Damn, there’s no new Lost tonight. I hate that. I wish ABC would take a page from British TV -- or from HBO -- and give us 22 straight weeks of new episodes, with no reruns, and be done with it. I hate all these fits and starts -- it’s bad for the momentum that a show like Lost needs.
And -- hooray! -- I’m not the only one who feels that way: the producers do, too:
The producers of Lost are seeking a new scheduling model for the show in the US to curb the frequency of repeats.Most US series, including Lost, typically air 22 new episodes each season over a period of 36 weeks, meaning that new episodes are often punctuated with repeats of old episodes.
US Lost fans have complained that having to wait many weeks for a new episode has ruined their enjoyment of the show....
Although Lost's broadcaster, ABC, is unwilling to adopt a similar strategy, show producers have come up with a compromise solution.
"We're lobbying ABC for when the show is on, it's on, and when it's off, it's off," exec producer Damon Lindelof told E! Online. "So, we want to air it in three acts next year. You know, blocks of seven, seven and eight. But in order to do that, we have to roll the show out in October instead of September, and hopefully that will work out."
[from the British site Digital Spy]
Maybe we’ll get lucky and ABC will relent.
In the meantime, if you need a Lost fix as badly as I do, check out Paul Levinson’s intriguing discussion of the series. Paul is an SF writer and media studies professor right here in the Bronx at Fordham University, but I had to go all the way to Boston to meet him -- we were on a panel together about Lost at Boskone in February, and he has some thoughtful perspectives on the show. I’m not even gonna quote from his essay here, but I will say that his likening Lost to The Canterbury Tales is fascinating.
When I mentioned the Lost Generation in relation to Generation X yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me that it’s probably not a coincidence that one of the biggest shows on TV at the moment explicitly calls to mind the zeitgeist of Gen X. Not deliberately, of course -- I doubt the Lost crew made a conscious decision to invoke the sense of alienation and disconnection many Xers feel. It’s just there, floating around in the culturosphere... and that’s why so many of us are hooked on this show: it speaks to both how we feel adrift and how we long for something to connect us... and how we might even react with grounded pragmatism to something as bizarre as the Dharma bunkers and the Others and the “sickness” and Henry Gale. It’s like, Yeah, okay, what fresh hell is this, and how do I deal with this? Jack and Kate and Sawyer: they’re so Xerishly practically. They do what needs doing, whether that’s ratting out your own father... or killing your own stepfather. You deal, and you move on.
What the hell is happening on Lost? That’s what Levinson asks (without really finding answers). If the whole shebang turns out to be real Xerish, though, we won’t get any concrete answers, just more fresh hells to be dealt with.
(Check out the unofficial fan site Lost TV for tons of links to news articles about the show, and such -- that’s where I found out about the producers lobbying for a change of schedule with the network. The Fuselage, the official site of JJ Abrams and his cast and crew, has the potential to be cool. Creative teammembers read and post in the forums, or some of them do, at least -- the geeky guys you might expect: Jorge Garcia posts as ThinkImGonnaHurley, and Dominick Monaghan posts as *snort* David St. Hubbins. But I’m not surprised that the likes of Daniel Dae Kim and Josh Holloway tend not to respond to postings that are mostly along the lines of “OMG!!! I can’t believe you took your shirt off in that one episode!!! YOU’RE SO HOT! You’re biggest fan eva!” *sigh*)
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