HERE IN AMERICA, only three weeks separate us from season two of the hit television programme Lost, while British viewers who have tuned into the show have made it only halfway through season one. Given that Lost is a show famously shrouded in mystery and suspense, this would normally grant me the cruel power of the spoiler. But where would I begin? Having watched an entire season, I suspect that I’m more confused than you are.

And that’s the beauty of Lost, hands-down the creepiest show that has ever been seen on American network TV, and also one of the best.

Lost is the story of 48 survivors of a plane crash who find themselves struggling to stay alive on a remote island in the Pacific. Early in the season, we learn that something is not altogether right on the island: some sort of mythic beast devours the plane’s pilot at the end of the first episode, and the survivors pick up an SOS signal broadcast in French that’s been playing for 16 years, with the message: “They are all dead, it killed them all, please help us.”

With a cast of about 20 main characters, led by an earnest young doctor played by Jack Shepherd and an inscrutable mystic named John Locke (the brilliant American character actor Terry O’Quinn), Lost may be the clearest example yet of the structural complexity that has become increasingly common on prime-time American TV, traditionally the province of punchline-every- 30-seconds instant gratification.

By genre, Lost is a disaster narrative — closest in spirit to the aircraft disaster movies of the 1970s, a genre so awful that they spawned an entire sub-genre of parodies.

But Lost’s creator, J. J. Abrams — who co-wrote and directed the show’s breathtaking two-hour opening episode — announced in the very first seconds of the show that this was no Airport ’77 remake.

If the networks had made Lost 30 years ago, it would have followed a fixed narrative flight path: introduce all the passengers and the pilots and the feuding stewardesses; learn each of their “back-stories”; and then have the engines fail.

Abrams did away with that entire prologue: Lost begins seconds after the crash, and so from the very beginning of the show, the 20-odd survivors that we focus on are complete mysteries to the audience.

We know nothing about them, and so the narrative pleasure comes from watching these interlinked histories being slowly revealed throughout the season, in flashbacks and reminiscences. Thirty years ago, of course, no American show would have dared to put 20 recurring characters into a network drama. Even the socially complex prime-time soaps such as Dallas tended to max out at around ten primary characters, while the sitcom’s sweet spot seemed to be at around six: just enough for a nuclear family and the wacky neighbour next door.

But no show back then would have dreamt of submitting the audience to so much deliberately murky narrative information. Only the notoriously opaque Twin Peaks — a hit in the early 1990s — compares to Lost’s entanglements.

Indeed, Lost came close to disappearing off the map itself: executives at ABC and Walt Disney, its parent company, had so little faith in the project that they fired the network chairman who had originally proposed to Abrams the idea of a plane-crash epic.

Only the lavish budget already spent on the pilot — $12 million (£6.6 million), several times larger than the TV norm — persuaded the network to give the show a chance.

Mystery, of course, is a staple of much serial drama. Dickens, after all, compulsively ended his instalments with a tantalising cliffhanger. But when American TV has withheld information for the purposes of suspense, it has historically focused on a single unanswered question, “Who shot JR?” being the canonical example. As uncanny as it was, Twin Peaks would never have attracted a mainstream audience without a central, catchphrase mystery at its core: who killed Laura Palmer?