Back in the mid-'00s, before streaming services began to dominate the television landscape, households around the world would tune in week-to-week for ABC's Lost--a survival mystery that ran for six years and dominated the pop culture landscape for most of them. It wasn't that Lost itself was a particularly novel premise on its surface--a plane crash left a handful of survivors stranded on a mysterious island where they were forced to govern themselves and outlast the elements--it was everything else. The show's supernatural, oftentimes conspiratorial spins capture imaginations and spurred legions of dedicated fans (several years before social media was as ubiquitous as it is now) into frenzies of wild speculation and theorizing.

The point being that participating in the frenzy around Lost in the mid aughts was a unique experience--one that hasn't been replicated by modern event TV. Shows like Game of Thrones and Westworld have certainly come close, but medieval fantasy and sci-fi dystopias don't quite have the same pull or flavor as a good old fashioned "is there a monster in the woods with them?" survival story.