoluted, and HBO cancelled the show in 2022 after four seasons even though the creators had planned a fifth and final one.
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Wayward Pines (2015)
7.3/10on IMDb
First aired
A short, sharp option if you want a strange-place mystery that actually tells you what is going on. Matt Dillon plays a Secret Service agent who wakes in an idyllic Idaho town that he cannot phone out of or drive away from, in an adaptation of Blake Crouch's novels with M. Night Shyamalan producing and directing the pilot. The town is the puzzle, and the residents' rules feel a lot like the Others' camp.
The first season is the one to watch: its ten episodes reveal the truth at a satisfying clip and were made to work as an ending. A second season followed in 2016 with Jason Patric as the new lead, and reviews were much harsher.
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The OA (2016)
7.8/10on IMDb
First aired
For the Lost viewer who liked it most when it got metaphysical. Brit Marling co-created and stars as a young woman who returns home seven years after vanishing, with her sight restored, and gathers five strangers to hear her story. The near-death experiences, coded movements and the sense that a group of misfits were brought together for a purpose all echo Lost's spiritual side, and it is as divisive as Lost's final season.
Netflix cancelled it in 2019 after two seasons, with the second ending on a mind-bending cliffhanger that will never be resolved.
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The Wilds (2020)
7.3/10on IMDb
First aired
The closest thing to Lost's first season retold as a teen drama. A group of girls from very different backgrounds survive a plane crash onto a deserted island, and each episode cuts back to one girl's life before the flight, which is the Lost flashback formula played straight. A framing device in which the survivors are being questioned afterwards adds a second layer of mystery about what really happened.
It suits viewers who loved the camp politics more than the mythology. Prime Video cancelled it in 2022 after two seasons, so its biggest questions are left hanging.
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La Brea (2021)
5.8/10on IMDb
First aired
The most literal Lost substitute on network TV in years. A giant sinkhole opens in Los Angeles and drops hundreds of people into a primeval wilderness, where a camp of strangers has to organise, ration and argue while their families above try to reach them. If the beach-camp politics of Lost's first season were your comfort viewing, this recreates them almost beat for beat.
It is pulpy and uneven rather than profound. The upside is that NBC let it finish: the third and final season, cut to six episodes, ended in February 2024 with a hopeful close to its time-travel story, though reviews of that finale were mixed.
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Twin Peaks (1990)
8.7/10on IMDb
First aired
Go back to one of the roots of TV's mystery-box tradition. David Lynch and Mark Frost's ABC series, which began in 1990, turns a murder in a Washington timber town into a portrait of a place where everyone has a secret and the woods hold something older. If what you loved in Lost was the sense of a location with its own will, you will feel it here first.
Set expectations, though: Twin Peaks follows dream logic and does not explain itself. The original two seasons end on a cliffhanger that was finally followed up in 2017 by Twin Peaks: The Return on Showtime, which answers some questions and raises many more.
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Alias (2001)
7.6/10on IMDb
First aired
J.J. Abrams' spy series is where Lost's DNA was first assembled: ABC, cliffhanger act breaks and a centuries-old prophecy hidden beneath the missions. Jennifer Garner's Sydney Bristow discovers she has been working for the enemy and becomes a double agent, while the mythology around a Renaissance inventor named Milo Rambaldi slowly takes over. Terry O'Quinn, Lost's John Locke, also turns up in a recurring role as an FBI official.
Watch the first two seasons for the best of it. The mythology is resolved in the 2006 finale, though the later seasons are uneven.
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Outer Range (2022)
7.1/10on IMDb
First aired
A Wyoming rancher, played by Josh Brolin, finds a bottomless black void in his western pasture, and it does to his family what the island's mysteries did to the survivors: it brings every buried secret to the surface. This is the pick for viewers who loved Lost's time-bending and the sense of a landscape with a will of its own, wrapped in a moody modern western.
It moves slowly and enjoys its own strangeness. Prime Video cancelled it in 2024 after two seasons, so the void's full story is never completed.
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