Sherwood Schwartz, a well-regarded young television writer in the early 1960s, had pitched a show about seven desert-island castaways trapped together to his longtime agent in Hollywood and got an unexpectedly virulent answer: “Sherwood, you’re out of your fucking mind. Who the hell is going to watch the same goddamn seven people on the same goddamn island every week?”
Schwartz changed agents and wrote out 31 two-to-three-sentence story ideas on a long roll of butcher paper he tacked up in his office and brought the roll into his next meeting. While CBS bought the show almost immediately, network president Jim Aubrey was insistent that it required far too much explanation of its guiding premise each week to make sense to viewers. Schwartz believed otherwise: His goal was to find a setup that would force disparate characters together without anyone being able to leave. “All my shows, actually, are how do people learn to get along with each other?” he would later note.
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