There are few targets in the TV biz easier than Netflix. The company’s programming strategy has left audiences with no shortage of things to complain about: the quantity-over-quality approach to originals, a trigger-happy approach to cancellation, and its inscrutable marketing priorities provide endless frustrations for fans and critics alike. Heavy lies the crown of being first and biggest among streamers. It’s not all bad though—occasionally the streamer’s algorithm can bestow blessings on under-seen cult favorites that arrive on the platform, bringing them to hungry audiences and catapulting them to buzzy fame. This cycle has begun anew with From, the MGM+ horror-mystery starring Lost‘s Harold Perrineau.
Fromis the perfect candidate for the Netflix Bump, the sort that reversed the fortunes of NBC’s canceled mysteryManifest after it shot up the streamer’s charts, earning a fourth and final season on Netflix followed by a forthcoming sequel series. While From doesn’t need saving the way Manifestdid—MGM+ has renewed the series for a fifth and final season, coming next year—it is the kind of TV show that Netflix users adore. A genre mystery with a healthy chunk of episodes to tear through and speculate over, From provides plenty of fodder for grassroots buzz on a platform that can, paradoxically, make buzz difficult to achieve.
And it doesn’t hurt if the show contains echoes of Lost. This was true of Manifest, which similarly began as a straightforward mystery about a lost flight and ended with a robust supernatural mythology and its characters facing cosmic moral judgment on humanity’s behalf. From similarly has Lost-like trappings: It’s set in a strange town that people all over the world stumble across and cannot leave; the town is also beset by mysterious vampire-like creatures that stalk it at night. A couple of big questions drive From‘s overall story (Where are they? Can they escape?) while smaller ones fuel episodes and seasons beyond, with room for character arcs to coalesce around them.
This is not to say that any and all Lostimitators are a surefire hit on Netflix. Fromdiverges from that influential show in ways that are important, and likely key to its survival as a beloved series on MGM+, a premium-cable channel with far fewer subscribers than Netflix. Arriving in 2022, with COVID-19 lockdown firmly in audiences minds, the series provided catharsis in its story of a declining U.S. town ensnared by an inescapable purgatory whose horrors require them to shelter in place. But Fromtakes care to not be unrelenting, with its storylines converging around cooperation in the weird pocket town that wants to tear its residents apart. The residents’ decency and routine are just as load-bearing to the show as the mystery-solving.
From‘s approach to its mysteries can also be read as a response to Lost. They’re cheeky jabs at forum-brained thinking (an early season-one puzzle is “Where does the town’s electricity come from?”) and how, on a macro level, the search for answers can be its own kind of hell. This is the real tension at the heart of From— not “When will the answers come?” but rather, “What might this relentless search for answers turn us into?”
Such questions might be conspiratorial subtext for other shows in the Lostmode. From makes it text, and does so in a way that makes a compelling response to the current moment, where the collapse of infrastructure and public trust have caused our information environments to deteriorate, and objective truth seems in danger of slipping away. Conspiracy is seductive in From and in real life, because it promises sense in a morass of nonsense. But nothing in From, even potential ways out of its central predicament, works in predictable ways, and attempts to harness the strange supernatural phenomena in the town tend to backfire. Success, the show argues in its best moments, stems not from understanding the uncontrollable forces that shape our lives, but understanding one another.
It’s a small but meaningful distinction, and one that makes From not merely a Lostimitator, but a true Lostsuccessor. It takes that show’s lessons (no doubt as internalized by Perrineau and his fellow Lostalumnus, producer-director Jack Bender) and does something different with them—something that’s also relevant to the era in which it’s being produced. It’s also why it’s worth bingeing the first three seasons on Netflix right now, and maybe hopping over to MGM+ to watch the fourth, so you can eagerly await the fifth with all your new fellow From-heads. The debates that lie ahead of us will likely be spirited, and very much like the ones inspired by Lost. Perhaps we’ll even have them again, a few years down the line should the entirety of From return to Netflix.
