If it seems that an innovative TV show like LOST doesn’t just appear out of nowhere, consider that Friends may have served as a testing ground for some of the key concepts. Here are some facets of Friends that resurface (often in a significantly different form) on LOST:
1) A small group of people live on an island. Slowly they come to discover that there are other people besides them who live on it.
2) Two key main characters who become romantically involved are a dark-haired “man of science” and a woman who ran out on her wedding.
3) The main characters are stranded in an apartment in which a hatch is discovered that apparently leads to a mysterious coffee house (or is it the other way around?).
4) Smokey appears in a few episodes.
5) Viewers spend multiple seasons wondering whether questions raised in the first season will ever get definitively answered. When eventually a small subset of the main characters escape the island, we wonder whether they will return or this will mark a permanent end to the show. We later find that another main character also makes it off the island and eventually winds up in California.
6) Other minor details, such as a character who makes a significant amount of money by manipulating seemingly meaningless numbers, the presence of a boat, guest appearances by characters’ parents, and the births of children to main characters are also parallels worth mentioning.
People have claimed to detect parallels between LOST and other TV shows, movies and books, but none are quite as close as those listed above…
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