That really sucks! Way to torture your loyal audience. I don’t care how expensive the shows are or whether or not its “sweeps” time, you don’t treat the people who watch your show and give it high ratings that way.
I remember when “Dallas” was a huge hit and all of America was watching (and many other countries as well), they never screwed the audience with mid season reruns. You got a new, exciting show that continued the story each and every week.
And when there is a new LOST episode, between all the commercials and the stupid first 5 minutes of reveiwing last week’s show, you only get about 30 minutes of new material.
There are 22 episodes each year.
Four will be shown in November, four in February, and four in May.
That means the other 10 have to be spread out from September to April, how do you suggest distributing them?
Dallas, in its later years, was closer to 30 episodes each year. So, fewer reruns.
And here we have the problem. Not like I expect 34 episodes per year like the good old days, but 22 episodes per season, if 12 of them are reserved for sweeps periods, is ridiculous.
In other rock-stupid scheduling news, Fox has announced that Prison Break, after sweeps, is going to go until May with no new episodes. What the hell? Fox has so many hit shows that they can afford to shit one away for six months? It’s going on hiatus to make way for the increasingly-tired 24; apparently there’s just no way that Fox can find nine hours of air time before fucking May to finish out the season.
Its a WEEKLY show. Every Wednesday night at 9:00, LOST is on and people expect a new show and rightly so.Twenty-two episodes are simply not enough for one season.
Advertisers are not stupid. They do not base the rates they pay on the “sweeps weeks”. I was so happy to see that LOST dropped to number 44 in the TV ratings a couple of weeks ago when they showed a repeat. Believe me, advertisers notice this! If LOST ran 30 or more episodes of new material, they would get high rating EVERY week and advertisers would be happy to pay high rates for the show.
And they have plenty of material to create 30 new, exciting shows. Right now they drag out the story lines at a snail’s pace.
Ah - so we wish to distort the space-time continuum. That is difficult for a network to do, no matter how powerful they seem.
It’s a given that there will be 4 episodes shown in November, 4 in February, and 4 in May, that takes twelve episodes.
There are 10 episodes left. And they want people to have watched a show or two before sweeps, otherwise they won’t be excited to watch during sweeps. So, realistically, there are at most nine episodes left - probably seven or eight.
However, there are 16 weeks in the intervening months (December, January, March, and April) So, we can’t have a new episode each week. There can only be a new episode some weeks. 24 is getting around this by not starting up until Jan and sacrificing November sweeps entirely. But they’re also willing to sacrifice a chunck of audience in order to do that. ABC is betting that you’d prefer to see at least a few episodes before 2006.
I question that upping the number of episodes from 22 to 24 is going to add so much to the production costs that the increases in various revenue streams that would result wouldn’t offset them.
Well, if you count the pilot as 2 eps (as it was two hours – parts 1, 2), and the finale was 3 parts (Exodus parts 1, 2, 3)… Then season 1 had 25 episodes… or at least 25 “hours” (a relative term due to the excessive commercial time, of course).
This is part of the reason I wait for a show to come out on DVD before I start watching it. You can watch the entire series in a week if you’re really dedicated. No commercials. No waiting between episodes. It’s the only way to do it!
So why not start the season in November, for sweeps? Maybe start it a week early?
That gives you 4 weeks of December to show new episodes (but you can ditch one of these for a Very Special Lost Christmas or a re-run of Rudolph). Four weeks in January, of which you maybe show three new episodes and re-run one of your December shows. February is sweeps so you show new all month. March you run four again. Now you’re up to… 4+3+3+4+4=18. Run another three new episodes in April and another four in May for sweeps, and you’re up to 25, just like last season.
Start late, end early, and don’t show any gorram reruns!
That link is giving me a general error message but this link appears to be the same story. I see nothing about halting production of scripts to allow for the novel to be written, and the story indicates that the novel will be written by someone outside the Lost writing staff.
I managed to watch the first 20 episodes of season 1 in a few weeks.