I got chills.”

A woman I’ll call Theresa was telling me about the early days of the Lost writers room, before the ABC drama premiered in September 2004. She knew in her bones it was special, long before huge ratings confirmed it. The story of plane crash survivors on a surreal tropical island—including Jack, a doctor transporting his late father’s body home, and Locke, a flinty survivalist in a wheelchair—was going to be, she was sure, deeper and wilder and more entertaining than the audience could possibly imagine.

“Someone would say, ‘Well, what if Locke walks?’ ” Theresa remembered. “ ‘What if the coffin is empty?’ As all that was going down, literally you got chills. We started doing the wave in the room, like, holy shit! I’d never seen anything like it in my career—that miraculous creative energy. The writers in that room were great.”

“It was heaven,” said a Lost veteran I’ll call Gretchen, describing an atmosphere in which ideas could come from anyone, regardless of rank.

When it came to the highlights of that gig—the big swings, the fusing of sci-fi mythology, adventure, and rich character building—the only thing Theresa could compare it to was seeing the original Dreamgirls on Broadway. When Jennifer Holliday gave her all to “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” “people were floating in their chairs,” Theresa said. “When something hits a certain frequency and you know it’s magic—that’s what was going on in that room.”

I knew that feeling. I had been writing about pop culture for years before Lost premiered, and when it debuted, I was a full-time TV critic. My whole life there had been good and fun and enjoyable TV, as well as programs that were important. But something big shifted in the early aughts thanks to daring shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Battlestar Galactica, and The Shield.

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For a long time, the more cautious broadcast networks struggled to keep up with this cable-driven revolution. Lost changed that. Its pilot, which cost a reported $13 million and was directed by cocreator J.J. Abrams, made excellent use of its Hawaii locations. And dozens of copycat dramas would never quite replicate the magic of its early seasons, which were bolstered by a brilliant structural device. Most Lost episodes focused on one individual, interspersing flashbacks to that person’s previous life. Viewers saw the mistakes and the disappointments many were fleeing—the show’s title was both an adjective and a metaphor—and when Lost was firing on all cylinders, we came to care deeply about not just what was happening but to whom it was happening.

Like the characters themselves, we wondered how a polar bear ended up on a tropical 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. 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. But what helped Lost win awards, and what kept some folks watching even through slow patches and narrative misfires were Lost’s deeper levels. 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. The show was allowed to continue down this wildly ambitious path because it was a giant hit. Lost and Desperate Housewives, which also premiered that fall, turned around the fortunes of an entire network.

Early 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. 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 was not going to be as edgy as shows like Oz, but securing Perrineau was, as they say in the industry, a big get. “Harold had one of the biggest careers of all of us when Lost began,” noted Daniel Dae Kim, another member of the cast. “He’s a very talented actor. And I thought his work was some of the best on the show.”

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. He’d been around long enough to know, as he put it, “where the lines were, and what the ceiling was” for Black actors. But he was encouraged by what he was told and by the cast that was assembled. “We were all really hopeful about it,” Perrineau remembered. “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. “I was such a believer.”

For a number of Lost sources I talked to, the creative highs that counterbalanced the hard parts of the job evaporated fast. A wave of dismissals (the first of many) came not long after the arrival of executive producer Carlton Cuse, an industry veteran who had worked on mainstream ’90s dramas like The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. and Nash Bridges. When Lost cocreator Damon Lindelof was starting out as a TV writer, one of his first jobs was on the staff of Nash Bridges. Lost was an enormous undertaking and Lindelof was overwhelmed by his vast new responsibilities, so he asked his former boss Cuse to work on the ABC program with him. Given that Lost was at the forefront of pop culture, Cuse and Lindelof were among the most well-known showrunners in American television for quite some time—avuncular, funny figureheads, fanning the flames of conjecture about certain mysteries, teasing upcoming developments, and, at times, attempting to defuse anger or confusion regarding some of the drama’s twists and turns. There was drama behind the scenes too, and it was also dark and complicated.

“I can only describe it as hazing. It was very much middle school and relentlessly cruel. And I've never heard that much racist commentary in one room in my career.”

Based on conversations with more than a dozen people who worked on Lost in various capacities, it’s clear that the landmark series played right into Hollywood’s most long-standing patterns, in which auteurs wield enormous power with very little oversight. Later, you will hear from Lindelof and Cuse at length regarding the allegations and issues their former colleagues raised with me. I talked to people across all six seasons, half of whom were people of color and more than half of whom were women. Every person I spoke with is justifiably proud of the work they did on the drama, but by all accounts, they worked very hard on a job that could be quite grueling. And scarring.

“All I wanted to do was write some really cool episodes of a cool show. That was an impossibility on that staff,” said Monica Owusu-Breen, who worked on Lost’s third season. “There was no way to navigate that situation. Part of it was they really didn’t like their characters of color. When you have to go home and cry for an hour before you can see your kids because you have to excise all the stress you’ve been holding in, you’re not going to write anything good after that.”

On set in Hawaii, much of the cast got along really well, at least at first. “A lot of us grew very close,” said an actor I’ll call Sloan. “The thing that kind of created a rift in the cast was money.” Perrineau and Sloan told me that the cast had discussions about holding firm and asking for equal pay when salary renegotiations with ABC Studios began. According to both, promises were made to present a united front. Almost a decade earlier, the cast of Friends had done just that and wound up with equal pay for all six leads. But at Lost, the united front quickly crumbled. Ultimately, the cast ended up in a series of compensation tiers, and Perrineau and Sloan said the highest tier was occupied solely by white actors.

“That affected relationships,” Sloan said. But the actor had no relationship with Cuse, who, Sloan believed, “didn’t seem to think much of me.” At least, during a work-related conversation, Cuse never berated Sloan to the point of tears for being “ungrateful,” which happened to another Lost actor Sloan knew.

As the 25-episode first season progressed, Perrineau noticed that a few of his castmates got the majority of the storytelling attention: “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,” all of whom got a good deal of screen time, as did Terry O’Quinn’s Locke. Indeed, a writer I spoke to who worked on Lost during the middle of its run said that the writing staff was told repeatedly who the “hero characters” were: Locke, Jack, Kate, and Sawyer, all of whom were white. “It’s not that they didn’t write stories for Sayid [an Iraqi character] or Sun and Jin [Korean characters],” the source added. Still, they recalled comments like “Nobody cares about these other characters. Just give them a few scenes on another beach.”

To ensure that his colleague would understand that this observation was not just actor jealousy rearing its head, Perrineau pointed out the storyline disparities to a Lost producer on set in a fairly mild way. He told me he said, “I don’t have to be the first, I don’t have to have the most episodes—but I’d like to be in the mix. But it seems like this is now a story about Jack and Kate and Sawyer.” Perrineau said he was told, “Well, this is just how audiences follow stories,” and those were the characters that were “relatable.” Malcolm David Kelley and Harold Perrineau in the season two finale.